Conversation with Nathan (Condensed)

This conversation occurred over the course of a couple days -- sorry, I try to avoid "My kid is so cute" blog posts but this was too funny.

Nathan: Mom, when are you going to get yourself tenure?
Mom: I don't know. What is tenure, anyway?
Nathan: It's when the universe decides to keep you.

Boys' day at school (warning: Toddler content)

M: Seth, how was your day at school?

S: Good.

M: What did you do on the playground?

S: Played. I played, somebody found Clara. Noah found Clara. She was better. Coming at school, and Noah found her. I played with Noah and I played with Clara. Both.

M: What did you do inside your classroom?

S: Played.

M: What happened when you woke up from nap?

S: Cried.

M: Why?

S: Because I have to go pooh.

M: Why were you crying? You have to go pooh all the time at home.

S: My belly hurts. I pushed my pooh down. My teacher not use toilet paper, use wipes.

M: Do you have anything else to tell me about school?

S: Yes. Um....um...

M: Seth, focus.

S: I did play. I did sing on the car rug. I sang some songs. Mom, let's draw.

Nathan: Mom! We don't sing in music. We do music. We have like books.

M: Books about music?

Nathan: We do things in books. Like we do like what order is this, what color is this, what instrument is this. That's really all I did.

M: Nathan, how was your day in school?

Nathan: OK.

M: Who did you play with at recess?

Nathan: Sonia. She speaks English.

M: And what did you do in English?

Nathan: We filled out a worksheet.

M: What was your favorite part of the day?

Nathan: English.

M: Did you learn any Spanish words?

Nathan: No.

M: Did you have homework?

Nathan: Yes. We had mathematics and Lengua.

M: Why don’t you ask your own question and answer it?

Nathan: Why did the chicken cross the road? (Laughs).

M: No, about school.

Nathan: Oh! How was recess? OK.

What did you do? I watched someone make something weird. There were some people, they were like making like a dirt rock thing. You can throw the rocks and then they break apart and some little ones you could break with bare hands.

M: Is that all?

N: Yeah.

Procuring items in Spain (car-less version)

About a week ago, we realized that to facilitate lazy parenting (i.e., sending the big kids out to run around with the U.N. crowd downstairs), we’d need to buy some stuff. Like racquets for padel (a game similar to tennis), in-line skates, and a balance bike for Seth. For those of you who know Seth, you’ll appreciate that he spent the better part of the week wearing us down by pointing to the big kids’ bikes and saying “I ride that. I big enough.”

So we located a Decathlon (reputed by our Spanish friends to be a purveyor of cheap sporting goods), and set off. Here’s what happened next.

How to get there from here, Madrid version: So one thing that the savvy traveler should know about Madrid (or at least, Alcobendas) is that there is no map on which bus routes are overlaid on an actual street grid. Most bus maps look like this:

And most street maps look like this:

Which means that finding out how to go from hither to tither entails extensive cross-referencing of the bus lines with streets. An hour later, we determine that the only bus going to Decathlon is Bus 157; we’d need to walk 20 minutes to reach a stop for it, and then would only take it about 200 meters before getting to the store. We decide to walk.

The warning: On Google, the store’s one “rating” was a comment along the lines of “I drove to this address, but there is no store there!” Heather insists, however, that she saw the Decathlon sign in the approximately correct location while out on a run with Seth. We’re ready to go.

Setting out: We pick up the kids at 4:30 from school, and after a brief detour to drop off book bags, pass an eerily cheerful 15 minutes walking toward the store. Then:

· We pass a traffic circle festooned with signs pointing to the Decathlon. Good news!

· We take the wrong exit from the traffic circle. Bad news.

· We locate a street map mounted by the side of the road. Good news!

· Although they include a “you are here” dot in the legend, the map curators have neglected to place one on the actual map. Bad news!

· Three kids hanging off Heather and opining loudly about where we are (the “you are here” dot, dumb Mommie!) means she cannot correctly read the map. More bad news!

· We walk down a busy road, ask a bystander for help, and are directed to a pedestrian bridge over an arroyo. Heading in the general direction of the store. Good news!

