Cooking Spanish Food - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Cooking Spanish Food – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I served Viña Esmerelda from the Torres winery outside Barcelona, Spain with the gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp).  The wine provided some “spin” stories, too.  Laurent and I relived our 1992 trip to Barcelona where we first tried this wine at the Los Caracoles restaurant.

I had just finished reading my first reference book in Spanish entitled Atlas de los Vinos de Espana (Atlas of Spanish wines) and could tell Laurent that Viña Esmerelda was made with muscat and gewürztraminer grapes.  Those grapes gave it a slightly sweet flavor that went well with the shrimp.

The wine’s name was the same as the heroine in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Nôtre Dame.   All this great spin came from one of the best kept secrets of the 1990s – inexpensive and very good Spanish wines.

The next dish I served was a roast leg of lamb that was really mutton.  I studded the roast with garlic and drizzled olive oil on it with thyme sprinkled on it to roast.

When the roast was medium rare, I carved it as Florence sprinkled chopped, fresh Italian parsley on white cannellini beans that would go with it.

I served the lamb-mutton on warm plates to keep the food hot so we could talk a long time.

I chose a French wine with not a Spanish one to go with the meal from the Bordeaux region – Lalande-de-Pomerol.  We bought that bottle as a souvenir from a Bordeaux area road trip.

Everyone liked the cognac-laced brownies.  Brownies may not be Spanish, but the Spaniards are the ones who brought Mexican chocolate to Europe along with other New World products such as corn (maiz), tomatoes, and potatoes.

The Spanish meal theme was a hit, but it can easily become all French, if you serve all French wines.

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

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Cooking Spanish Food - Part 1 - with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Cooking Spanish Food – Part 1 - with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I volunteered to cook a Spanish anniversary meal for Laurent with little Florence as a guest one year when we lived in Wisconsin.  Spanish food is similar to what is made in Languedoc and the Pays Basque, which share the Pyrenées mountain region between them.

I took out my copy of Penelope Casas’ cookbook The Food and Wine of Spain to look up recipes.  This cookbook always makes me think of love as Casas described how she and her Spanish boyfriend sampled tapas (appetizers) in the “tasca” bars of Madrid.

That sweet story made me think of eating in Chicago’s many ethnic restaurants with Laurent when we first dated.

I read through Casas’ recipes and came up with my basic menu:

-Ensalada San Isidro

-Gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp)

-Roast lamb with white beans

-Brownies (These are not Spanish, but Laurent and Florence both like them.)

I looked through our wines and wrote out our menu on a piece of bordered stationery with a rose on it.

This menu replaced the one that I had in a frame by the dining room table from our last meal.  I pasted the old menu in our menu journal of festive family meals.

Now all I had to do was deliver on my gourmet promises as I taught Florence how to do some things in the kitchen like mixing brownie batter.

The Ensalada San Isidro required marinating canned tuna (packed in oil) with red wine vinegar, minced onion, chopped parsley, and pepper overnight.  Casas’ recipe called for sour capers, but I did not use them, because Laurent does not like sour food.  Even without the capers, this marinated tuna salad was delicious and can also be used for sandwiches.

I liked rolling around the sound of “atún escabechado” for marinated tuna on my tongue.  I added this savory concoction to hand torn romaine lettuce that Florence helped tear after I washed it.   She added sliced tomatoes, chopped cooked white asparagus (from France), and sliced onion that we had soaked in warm water to mellow the taste.  Green olives with red pimiento peppers made the salad colorful.

Ensalada San Isidro is basically a tuna salad, but it has flair.  The flair, of course, came from telling Florence that San Isidro is the patron saint of farmers and shepherds in Spain and that God sent him to help with plowing.

It may be tuna salad, but it has a college education as we say in the United States.  The hagiography required a little research, but it let me add some “spin” to my food offerings in addition to nice bread to soak up the dressing, which we only do at home not in restaurants.

The gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp) needed no spin; everyone who lives in the Midwest starves for fresh seafood.  Most shrimp in Wisconsin is frozen, which is fine if it is frozen raw shrimp that you can thaw and cook like fresh seafood.

End of Part 1.

To be continued…

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

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Attending a Poetry Slam in Monterey County California by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Attending a Poetry Slam in Monterey County California by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Most of Monterey County’s Poetry Slams are held in the East Village Coffee Lounge in downtown Monterey, but the Steinbeck Center in Salinas held one as part of the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read program honoring Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers when I was the youth services librarian for Monterey County.

I took my daughter Florence along to attend a poetry slam held in conjunction with the Robinson Jeffers Big Read.  Slam poetry is a performance art.  The genre is urban and was most definitely influenced by hip hop music.  The teen poets who performed that evening came from Oakland, California.

