Shop local, think new upholstery

I don’t have to walk more than 200 meters from my house to buy everything a person could need for day-to-day survival.  There are two small grocery stores, butchers, fish shops, multiple fruit/veggie stands, bakeries, banks and junky “dollar stores”  full of all the plastic nick knacks a person could ever desire.  This commercial bounty is all closer to my house than the garage where we park our car.

But once in a while I feel the need to drop some cash in a larger, one-stop-shop type of grocery store. Sometimes I crave a more anonymous and efficient experience.  The flourescent lights and generic design are a relief from gossiping with the neighbours while waiting half an hour for the local fruit guy to sell me 4 pears.   It’s telling when you find benches in the butcher shop.  They are prepared for you to wait, so you better be as well.

Luckily, I don’t have to travel far to reach a large grocery store either.  It’s perhaps a 500 meter walk, cross-country.  But if you get tired, there is plenty of seating as well.

500 meters of garbage, or a lovely place to curl up and enjoy Algeciras green space.  Depends on your point of view.

It’s also the local discount copper wire source.  Ah, European living.  We really do have it all close to home.

The Leper Kings. Not feeling the love tonight.

Yesterday was a gorgeous winter day in southern Spain.  Perfect park weather.  We left the apartment in a refreshing chill, but by mid morning we were stripping off  layers and turning our faces to the sun like lizards.

We average about five visits per week to the neighbourhood playground and are consistently alone.  We own that park in the winter.  The local kids are banished to indoor locations until May.

So shortly after arrival there were trucks, sweaters and half-eaten apricots strewn from one end to the other.  Why not, we weren’t bothering anyone.

Everyone was in their glory and shirt sleeves.  Yago was six feet up a fence, yelling obscenities at the high-school kids.  Río was crawling the perimeter, eating apricots off the ground.  I was  collapsed sprawled on the ground, soaking up the sun and congratulating myself on superior parenting.  Superior parenting defined by:

• nobody crying
• limbs intact
• eating healthy (the apricots were organic)

A Spanish trio entered stage left; a well dressed, perfectly coiffed grandmother and grandfather with a vacuum-packed toddler in stroller.  All you could see were the kid’s eyes, the rest was buried under layers of wool and plastic.

Yago stopped mid profanity to stare.  Visitors?  To our park?  At only 12 degrees celsius?  Unheard of!  I could see his social expectations rising with the temperature.  Perhaps we wouldn’t be social lepers after all.

Alas, it was not to be.  We are a Spanish grandmother’s worst nightmare.

• Poorly shod foreign woman face up on dirty surface.
• A gravity defying,  hatless toddler.
• A baby eating hippy food off the ground.

They took one look at us and high-tailed it out of there, as fast as Grandma could push the vacuum-packed stroller in her high heels.

A couple tools short of a diaper bag.

“You know Río, Mommy is posting dialogues again.  She thinks she’s funny.  Pass me a screw driver, would ya?”

“Phillips or flat head?   She’s getting some mojo flowin’, is she?”

“Mojo?  That might be going a little far.  But she shaved her legs while I pelted her with rubber ducks last night.  I heard her say that she is finally starting to recover from three years of sleep deprivation.  Hmm, what do we have for bonding agents?”

“Glue gun or welding torch.  Sleep deprivation?  Isn’t that how they extracted illegal confessions from Guantanamo Bay prisoners?”

“Torch.  Thanks.  Sleep deprivation torture, complete with reduced cognitive performance and poor psychomotor functioning, exactly.  Just ask Mommy what’s for snack-time and girlfriend will tell you anything you wanna hear.  Jackhammer please.” 

“Why is she so tired?  Shall I check the tolerances?”

Please.  It’s the hourly breast-feeding sessions, dude.  But now that you have backed-off the boob at night she’s not cross-eyed in the morning.  Haven’t you noticed she isn’t wearing her pants inside-out as often anymore?  Pass the titanium.”

