comida, cafe con leche, y caracol

I’m pretty sure I was made for the Spanish horario– the Spanish daily routine. The day starts around 8:00. We eat toast or fresh bread for breakfast with marmalade or a tomato paste that’s made with salt, vinegar, and olive oil. The marmalade sitting on my shelf of the refrigerator at the moment is ciruela amarillo – yellow plumb. This is my favorite fruit in Spain and ever in the world. I eat it in any form possible: whole, sliced, marmalade on toast, in yogurt, in pastry, on pastry, in hand, on hand, yummmm ciruela! Breakfast is, as it should be, accompanied by coffee, and Oh how I do enjoy a café con leche! Though I’ve taken a liking to café bon bon which is espresso largo mixed with sweetened condensed milk. Around 9:00, everyone is at work or at school and almost all the shops have opened. At 12:00, we’re all a little hungry of course so we have some more coffee and eat a montadito (a little sandwich) with jamón (ham) or eggs. Here let me just say that these people put eggs on anything at any time of the day. This is another reason we get along so well. The school day is done by 14:30 and we all go home to have a generous meal with the family, after which one will most likely have an inkling to go to sleep for a bit. This is convenient, because between the hours of 15:00 and 18:00 nothing is open (except for the shops owned by Brits who are NOT Spanish and don’t you forget it!) and nobody is out, so you might as well take the siesta to descansarse (sleep). Once siesta is over, we have another coffee and go out to meet friends. The place comes alive again and you’ll find people meeting for drinks from now until about midnight when it’s supper time. Dinner is small but still an event. The best part is that this doesn’t just happen on the weekends. People love to go out and enjoy themselves on any day of the week.

Did I mention how much I love café con leche? Little did I know there’s a plethora of coffee options including café bon bon, café corto, café solo, café Americano, and café largo. I know this because Osbaldo told me. In fact, I’ve been learning something new about food everyday lately. My Colombian padre, as I like to think of him, absolutely adores food. A former pastelerie chef, he loves baking, boiling, mixing, chopping, grilling, mashing, stewing, frying, and simmering just about anything. Not only that, but once we’ve all sat down together to have an extravagant comida, after a few minutes he’s already describing another apparently amazing dish that he knows how to make. I say apparently amazing, because the man’s eyes truly sparkle when he describes food. “A little bit of salt … a little bit a berenjila … olive oil … lemon juice … and it’s perfect,” he makes sure to pause after each bit of direction (given in Spanish) just so we can all imagine the different flavors he’s bringing into the picture.

Every once in a while Osbaldo goes to the nearby countryside to gather a supply of fresh fruit, nuts, and vegetables. From such trips, he’s brought back squash, figs, acelga (a type of leaf related to spinach that’s delicious in soup), and almonds. I had the opportunity of accompanying him on a countryside trip one afternoon along with Mari Elisa and Carolina. We gathered almonds and found caracoles (snails). One day, one of these little boogers hitch-hiked home on an acelga leaf. When the family discovered him, they were so delighted exclaiming, “Oh, ¡qué bonito!” – “how cute!” After that, he was promptly put into the refrigerator and cooked the next day.