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La Semana de Pintxos en la Cocina Vasca

rahayash — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 23:28:45 +0000

Before coming to Spain, I had started to have an interest in food. My father had always been very talented at cooking and despite the fact that he was born in Japan, had always had a special love for Italian food. I went to Spain without any idea of what Spanish food would be like, but aware that I would probably like it. I didn’t just end up liking food in Spain, I ended up planning much of my experience around it. I was particularly enamored with small bar foods served in the north of Spain known as pintxos, and was anxious to get a chance to try the hundreds of variety as well as prepare my own. Food became an extremely important part of my life, and I began to taking cooking very seriously, with a flare for Spanish and Basque cuisine. This is probably the biggest effect that my study abroad experience had on me.

When this photo was taken, I had probably already had eight different pintxos that day, and with some friends, had very formally scored them out of 10 (5 points for taste, 3 for innovation, 2 for presentation). We had had some very good ones and some that were a little less than enthralling, but I knew that this bar/restaurant had a good reputation and they had interesting pintxos. I was awed both by the food itself and the culture around it – the only time I saw more people out on the street in Pamplona was during San Fermin, which is often reputed to be one of the greatest street parties on earth.

I am still awed by the food culture of Navarra and the Basque country, and have done my best to bring some of it back with me – I still make an effort to cook a lot, and I do my best to cook both in the philosophy and in the style of Basque Spanish cooking, but I am limited – both because the food culture in the united states is not the same, and in that many ingredients that are used to in Basque and Spanish cuisines (particularly pintxos) are easily available locally, but rather difficult to find internationally.

I took this picture because I felt that this bar did the best job of presenting their pintxos and explaining them – not all bars offered anywhere near this level of explanation or presentation. While these were not the best pintxos I ended up having, the one on the left came very close, scoring an aggregate 9/10 from my friends and I.

This is an image from the inside of the restaurant/bar San Nicolas: Cocina Vasca. I took it during one of Navarra’s most beloved and eagerly awaited culinary events, La Semana de Pintxos (The week of pintxos). Pintxos are small, carefully crafted but inexpensive foods sold in bars prepared primarily in the north of Spain in Navarra and Basque country. The Semana de Pintxos is a week long competition amongst literally hundreds of bars throughout Navarra for the the best, most innovative pintxos. Fortunately, normal people are allowed to participate as well, going from bar to bar and asking for their entries into the contest. Here are San Nicolas: Cocina Vasca’s entries to the contest: a mini-hamburger made from baby squid with a shrimp carpaccio and ali-oli as well as sliced tomatoes with avocado and smoked salmon.

They Call it: Tomate de Arbol

msunada — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:21:48 +0000

They Call it: Tomate de Arbol
Emily Schmierer: Ecuador, Fall 2009

The first lunch with my host family was about as awkward as you could imagine. There was miscommunication, lack of understanding of accents, (or lack of accent on my part), my slow listening with their fast speaking, and weird pauses in conversation, all of which is to be expected. What turned out to be even harder to get through than all that was the desert. Well, they kept calling it desert, but I wouldn’t have. It came in a bowl, alongside a spoon, with the stem still on it. It was partly shriveled, partly soggy, drowning in some kind of goopy substance. It was a fruit, and it was desert. Without any explanation, or even an introduction to the thing, all members of the family began to eat theirs with the greatest of ease. I decided to just go for it, but as you might expect had a lot of trouble with it. It was slippery and squishy but round so that the spoon couldn’t cut into it. The goop it was submerged in was slimy, and the fruit just sloshed violently around the bowl, resisting my attempts to cut through it. I was about to give up, when my new host sister told me to hold the stem, and sort of pull on the fruit with the spoon to tear off a bite. She made it look easy enough, so I tried again, and somehow, pulled off a sizeable bite. It looked like a normal enough fruit on the inside, but would it be tasty? Only one way to find out. Shortly after deciding that it was not in fact tasty, my host mom told me that they call it “tomate de arbol,” which directly translated to English means “tree tomato.” She was also delighted to tell me that it only grew in Ecuador, and is the most delicious fruit. Though I disagreed, I was glad to have the experience, and move on. A few days later, once again at the family lunch, we had tomate de arbol again for desert. I really didn’t want to eat it, but at least this time I knew how to, so I did. I guess I ate it a little too skillfully the second time, that I gave the impression that I really liked it. We had it again the next day, and the day after that. Over the months, we probably had tomate de arbol three times a week, and I came to expect it. I even came to enjoy it a little bit. When we didn’t have it, I sort of missed it. I even took a picture of it before I left, so that I could remember it, and here I am, being nostalgic about it. My relationship with the tomate de arbol is sort of representative of the whole study abroad experience, in that it was a challenge, and something different that I just had to get used to, even if I didn’t really like it, but soon came to realize that it wasn’t too bad at all.

The Teahouse

msunada — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:34:02 +0000

In the middle of Old Town Shanghai, there is a garden called Yuyuan and on the small lake lies a teahouse only accessible by a bridge of “nine-turnings.” As I walked up the stairs into the tea-rooms, I felt as though I was entering a completely different world. This was not the China I had come to know, but an older, more simple version. I drank tea from a tiny porcelain cup and whiled away the hours. Although I knew I was still in Shanghai, I felt as though I had traveled back in time or maybe just out of the big city. In the room across the stairs, a small band of musicians played traditional Chinese folk songs. The man playing the pipa must have been eighty years old, his back curved uncomfortably but he played with the agility of a twenty-year-old. The four men played together for hours, not working, but having fun. They communicated with each other through music. I learned a lot from those four musicians. They gave me a look into their beloved culture just though their playing. I will never forget the few hours I spent in that tea-house, enamored with the history and culture brought together in the center of one of the largest, busiest metropolitan cities in the world.

Hong Kong dim sum

msunada — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:11:10 +0000

Hong Kong is the birthplace of dim sum. For the five months I was there, I was lucky enough to go out for it at least once every two weeks. It was available everywhere- from the five-star hotels downtown to random street vendors. Yet the best dim sum I’ve had to date was for a late night snack one night at an inconspicuous hole-in-the-wall place in a more sketchy area of town with a friend who spoke Cantonese. She said, “we’re going to do this the right way” and she ordered some of the more traditional dishes. It was probably one of the most memorable meals of my experience abroad.