Food

Dave Rothstein requested a post about food here in Spain. So here goes.

Galicia has a strong maritime culture and therefore galicians specialize in fish and seafood. Especially octopus.

Restaurants in Santiago have glass cases in front displaying enormous purple octopus tentacles and tanks with somnolent lobsters and crabs and bags of clams and mussels and other shellfish that I can't quite identify.

But after two weeks here, I still have yet to go to one of these restaurants. Or go out for a big meal at all. And I keep forgetting to get the octopus in bars. I see other people eating it, though. It comes on a wooden slab and is usually seasoned with a red garlicky sauce.

I normally have one big meal a day with the family I live with. We have all different kinds of things:

• pasta or rice salad with olives, crab stick, carrots, corn...
• Pimientos de Padrón -- fried green peppers with sea salt. Padrón is a town nearby that's reknowned for its peppers. Most of them are sweet, but every once in a while you get an extremely hot one. So eating a plate of them is a little like playing Russian roulette.
• Tortillas españolas -- basically a thick omelette with potatoes inside.
• Sometimes we have a white bean soup made orangey with chorizo. Señora Matos says it's an Asturian dish.
• We had a dish of spaghetti the length of my little finger with tomato sauce and a purple, tentacled animal in the octopus family.
• Sardines fried and eaten whole, bones and all.
• Empanadas -- flat pastry with meat inside.
• For dessert we normally have peaches, sometimes ripe and sweetly dripping, sometimes hard and tart.
• We eat a lot of vegetables from the family's garden in the countryside. Right now, string beans, tomatoes and zucchini are in season.
• One memorable Sunday we had a homemade Tarta de Santiago. It's a cake made with 300 grams of sugar, 300 grams of ground almonds and 4 eggs. It's nutty and rich. In stores, it comes dusted with powdered sugar in the traditional galician sword shape.
• When I go out, the tapas are normally tortilla española, Iberian ham or chorizo on a round of bread, or small squares of empanada. But it depends on the place and the time of day. Sometimes you just get peanuts. In the late morning, if you order coffee you'll get churros (fried salty dough in a striated finger shape) or a small sweet baked good.