“Now that you mention it, I can’t remember the last time we wandered a parking lot aimlessly searching for the car.  So, do you think a rested Mommy, could be, like, witty?  Or efficient?  An interesting conversationalist?  I always took her as three potatoes short of a tortilla.     For example, this diaper bag is completely lacking in radioactive material.  Will a juice box do?”  

“Remind me to call the Russians this afternoon.  Anyway, a witty and intelligent Mommy may be a stretch, but she brushed her teeth today.  That has to be a good sign.  Careful you don’t snag a leg warmer on the hydraulics.  There!  All I need is a purple crayon and this puppy is as good as new.”

“Smooth legs, fresh breath.   Looking good, Mommy.  So, do you think there’s a chance of us getting another little brother out of this deal?”

“Don’t count on it, kid.”

Those walking blues

Yago:  “Ya baby!  These winter beach days are the bomb!  Shades on, sand between the toes.  Pay attention kid, this is the life.”

Río:  “Whatever you say, bro.  I don’t have a clue what’s happening, but I’m your man.  So what’s the program?  Sand eating?  Shovel throwing?  General skin exfoliation?”

Río:  “Or how about I walk over there and bonk you on the head with this rake?”

Río:  “Dang, I haven’t really gotten the hang of this walking thing yet.”

Yago:  “You’re pulling a John Wayne, kid.  Get those legs together.  Look, this walking stuff is just physics.  Don’t sweat the low center of gravity, your ass is hardly off the ground.  Now.  Lower you leg-lever-length to weight ratio, maximize toe thrust and stick your tongue out.  That fine tunes the balance.

“Huh?”

“Sigh…  Kids these days.  Never listen to the voice of authority and reason.”

“F**k your toe thrust.  With my 4×4 speed I’ll hit the water before anyone catches me.”

Crazy spoon heads – rated “G” for Grandparents

It’s been months of trying and litres of rice cereal.  But alas, Río is just not interested in traditional baby meals.  Not that we worried he would starve.  But at some point I hoped cave-baby would eat something other than meat off the bone.  Today, we finally began Río’s relationship with utensils.

The first step was to admit defeat.  Obviously, everything I was doing was crap.  Then, I enlisted the assistance of an expert.  Someone with recent and relevant experience.  Someone with skills clearly superior to mine.  Because success was instant.

And now, I just man the mop.

“On the 564th day of Christmas, the Crapper said to me”

Here we are, well into 2012.  The decorations are down, the last of the tinsel vacuumed up.  The last Ferrer Roche has been gobbled and the fridge is stocked with beans and brown rice.

Right?

Hell no.  Over in Spain I still have to look at this.

No offense, baby Jesus, but I’ve seen enough of yo’ ass.  I need a change of nativity scene, so to speak.

Granted, our nativity scene saw a lot of action, but even Yago is bored with it now.

As nativity scenes go around here, ours was tiny, but it still occupied an entire table, plus compliments of Lego and Playmobile for over a month.  But I can’t complain.  Check out our friend, Fede’s.

His wife had to park on the street for a month while baby Jesus took over the garage.

This is the Algeciras municipal nativity scene.  Thanks to the crisis, it was significantly scaled down this year.

But they couldn’t do without “El Cagon.”  That’s right, “The Pooer”.  You can’t have a Spanish nativity scene without some guy taking a crap behind the stable.

And dude, I’ve seen enough of yo’ ass too.

Roscon de busy Mommys

I spend a lot of time in my kitchen.  It ain’t pretty, but it’s usually where the action is.  Today was a baking day.  Lemon poppy-seed muffins, apple/carrot/zucchini loaf and Roscón de Reyes.

Tomorrow is the big Christmas finale in Spain.  The Kings come with the graft and the calories come with the official holiday baked good, the Roscón.

I’m an improviser.  I chuck stuff in the bowl until it looks about right. I can eyeball 4 cups or a couple of tablespoons.  But Spanish recipes leave me baffled.  650 grams of flour?

No clue.  So I actually got the precision scale out today.  It goes against my principles, but for the sake of avoiding store-bought Roscón, I’ll sink to new lows of order.

