Mediterranean Breakfast at Ikea

It's been a long time since we made the little trek to Ikea in Murcia, and we have determined that the Ikea food shop has the best prices on marinated herring for our weekly smørrebrød. Of course, we were also thinking of several other small house improvements that could be made. So this morning after an early dental appointment, we headed off through San Isidro to the E15 and then south to Murcia. I examined every white storage unit on the display floor to find something for my office, and the man of the house concentrated on side chairs for the living room. When we both had reached an intolerable point of indecision, we cut through to the cafe. I had noticed earlier that they were offering coffee and a tostada for one euro per person.

Even at 11:30 AM, the special "Mediterranean Breakfast" was still available. The server placed a large baguette and a generous piece of jamón serrano on each plate, and then added two individual plastic containers of what I assumed was jam or jelly. She also gave us each a coffee cup and told us to help ourselves at the coffee bar.

We found a table at the window, looking out onto a striking display of magenta midday-flowers. And as I tackled my baguette, I realized that this was not jelly--the plastic containers cups contained generous servings of olive oil and tomato puree. This was a true Mediterranean breakfast--my favorite media tostada con tomate, with the added luxury of the slice of jamón serrano. Plus the cup of cafe con leche, and we could have gone back for seconds of that. For one euro, this has got to be the best deal on the planet! The normal price of a cafe con leche most places has slipped up to the €1.20 or €1.30 range of late, a tostada is another euro, and the jamon would cost even more. Ikea's Mediterranean Breakfast puts even McDonald's dollar menu breakfast selections to shame.

The placemat on our breakfast tray was advertising another new Ikea menu item: tapas suecos, or Swedish tapas. A selection of three, each for a half euro! The specific tapa promoted here was bacalao con espinaca, a cod and spinach ball. Alas, the tapas will have to wait for another day. Even after we decided on the storage unit, chair, and some new dining room curtains, and got everything into or onto the car, we still weren't hungry again. I barely remembered to rush back in to the food store to buy the herring we had come for, and some bottled water for the trip home.

El hombre propone...

Life was not as expected this week, even in Spain, which is relatively removed from the effects of the ash released by the volcano in Iceland. Our airports were not closed; domestic flights continued as normal. External flights, of course, were a different matter. The first time I realized there was a  problem was on Sunday morning, when we heard reports that John Cleese, needing to make it from Oslo to Belgium, had chartered a taxi to drive him! Three drivers were required to comply with EU travel regulations, and it cost $5000.

Here's a little list of travel disruptions and the rippling consequences they have had on people closer to me than Mr. Cleese:

• The Sunday market, even though rain threatened and did eventually fulfill its promise, was far busier than usual, with many people on an extended holiday and still enjoying it at this early stage. But we shared a table at the hotdog stand with a lone woman who was supposed to be here with family from Norway--they had been unable to get out before the planes stopped flying.
• On Monday I heard the chatter of young English children on our street, who had been here the week before, as usual, on Easter holiday. They were obviously still here, past the time when they should have been home and in school, and I mentally pictured schoolrooms across northern Europe graphically revealing which families had done some foreign travel during spring break, and which had stayed home. By midweek the chatter stopped. Perhaps they were part of the coach convoys that were formed to drive holiday-makers to the north of Spain and then be transported by ferry over to Britain?
• Weekend visitors from Almería, who had been planning to proceed farther up the coast to see a sister on Tuesday, got a text message saying not to come--the sister was in England and unable to get to Spain.
• An older woman living alone in our neighborhood experienced a break-in and was assisted in her police report by our resident translator. Although her daughter wanted to come for a visit and to help out in this stressful situation, the lady remained alone because of the travel ban.
• Danish cousins, vacationing in Turkey over the Easter holiday, were stranded abroad, eventually returning by air to Stockholm and then by rail to Copenhagen--a long (an undoubtedly expensive) overnight train trip.
• I wondered about my Spanish class, canceled last week because my teacher had house guests from the north. Did she still have house guests several days after they had been due to leave? Yes, but nevertheless we met for the lesson--perhaps she appreciated a short hour of normalcy in what had become a longer visit than planned.
• Johannes canceled his scheduled trip to Berlin on Thursday and further to Copenhagen for his engineering school reunion--travel connections and air quality in the north still too uncertain. This means that I will surely get less work done this coming week than I had planned.
• And I am writing this Friday morning, missing the scheduled pétanque tournament that started two weeks ago, because this week's match has been postponed--the opposing team has four members stranded in the UK.
• I am also hoping, this Friday morning, that one regular reader of this blog is having an uneventful return to the U.S. from an otherwise eventful trip to Greece.

