The Foods and Wines of Spain - A Review Focused on Food Self-Sufficiency - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Foods and Wines of Spain – A Review Focused on Food Self-Sufficiency – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Ruth Paget’s Mediterranean Diet – Spanish Style

I am not selling this diet, but this is what I have developed for myself as a nexus of budget and personal preference over 3 decades.

I look for recipes that fit the following pattern when I look through Spanish cookbooks:

-Monday through Thursday:

I eat protein combinations from 3 to 4 appetizer dishes and at least one pantry meal made from rice, beans, or pasta.  I snack on homemade popcorn with sea salt.

-Friday:

Baked fish plus baked, potato wedges with Italian seasoning are my favorite.

-Saturday

A chicken or pork dish

-Sunday

A seafood dish three times a month and beef once a month.

Sometimes the order is reversed on the weekends.

In Monterey (California) where I live now, I tend to eat chicken and seafood at Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean restaurants.

I like Spanish food, because the basic ingredients can grow in almost all 50 states during summer and in greenhouses during winter.  Hydroponic irrigation/agriculture systems in greenhouses might make this possible.

Reading Casas’ cookbook at a young age made me think that many American states could be self-sufficient in food and have a surplus to sell or store in the form of gazpacho.

Gazpacho is like V8 with the addition of garlic toast all blended and chilled.  You can store some brands at room temperature and refrigerate them after opening.

Purdue University or Cal Poly need to test if gazpacho is a complete protein.  Bread is made from wheat grains, but do seeds in tomatoes, cucumbers, and pepper constitute the “grain plus seed” formula to make a full protein?  Fact check needed for a delicious and nutritious cold soup drink or salad in a bottle.

Using my region as an example, South Monterey County is also ranching country for beef, the coasts can provide fish and seafood, Idaho is close for chickens, and lamb for Easter can be shipped in from New Mexico or New Zealand.

Monterey County might even be able to make a surplus for storage or sales to other places of some items.

We already have crops growing in our county like lettuce that is the size of Vermont and New Hampshire put together.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Hearst Castle with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Hearst Castle with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

My family often visited Hearst Castle when Florence was small to get out of the Monterey Peninsula (California) for the day.  After taking one of the castle tours, we would go to the Cavalier Restaurant on the oceanfront for lunch and drive back on Highway 1 to Monterey.

These days now that Florence is older, we drive from the Hearst Castle to the Firestone Walker Brew Pub for fish and chips and sometimes take a tour of the brewery to see what is new.  The merchandise store always has pint glasses, coasters, beer aprons, and rare edition heritage beers.

At Hearst Castle, there have always been separate tours of the main house, gardens, and guesthouses.  Hearst Castle has added an art tour.  (The art tour cost $100 the last time we visited, but given the Hearst Family’s media empire of 250 magazines and newspapers, I think it might be a good tour to learn about ideas that are used in advertising.)

You still take a bus up the hill to the Castle and depart from various locations depending on your tour.

There are zebras wandering around the Hearst property and hillsides.  I thought of the book D.V. by Diana Vreeland as I listened to flapper music of the 1920s on the way up the hilltop.

Vreeland was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue magazines.  She wrote about zebras lining along the roadway up to the Castle in her memoirs.  I wondered if she listened to music of the 1920s or was busy making deals and setting up interviews as she rode up the hill.

The tour guide we had that day started our tour off by saying Hearst came to California with a dream and made a plan to obtain it.   I am sure he might have revised some items as he researched his road plan, but having a goal or 1 to 5 goals is okay as far as I am concerned.

Our tour guide started the main house tour with the following remarks that people could use to make their homes more organized, comfortable, and relaxing albeit on a smaller scale:

-In the downstairs living room, Hearst gave people a place to relax before dinner after walking in the gardens to get a break from city air.

-Hearst let guests have 1 or 2 drinks before dinner, but no more.  You could drink, but you could not get drunk, if you wanted to make a deal on Hearst Mountain.

-The Great Hall was based on an early Renaissance dining hall.  (The cover of the cookbook – The Castle Cookbook: Favorite Recipes of William Randolph Hearst shows this hall.)  Renaissance tapestries line the walls for decoration and to keep heat in the home. 

Palio flags hang over the table from the horserace in Sienna, Italy.  The palio has been run since medieval times.

-New guests always sat next to Hearst in the center of the banquet table and then were seated down towards the table ends as they made their deals or overextended their stays.

-The tour guide said the Hearst Castle was totally self-sufficient in food. 

I bought “The Castle Cookbook” after the tour and agreed that you could raise all items in it and eat a largely English diet with English breakfasts offered or baked goods and coffee for breakfast.

-The tour guide further stated that all food was served on silver plate with silver covers on top of it.

In the other rooms, we saw that Hearst had items to entertain himself in winter such as a billiards room and a theatre.  He watched films every day with his guests.  He probably had to edit magazine proofs all day long and might not have read much.

Hearst Castle is most well-known for its swimming pools that photograph well with starlets.  The indoor pool is made up of lapis lazuli-colored tiles and gold.  The outdoor pool has Greek columns around it.

We took the bus down the mountain.  I headed straight towards the bookstore and bought The Castle Cookbook:  Favorite Recipes of William Randolph Hearst by Marjorie Collord and Ann Miller Lopez.

This book is small, but I agreed that people who wanted to regularly eat English food made up of English breakfasts, meal salads, meat and vegetable stews, fish and chips, and fruit pies could be self-sufficient in food in California, especially since irrigation is legal here for the wine and agricultural industries.  California is also the largest producer of cheese in the US and has a ton of cider, too.

I like to think of wealth like Hearst might have, too, but would add a supply of beans and rice like the medieval Florentines and Milanese had and corn kernals (seeds) like smart Americans have for long-term investment.  For short-term investment, I take the French as an example and like fresh eggs.

I have always liked visiting Hearst Castle, because I come from a family of three generations of female printers, who worked on rival newspapers and magazines.

Happy Holidays!!!!

By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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