· Notice the area is covered with an unnaturally large number of odd-looking mushrooms. Remember that Madrid is in a desert, and it hasn’t rained here in almost 3 weeks. Mushrooms probably bad news.

· Cross bridge, end up in abandoned (and possibly toxic), completely fenced-off brownfield. Very bad news.

By now we are getting some serious bad attitude from the kids. We retrace our steps and realize that it will not be possible to get to Decathlon unless we want to enter the equivalent of a 3-lane traffic circle with semi-trailers but no sidewalks. Then, Jon spots the 157 bus stop. We are saved!

40 minutes later: The bus actually comes. Kids have in the meantime eaten/drank every drop/morsel of food we brought; they are still hungry and have turned on us. We pay $6.50 for a 200-meter bus ride, upon which time we disembark and go to the sporting goods store.

The store: Enough like being in an REI to cause Mommie a hint of happiness. Look on Seth’s face upon seeing his new bike also causes great joy. General behavior of kids does not.

Retracing our steps: Another $6.50 for reverse 200-meter bus ride. Same bus driver, who gives us a knowing smile. Walk back home. Feed masses, supervise homework, put them to bed.

Elapsed time in transit: 4 hours.

Seth’s comments upon riding his new bike.

Seth: Oh I can do it!

Mommie: Yes, you just push with your feet.

(A minute elapses as Seth toddles around on the balance bike)

Seth: HOW I GO FAST ON THIS BIKE?

Mommie: You push hard with your feet! And practice!

(A minute elapses)

Seth: This bike not go fast. I want new bike go fast. All done this bike.

Quick weekend update

So we’ve passed a relatively happy week here. The kids seem to be adjusting to their school: Nora is actively trying to speak Spanish in full sentences; to our great surprise, Seth has gone from screaming "I don't want to go!" to taking a shine to after-school sports and swimming; Nathan got a glowing report from his teacher (who insisted, to our complete puzzlement, that he is quite talkative in class). We found a kick-butt park yesterday in north Alcobendas (they actually had, among other things, a kid-sized ant farm) and a good pizza place nearby. Other than the slow-motion self-immolation of the Red Sox, life is good.

Just a few random comments from me (Heather) to catch you all up:

Ham: It is possible that from Jon’s last post you might have underestimated the amount of ham in the local grocery store. To get a sense for his, imagine the meat aisle in the typical U.S. grocery store. There’s one aisle (half-aisle) laid against the back of the store, and bacon takes up a few feet, ham takes up a few feet, then hamburger, steak, and chicken take up the rest. It’s maybe 15-20 yards of meat all told.

In our Spanish grocery store, here’s the situation:

· Bacon has one side of an aisle to itself

· Across from bacon, there’s a half-aisle devoted to what I call ham-bits – processed ham of all kinds, chopped ham, salami, chorizo, etc. This is my favorite aisle.

· Next aisle over – more ham. This time, however, it’s sandwich meat ham, mixed in with some turkey (ham flavored turkey lunch meat, that is). Why there’s a need for pale square ham sandwich meat here, I do not know, as the real shavings are easy to come by and very tasty.

· Next aisle over from that – “other” pork products + rabbit and chicken. In a tiny corner, there is some sad-looking (and odd-tasting) hamburger. Other pork products include pigs’ feet and ears, all bundled up nicely for easy sale.

· Lining the back of the store, as Jon mentioned, are whole hamhocks.

In total, it’s probably 60+ yards of meat – and that’s separate from the fish section, which we’ll catch you up on some other time (think giant dead toothy grinning fish at eye-level with your toddler).

The model U.N. People who knew me in high school might remember that I briefly belonged to the “model U.N.” club. It wasn’t a good fit. I don’t much care about international relations, am not a good debater, and didn’t do well on field trips (although I have maintained a lifelong curiosity about Burkino Faso).