As the week wore on, newspaper and TV news reports began to concentrate less on the inconvenience and more on the costs of the fallout. Spain alone is said to have lost €450 million due to the volcano. And how does this unscheduled time away from work get charted, anyway? Does it go to vacation time, sick time, or act of God?

The Spanish have a saying: El hombre propone y Dios dispone. Man proposes, and God decides.

Or, as John Cleese said:

"How do you get God to laugh?"

"Tell him your plans."

Harvesting the Oranges

When I looked outside on Friday morning, I realized that our orange harvest had begun. For the first time in months, I did not see any oranges on the trees in the grove I see from my bathroom window.

Mind you, I had been wondering whether those oranges would ever be harvested. They have been orange ever since December. Almost all the other groves in the area have been picked clean--those orange trees recently have shown just pretty green foliage. As we have walked by our orange grove for the past several weeks, we have seen bunches of bright orange on the trees, and we also have seen lots of oranges fallen to the ground, where they have remained for weeks on end. If the grove were not surrounded by a barbed wire fence and planted a good six feet lower than the road on which we walked, we would have scooted over to the trees ourselves and picked up the fallen fruit from between the rows of trees. We have been wondering whether these particular trees would ever be harvested, and if not, why not? Certainly there is enough cheap labor to accomplish the picking job. Perhaps the market price is so bad that it is not economically worthwhile to pick this crop?

Indeed, I had just about given up hope that we would ever see the harvesting of these oranges.

Well, I still haven't seen anyone or anything picking fruit. I couldn't go out on Friday morning to inspect, but Saturday morning I walked along the path that takes us by the long field. There was no activity in the area, but I noticed that the harvest wasn't finished yet. About three quarters of the rows that I walked past had been picked and no longer showed any orange spots against the green. But a few rows in the back, the farthest away from our neighborhood, still had fruit. I'm hoping that the harvest will resume tomorrow and that I can see it in action. Meanwhile, this morning when we walked over to our neighborhood recreation area, we noticed that most of the trees are filled with orange blossoms already! I had always thought that the time between orange blossoms and orange fruit was relatively short, but I also had thought that the blossoms came first, and the fruit came just a short time later. These blossoms seem to have sprung immediately from underneath the plucked fruit. Now I wonder how long we will have orange blossoms before they are replaced by green fruit.

We had run into the farmer many months ago, when the oranges were still green, and asked him when the harvest would be done. He had told us "May," which seemed like a very long time from then. It has been a long time, but now, in mid-April, we realize that these oranges have a very long growing season after all.

Los Montesinos de Tapas

We have had three glorious days of spring weather, and three fun days of sitting in the sun, having a drink, and eating tapas. Tapas, of course, are the small appetizers accompanying a drink, for which Spain is famous. Some tapas may be eaten by hand, they may come on a toothpick or a mini-skewer, or they may require a fork, and they can range from a single bite of something delectable to a substantial plate or dish that could almost be considered a small entree.

At first I thought it rather odd to have a tapas festival starting on Good Friday, but maybe not. It's a Spanish national holiday, and there were Spanish voices all around as we visited three bar/cafes with friends Friday afternoon, exploring the tapas in the small nearby town of Los Montesinos.

