I rock....

So it´s Christmas eve and a few weeks ago, Carme volunteered me for Christmas eve dinner. This dinner is to include her parents, sister, brother in law and daughter and of course Alex, Carme and myself. Afterall I cooked it so I guess I should be able to eat it. So I am cooking for 8. That is no big feat in itself but the obstacles were many and varied.

First of all, as I said before, things are just different here as one would expect. Those normal food items one would expect at your local Ukrops just aren´t readily available here due to culture and tastes. The first obstacle was to find a whole turkey. sure I could have found all the octopus you can shake a stick at (would someone please explain this phrase to me) but I could not bring myself to basting it for 15 minutes. Here, one has to order a turkey and I guess some United Nations peace keeping force airdrops it to you. You must go to your local butcher (yes they still have real live full time run of the mill butchers here) which you can find at a butcher shop or a grocery store. You order it and in a few days they have a fresh turkey for you. And when I say fresh I mean with a few quills still attached to it. I spent a good hour inspecting and pulling feathers off of this naked bird. The bird weighed 6 kilos(15 lbs roughly) so I knew I had at least 4 hours of basting and rotating.

Next, I had to plan my menu. The turkey was taken care of and side vegetables would not be an issue. Now I had to decide on what to make for dessert. Dessert is a bit trickier as the desserts here are...well how can I put this...not sweet. The desserts here are beautiful and works of art. Rather than your typical cake in a 9" round pan with multiple layers and icing (or frosting, I get them confused ...wait...icing is cold right?) that seem to make your teeth ache after one bite. Here they are flaky, crusty, full of cream, and laking in flavor. Pretty much every dessert tastes the same but are different in the way they are arranged. More like the different in a Picaso and a Renoir.

So I went browsing thru my local grocery stores. There are 3 here in Tossa all within a 2 minute walk of one another. Caprabo is right outside of our balcony and is pretty large..considering I am used to WalMart Super stores. When you walk into most stores with shopping carts, they have solved the problem of disappearing shopping carts,...YOU PAY TO USE ONE. Of course you get this money back and it varies from 50 cents to 1 €. All the carts are daisy chained together so you won´t get it free until you deposit a coin into a special slot on the cart to release the chain. You walk around the store hoping you won´t come up an Euro short in the check out line.

Another funny thing about the carts, all four wheels move independently. In America the front two wheels move so you can just push and steer. Here, you have to sign up for liability insurance just to maneuver thru the narrow food aisles. Yes, the aisles are just as narrow as the Medieval streets. So before grocery shopping, I get a physical for my knees ever since I saw this old lady blow a ACL in the frozen foods aisle. How can this happen? Well imagine trying to round a curb with a basket full of food and your back wheels go out on you. So your tail in comes around and you try to brace yourself for the shift in weight and you hear an unfamiliar snap but still somehow you know what the noise if from.

So I head to the baking aisle, when I realize, there is no baking aisle. There is no row of baking powder, different types of flour, instant cake mixes and jars of Duncan Hines icing...or frosting. Actually it´s one thing to look for familiar food items, it´s another to try to translate them. for the love of god, what does baking soda translate to? Oh I can find baking powder. It says in English right on the can. But baking soda...that´s a no go. So I guess cakes are out of the questions. I can´t imagine why they would need leavening, most of the bread is just hard and crusty baguettes. So I move on to other ideas. I do make a mean apple pie. I will even make my own crust!

So back to the crib to begin my holiday cook-o-thon. Another thing here, well all the appliances are small. I mean small as in I an dry one one pair of jeans at a time. The oven is bit larger than a Betty Crocker Easy Bake, and the turkey had an ass bigger than my 3rd grade teacher Mr. Roundbottom. So I become a bit more McGyver-ish and lube the bird down with some KY Jelly and go to peeling apples.

By the end of the day, we sat to have dinner at 9pm. Not because it took me all day to cook these items, ONE AT A FREAKING TIME...but because normally here in Spain, dinner is not until then! It was a feat keeping things warm and moist as I was finished cooking by 7pm. The reason for the wait: Papa Noel was coming.

the parents here find ingenious ways to figure out how to present these gifts to children while they are awake and anxious for his arrival. I will get into this tomorrow with another blog in itself because it is classic. So stay tuned.

So all in all, the turkey came out perfect, mashed potatoes were awed over by Johnny (due to the fact they were real potatoes and not instant), the cornbread stuffing was a hit, too. I added bacon and chilies to the mix and made it nice and tasty. I made two different types of gravy. One was a pan gravy flavored with a pinch of nutmeg and the other was made of homemade turkey stock and garlic. For dessert, I made a crust flavored with cream cheese filled with 3 different types of apples and a crumb topping. actually i made one with raisins for my own benefit. I was hoping no one would like the raisins and I would have it all to myself but no such luck.

In the end, everyone was pleased with an American holiday meal and I was pleased that I did not have to scrape a plate before doing dishes. I guess I can bring a little bit of my culture to this non baking soda having place.