Ironically, 25 years later, it turns out I should have invested more in those skills. Our complex is a little U.N.: Norway, France, Great Britain, Spain, the U.S. The kids from these countries have formed what we call the “Model U.N.” in the complex – starting at about 5 PM, the place is awash in children skating, cycling, scootering, and playing hide and seek, cards, and padel (a game related to tennis). We Americans free-ride off the parenting norms in Europe, essentially shoving our big kids out the door after school and then calling them in for dinner at 7:30. On weekends, the revelry starts at 2:30 and lasts until sundown. When Seth joins in, he is more often than not “adopted” by a sweet French or British girl, leaving Mommie to only read her kindle, relax in the sun, and play amateur sociologist as she watches the kids try to communicate rules/ norms and form international treaties with one another in broken Spanish. As one of my FB friends said, “The best playdates are the ones with no parents present.”

Tomorrow: Some adventures in getting from here to there.

Nathan rocks out

Nathan was dancing to one of his favorite songs.

Food, glorious food!

New foods that are playing a more prominent role the Starhill diet in Spain

I live in a household of (generally) not very adventurous eaters. But since I’m usually the cook and the food shopper, I have had a chance to take some small steps toward diversifying the food we eat to take advantage of what is special and unique to Spain. Here are the top 10 foods that have worked their way into Starhill stomachs.

1. Pan

See an earlier post for our testimonial to bread. Each day, usually about mid-morning, Heather or I take a 10-minute walk to one of several places that sell fresh baguettes. We buy two baguettes – total price a bit less than $2 – that lasts us through the day. Often as an easy dinner, we feed the kids bocadillos, which is what the Spanish call sandwiches that use baguette bread. Usually bocadillos are very simple – no lettuce, tomato, mayo, mustard, etc. – just bread and the filling. Popular fillings are chorizo (see #2 below), salami, tortilla (see #5 below), and US-style ham. After a day, these baguettes get very stale and are generally not useful, although it is nice to dunk stale bread into my gazpacho (see #4 below).

Right now we tend to get our bread from several different places. When we are going to the (big supermarket) Al Campo anyway, we pick up bread from them. Sometimes we go to a cafe that makes bread as well as lots of different kinds of cookies; these baguettes have an especially flaky and crunchy crust. Sometimes we go to another bakery that has a more traditional baguette with a smooth crust.

2. Chorizo

Spanish chorizo is very different from what I was used to calling chorizo in America (spicy sausage or ground meat). Chorizo here is pork sausage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorizo

It can be bought cured (no need to cook, just slide and eat or put in a bocadillo) or raw. Of the varieties that we’ve had here, right now we seem to like what is called chorizo Asturiano, which I think is popular in the north of Spain. It is pretty flavorful and spicy, but not in the same way that chili peppers are spicy. We get it at the Al Campo but also at a number of small neighborhood butcher shops near us. We recently found another type of chorizo that is native to another region of Spain called chorizo Jaen; it is supposedly a bit more mild (suave, in Spanish) and so will be worth a try.

3. Olives

I love olives, and they are abundant here in Spain. At the supermarket we buy the familiar green olives and the familiar black olives, but there are also many other varieties to try. My current favorite is called Campo Real (named after the area in Spain where they are from). They are a brighter shade of green than the familiar green olive, a bit softer, a bit larger pit, and more juicy.

It is very common, when you order a drink or a soda in a bar, to be served some sort of small munch-y snack. Potato chips are common (see ham-flavored potato chips from an earlier post). But I tend to ask for aceitunas (olives).

4. Gazpacho

Spanish gazpacho is a bit different from what one often finds in America. For one, it is smooth, not chunky. (Although it is also common to sprinkle some chopped peppers, onions, and even bread on top of a bowl of gazpacho.) But basically it is a chilled tomato soup, with cucumbers, onions, peppers, vinegar, garlic, and olive oil. I don’t remember having it much in the US, but I really love it here.

In a Spanish grocery store, it is common to find gazpacho in milk cartons (e.g., a quart size), in the chilled aisles near the vegetables. Most people just pour themselves a glass of gazpacho – it is more of a drink than it is a soup.

If anyone else in my family would drink it, I would love to make my own gazpacho. (Our apartment doesn’t have a blender, but I’d love an excuse to buy one!) So I buy the pre-made gazpacho in the milk cartons and it is very good. If I were to make my own homemade gazpacho, I would surely use the recipe of our friend Miguel from Aranjuez, which is a town just south of Madrid. His gazpacho is very yummy. Here I include his recipe (without getting his permission – I hope this is OK, Miguel!), in case anyone wants to try it at home.