Our first tapa was at the hotel on the edge of town. They brought us a small piquillo pepper stuffed with cod, and a slice of baguette to wipe up the delicate sauce that the pepper rested on. Then on to the center of town, where numerous bars and cafes surround the plaza. Our second tapa was a large toasted slice of baguette with smoked salmon and a sauteed quail egg, sunny side up, arranged attractively on top. The third stop Friday, at el Rincón, gave us a little square tart, filled with cheese and fresh from the oven. By the time we were finished with that the afternoon was drawing to a close, and it was time to play pétanque with the Danish club.

Saturday I read the scorecard and program that we had been given the day before. There were 28 establishments listed altogether--bars, cafés and restaurants, with a map of where they were located in town. Each offered a different tapa each day, so you could choose what you wanted to eat and go in that direction. But now I noticed that there were certain hours that each establishment was serving, and that many were not offering tapas between 4:00 and 7:00 in the afternoon. By the time we were ready to head out, of course, it was 4:00 PM. I scoured the listing and coordinated on the map, and we were still able to find a couple to try. One of the tastiest was a small Mexican tortilla-wrapped warm roasted beef sandwich, offered by a tiny restaurant, Azul Blue, that otherwise appeared to only serve pizza and kebabs. I can't even remember now what our second tapa was on Saturday--the English restaurant, Margarita, had run out of its planned offering and the chef had invented something else, with fish. It was good enough, though, that we stayed here for a light supper and vowed that we would return some time. On the way home we stopped off at a very old Spanish restaurant where we had enjoyed a lovely luncheon a few weeks previously. The atmosphere was mellow as we sat in an interior courtyard, and the tapa was elegant, though the least substantial of all we tried: a walnut-sized ball of pate on a single melba round.

Sunday we spent the afternoon finishing our tax return and only went out for tapas as a reward for finishing that task. We found two places open for tapas that late afternoon. I deposited my scorecard, which I had dutifully had stamped at each establishment, and voted for the last tapa, a very traditional beef in tomato sauce, with bread, as my favorite. Perhaps it wasn't really my favorite, or my only favorite, but it was my favorite at the time.

We were told that this was the first tapas festival that the town Los Montesinos had sponsored, and that it was a cooperative venture in which the eating establishments had done the planning and promotion--there was even a bus to take people around from place to place in case they had too many wines or beers while sampling the tapas. By all accounts it was a big success. They announced the winning tapa Friday morning at the town hall, if all went according to plan, but I wasn't able to attend the ceremony, so I will probbly read about it in one of the weekly newspapers. And no one has called me to tell me that my ballot won the drawing for a free dinner for two at one of the sponsoring restaurants. But we explored on foot many side streets in a town that we had only driven through before, and now we have several ideas of cafes and restaurants to go back to at some time in the future. And we sat out in the sun three days in a row.

Domingo de Ramos

This Sunday in Spain is Domingo de Ramos, Palm Sunday, and it dawned bright and early. Earlier than normal, because this year it is also the day for cambio de hora, when we spring our clocks forward one hour to march from Winter time to Summer time. Actually we turned the clocks ahead last night (Saturday) before going to bed, even though the time change occurs at 2:00 AM on Sunday, as it also does in the U.S. It just occurs on a different date than in the U.S. For the past few weeks, there have been only five hours difference in time between Spain and the east coast U.S. Normally there are six hours difference, and now, thank goodness, it is again six hours. It's amazing how that one hour of difference can upset my orientation so much.

So I was feeling good this morning to get back to my regular mental time framework, and then there was the added bonus that the weather was great. I won two games of pétanque, and then we drove into the country to enjoy the day. During pétanque I had let my lower legs see the light of day for the first time in several months, and before driving out I also changed to a sleeveless blouse, exposing my upper arms to the sun for the first time in ages.