I used the same recipe as last year.   The key of course is a healthy swig of Rum and orange blossom water.  Other than that it is just run of the mill sweet bread.

The other identifiable feature of Roscón is that it is decorated with candied fruit, something I never have on hand.    More improvisation.   This always amuses Rogelio, who cannot imagine Roscón anyway but “the official way”.   As a foreigner I am not confined by convention and tradition.  So mine has poppy seeds and dried cherries.

The shape didn’t turn out quite as pretty as last year.  And what in tarnation is oozing across my floor?    This year I have one more kid “helping ” me.  One more kid raining me with broccoli from the high chair.  One more kid hiding kitchen implements.

One more load of laundry every meal time.  And one lumpy Roscón.

I’m OK with that.  I like a clean kitchen, but that’s just not where I am in my life.  I have to choose.  I can have a clean kitchen or I can make dough with two kids, run off to a parade, then tag team bedtime with Papi during the aesthetic portion of my baking extravaganza.    So my Roscón looks a little, well, improvised.

But when the kids are asleep and if you don’t look at floor level, the Roscón tastes good,

and I’m OK with that.

Move over Bam-Bam, there’s a new cave-baby in Bedrock

A few relatives of mine, (second children themselves) have commented that Río gets little airtime on this blog.  They fear his therapy bill is mounting since his older brother enjoys more exploitation attention in cyber space.  True enough.

So here’s one for the relatives.

Río outright refuses to eat anything pureed.  On a few occasions I have snuck a micro-spoonful of sweet potato in there, but that’s it.   No fruits, no veggies, no cereals of any kind.  He has survived almost ten months on breast milk and finger food, (which is perfectly healthy by the way.)

This is the only way he will eat.

This kid is destined to be a gourmet, or a caveman.

He locks down at the sight of rice cereal.  The lips seal in the presence of mushy pears.  But give him a hunk of something yummy and he goes to town.

And don’t think that he just sucked the juice off that chicken leg.  By the end the bone was cleaner than his face, but that’s not saying much.

Did I mention that this was breakfast?

Video below rated G for grandparents.

January 1st, a self-portrait

“There have to be some more chocolates around here somewhere. “

You know your husband is Spanish when…

You know your husband is Spanish when….

• at noon you offer him a cup of tea and he says, “At this hour?  Wouldn’t a glass of wine be more appropriate?”

• he looks out the window and says “Bundle up the kids if you are going to the park.  It’s only 18·C today.“

• He declares, “I’m going to cook lunch”, and automatically empties a litre of extra virgin olive oil in a pan, then rummages through the fridge to see what he can fry.

This is what he found to fry today.  Pimientos de Padron.

Pimientos de Padron are tasty mini green peppers.  They are native to a little place called Padron in northern Spain, close to my father-in-law’s village in Galicia.  Now you can buy them everywhere and in fact, these ones were imported from Morocco.  And so goes globalization.  Padron has lost its monopoly on tasty little peppers.

You give them a quick fry until they shrivel up.  Toss some coarse salt on them and pop them in your mouth, seeds and all.

Pimientos de Padron are super fun to eat, especially with people who don’t know about them.  Because a good batch has a few surprises.  So you’re with friends, tossing back sweet little peppers, and then once in a while BAM, someone starts jumping up and down, tongue out, reaching for their beer, while the rest of the group points and laughs.  They are sweet peppers, but one or two in a batch are spicy hot.  And as far as I know, visually you can’t tell a spicy pepper from a sweet one.  You are just merrily munching away and WHAM, your tongue is burning.  I think they specially breed Pimientos de Padron to mess with the uninitiated.

Most Spanish folks, at least the ones that I know, don’t like spicy food at all.  My father-in-law will turn up his nose at a sprinkling of black pepper.  But they love to put out a plate of Pimientos de Padron and then laugh their asses off at whoever picks the spicy one.

You know your wife is not Spanish when she hopes that she gets the hot one.