The evening was organized by Monterey’s local slam poets Garland Thompson and Marcos Cabrera – stars at the time at the East Village Coffee Lounge, newspaper writers, and fellow producers of youth summer reading programs from the Salinas Public Library.

Thompson began the evening by saying that poetry slams in coffee houses begin with people snapping their fingers to bring the poets on stage.  I began snapping my fingers rhythmically imitating dance music, looking forward to a great evening.

The teen poets dealt with every problem in the US and the world it seemed.  I was happy that social studies had not been dropped from school curriculums and that the teens had some solutions for pollution.

The only thing I would change about the evening would be to end with a Japanese renga poem, which has a same beginning that everyone adds to in order to bring everyone into the poetry circle.

Then, I would use poetry rounds to start having attendees think about simple poetry prompts for their own work.  The one round that everyone learns in kindergarten in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”  That one might generate laughs, but songs like “Home on the Range” and “America the Beautiful” encourage poets to look for beauty around them.

Reading a poem together might create a contemplative atmosphere for writing after an evening of poetry slamming.  My suggestion would be “A Negro Speaks of Rivers” by New York poet Langston Hughes in order to have Monterey County slam poetry attendees to think of our underground Salinas River and usually dry Carmel River.

I am not a poet, but love reading Japanese haiku poems about nature.  The form and subject are easy to learn and might be a good wrap up for a poetry slam as well.

I like slam poetry for the way it draws the audience in, but think it could be even more powerful by capitalizing on audience energy to write group poems and individual poems focused on solutions to maintain or retrieve unpolluted nature. (Clean, pristine water is beautiful, and we need it everywhere.)

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

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Carmel Valley Pool Life by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Carmel Valley Pool Life by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When I first moved to Monterey County California more than twenty years ago, I worked part-time and would take my daughter Florence out to the Carmel Valley pool during summer vacations.

I always bought a summer pass and took some writing to do while Florence played and swam.  I thought the summer pass was a great investment, because we went there everyday Monday through Friday.  The pool also had a concession stand where you could buy an inexpensive lunch.

The Monterey Peninsula is chillier than you would expect and does not have pool weather.  Surfers wear wetsuits in the cold Pacific waters here.  The temperature range is between the high 60s and low 70s.

However, once you go inland toward the mountains, the temperatures rise to the mid 80s and 90s in Carmel Valley – wine grape growing territory.   Carmel Valley Village is obviously great swimming pool territory.

At the pool, I pulled up two lounge chairs for Florence and me and put an adjustable umbrella between the chairs to angle shade my way when the sun changed position.

After two or three hours of water play, Florence would come play move star and lay back on her lounge chair.  She would push her wet hair back and put on black sunglasses.  She repeated what I always said, “Those mountains with the blue sky behind them are beautiful.”

The pool is next to a large park with green grass and a white gazebo with lacy woodwork.  When there was a breeze, the wind smelled like freshly cut grass.  There are several picnic tables in the park for families doing larger lunches.

Once Florence was comfortable, I would ask her if she wanted a hot dog or hamburger that day.  With the order placed, I would usually bring back all-beef hot dogs with “the works” on them, diet sodas, and ice cream sandwiches.

After lunch, we would clean up and head back to town happy and fed with plans to return.

On one of our trips to the Carmel Valley pool, one of the other sunbathers there introduced herself to me.

She was an author, who had just obtained her first publishing contract.

I congratulated her and said, “I have a bunch of writing prompt responses here that I am trying to arrange and put together into a book.”

“Would you like me to look at some of it?” she asked.

“I’d love it,” I said and added, “I know most people pay for this type of consulting, but all I can afford now is lunch.  Can I offer you a hot dog meal?”

“Sure,” she said and added, “I’d love it.”

Florence came out of the pool and talked with the Carmel Valley Welcome Committee author as I went to get us all lunch.

The author had some good advice for my writing responses that I wanted to turn into a book.

“Maybe short stores that resemble movie scenes would be a way to start before formally outlining memoirs, which still use narrative storytelling,” she said.

I wrote that down and made a smile next to the note.  I was starting to like Monterey County very much.

I thanked her and said that I would be taking classes with David Gitin at Monterey Peninsula College and wanted to have some work together before classes started.

“That’s an efficient way to work,” she said and thanked me for lunch.

The author disappeared into a writing cave to write many more books, but I saw her at the grocery store sometimes when I went to Trader Joe’s in Pacific Grove as she busied herself with mundane chores that might become movie scenes.

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

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