We stopped at a do-it-yourself car wash and vacuum station and gave the Ford a long-awaited spring cleaning. Then we just followed the interesting roads and before we knew it, we were in the small village of Torremendo, on the western side of a large lake. The lake turned out to be a reservoir, or a pantano, as we learned when we paused for a café con leche and media tostada while wandering on foot through the village. A man stopped to explain how great the fishing was now at the pantano--among other things, you could catch trucha americana, American trout, whatever that is. However, most establishments sported signs saying ¡Vertedero No! (No to the garbage dump) and I slowly realized that perhaps the man had been trying to tell us that the fishing would be threatened if a regional garbage dump comes to town.

There were lots of people out on the street in this tiny town on Palm Sunday morning. We heard the church clock strike three times on the quarter hour while we were there, and a few families were making their way from church carrying palm and olive branches as a traditional recuerdo of the day. We walked around a little more after our snack and then drove even further inland, to the Region of Murcia, before taking back roads again into the Valencia Region, where we stopped for a lunch of grilled lamb chops. The pharmacy temperature gauge showed 24 degrees (75 C.) as we came through Algorfa on the way home at mid-afternoon, but now at 6:30 I have a long-sleeved sweater on again as the sun is going down. It's spring, but the nights are still cool.

Health Care in Spain

This Sunday in Spain I am going to be watching the health care vote in the United States. Whether it passes--and whatever it may be that eventually squeaks through--it will still be years, or decades, before the U.S. has overall health care as good as that in Spain.

The key word, of course, is "overall." The U.S. has excellent health care for those who can pay. It's just that fewer and fewer individuals and companies can afford to pay exorbitant rates for health insurance and procedures. In Spain, if you are a legal resident, you can get pretty good health care for free, and if you want to pay, you can get health care equal to the best in the world. Spain has a public healthcare system that is administered through its 26 autonomous regions. That's why, when we moved from Roquetas de Mar in Andalucía to Alicante in the Valencia region, we had to get new health cards. Spain also has a thriving industry of private healthcare providers. I have used both public and private services during the years I have been in Spain.

This week I was approved in the public system for a cataract operation. Yes, I have to wait. There are three boxes on my authorization form: my condition is not Urgent, nor is it Preferred. It's just Ordinary. Within three months, the ophthalmologist at my regional Centro de Especialidades told me, I will get a phone call from the Vega Baja hospital. Then I will go in to talk with the specialists there, and it may take up to a month after that before the operation can take place. Well, I don't mind waiting, since with my particular eye history and my complicated schedule, I'm not quite ready to look this laser in the eye just yet. But it is amazing to me, as an American who has experienced several private insurance plans over the years, been in a few HMOs, and paid a lot for private individual insurance, to think that I might have this surgical procedure without producing money or processing paperwork. All I have to do is show my card.

All my previous eye care in Spain has been through private providers, because it occurred before I became a legal resident and obtained my health card. It was excellent, with the most up-to-date equipment and knowledgeable personnel. Because I had experienced the same procedures in the U.S., I can say that the Spanish care was equal to that in the U.S. The costs, though considerable, were significantly less--about half.

I have also used private care for a couple minor walk-in problems--a bad back spasm, a mysterious skin rash--and paid prices that I believe are comparable to what I would pay in the U.S. as a non-insured patient. When I severely twisted my ankle on a Saturday night just before getting ready to leave for Argentina on Monday, however, I went to the public clinic, because it was open on Sunday, and they sent me on to the public hospital for X-rays, binding up, and prescriptions for crutches, a painkiller, and injections to avoid complications during air travel. Since I did not at that time have my health card, I got a bill for that service a few weeks later, payable to the teller at the corner bank--a total of something like 117 euros and some cents, obviously the amount that some accountant has figured that particular event costs the system.

I do have some complaints about health care in Spain. Over-the-counter medications are expensive, so my suitcase on returning from the U.S. is always packed with the Meijer or Target equivalent of aspirin, vitamin and mineral supplements, and Ocuvite (which I can get here, but at more than twice the price). Medications prescribed by a private practice are also expensive, but the same compound prescribed through the public system is free. Dental care is not a part of the public system, so there is lots of competition among lots of dental practices.

Spaniards can buy medical insurance if they want to use the services of private practices, and judging from the number of Spaniards I have seen in the waiting rooms of the private clinics I have been in, they do. Private practices are also heavily used by foreigners who do not have access to the health card or who prefer medical staff who speak their own language, or at least English.

Public and private health care seems to work quite well in Spain, providing several options for the diverse population. I expect to continue to be a consumer of both. I wish the options were as good for people in the United States.

Cuaresma

We are deep into Cuaresma, Lent. You can tell by the rows upon rows of cod in the grocery stores: frozen, fresh, dried, all cut (or not) in several different shapes. You would also know it because the headlines in both the Spanish and foreign press are filled with plans for the Semana Santa (Holy Week) parades, and the advertisements are all about travel and hotel packages for four days or more during the week-long vacation period.

A few years ago I bought a small paperback cookbook at the cathedral in Seville with meatless recipes for Cuaresma. It was one of those old cookbooks that was basically a written recording of oral tradition. Directions were general and did not include measurements or detail--it served better for reading than for cooking. I don't think I ever made anything from it, and last year I managed to throw it away when it got stuck between several newspapers that went to the recycling bin.

This year I found an article with traditional recipes in Activa Orihuela, a monthly free paper I picked up at the ayuntamiento (town hall) in Algorfa, and decided to do a Spanish Cuaresma recipe for two other couples who were coming to dinner on Wednesday. I hadn't met one of the couples before, so I wasn't sure about making fish as a main course, but the other popular Lenten ingredient is garbanzo beans. There was a recipe for potaje de garbanzos that sounded good as a first course. This recipe said that it served four and yet called for a half kilo (one pound) of garbanzos (chickpeas). And it meant dried garbanzos, because it said to put them to soak overnight. I thought that was an awful lot of garbanzos for four people, but since I'm rather compulsive about following recipes carefully the first time I use them and even more compulsive about making sure I have more than enough to serve guests, and because I love garbanzos and wanted some leftovers for another evening meal or a couple lunches later in the week, I doubled the recipe.

It's now Sunday and we are still eating potaje de garbanzos. It served six people nicely on Wednesday, though I had to transfer it to a larger pot than I had originally intended  to use for the soup. It was good again on Thursday for lunch. Friday evening supper was two big bowls of potaje, accompanied by paté sandwiches. We took Saturday off, but for a quick and late lunch today after our bicycle ride, I added some chunks of lomo de cerdo ahumado (smoked pork loin) to the potaje and heated it in the microwave. Talk about recycling Cuaresma recipes! There is one more main meal, or two lunches, of the potaje de garbanzos still to go, which I am sure that one person in the household is not thrilled to learn.

But I do like garbanzos.

Potaje de Garbanzos (Chickpea Soup)
1 pound chickpeas, dried
10 oz. package of frozen chopped spinach, thawed
2 large carrots
2 onions
3 garlic cloves (or more if you like)
1 tomato, chopped
Olive oil
1 bay leaf
Parsley
Salt
Pepper

Put the chickpeas in a large soup pot, cover with water, add salt, and let them soak overnight. The next day bring the chickpeas to a boil and then add a dash of olive oil, the carrots in large chunks, one onion, a bay leaf, 2 cloves of garlic (minced), and a little parsley. Cook until the chickpeas are soft (1-3 hours). Remove the carrot and onion from the pot, together with about a cup of chickpeas and a cup of broth, puré the mixture in a blender, and return to the pot. Add the spinach and simmer until hot. In a frying pan, sauté the second onion, chopped finely, one clove of garlic, minced, and the tomato in olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve the potaje in individual soup bowls with a spoonful of the onion/garlic/tomato garnish on top. Serves 6-8 as an appetizer. (This is the original recipe, translated, not the doubled version).