Also, a word on olive oil. Although it is possible to buy other kinds of oil in Spain (vegetable, canola, sunflower, sesame, etc.), most people only use olive oil. As a result, stores sell two main kinds of olive oils. Extra virgin olive oil is what we usually buy in the states. However, the second kind (called suave, or mild) is a much milder-tasting oil. It can be used in cooking or baking where one doesn’t want to have the strong flavor of olive oil. You’ll note that in this recipe, Miguel uses suave olive oil. For cooks in the US, you’ll need to use extra virgin and perhaps add a little extra water or ice to make it a bit more mild.

Gazpacho, by Miguel Abánades

Ingredientes:

* 1200 g. tomates maduros (si la batidora es buena, no es necesario pelarlos, pero si no, necesitarás pelarlos y para ello se hierven unos segundos en agua para que la piel se separe fácilmente)

* 1/2 cebolla mediana (80 g. aprox) pelada

* 1 pepino pequeño pelado

* 1 pimiento verde pequeño sin las pepitas

* 1 manzana pelada

* 1/2 diente de ajo

* 1 taza (200 ml.) de aceite de oliva suave (NO virgen)

* 2 Cucharadas de vinagre (de vino)

* 1 Cucharadita de sal

Opcional: miga de pan a remojo en agua

Para prepararlo se lavan las verduras y se parten en trozos y se baten en la batidora hasta que quede fino. Con esta cantidad salen aproximadamente 2 litros de gazpacho. Hay que ponerlo en la nevera y servirlo muy frío.

(Hay gente que añade un poco de agua (o hielo) para que quede más suave, Y hay gente que para tomarlo añade por encima trozos pequeños de tomate, cebolla, pimiento verde, pepino y pan.)

Buen provecho!

5. Tortilla

Here I mean what sometimes is called “Spanish Tortilla” or tortilla Española, not the flat bread that is common in Mexican food. Tortilla is served in a variety of ways here – as tapas, in a bocadillo, as part of a big meal. I have always loved eggs, potatoes, and onion concoctions, of which this is another variety.

I’ve been ordering and eating tortillas a lot in various cafes, trying to reverse engineer how it is made. In my few attempts to make it at home, I think I am getting better. Basically, you fry up lots of potatoes in lots of olive oil. Then you mix the potatoes with egg and cook as you would an omelet. However, most tortillas are not quite done on the inside, so watching for how the egg is cooking is key. Flipping the tortilla is also a challenge, especially since you need to flip it when the egg is not quite set. They make special pans for this, but a trick that a Spaniard told me about was to use a plate. You put the plate on top of the egg/pan, flip the tortilla so that it is on the plate instead of the pan, and then slide the tortilla off of the plate back in the pan.

6. Rioja

What we’ve most enjoyed about Spanish wine so far is that you can get pretty good Riojas for amazingly cheap. At Al Campo, we’ve been sampling the selection of Riojas in the 2 to 4 euros range. Perhaps we don’t have the most refined wine tastes ever, but we really like these wines. In the US, it seems that one might want to spend $10 to get a half-decent bottle of wine, but here it is possible to spend considerably less and do just fine.

7. Nutella

Nutella on good bread is a common snack for the kids at school and one that I’ve come to love as well. If you don’t know what Nutella is, here is some info.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutella

It is available in the states but is more ubiquitous and cheap here. Yum!

8. Fruit (melons, pears, plums)

Seth is in a banana stage right now, which means that we go through a ton of bananas. But we’ve been trying to sample other fruits that seem to be in season here. Our favorites so far are a variety of pear that seems to be peaking right about now and that is very tasty, some pretty and very sweet plums that are yellow, and melon. Apparently Spain is the world’s largest exporter of melons, and right now there is a variety that is green with white/yellow flesh that is sweet and very yummy. So we are eating lots of melon now.

From our Spanish friends we learned a new way to cut melon that makes so much sense that it is a wonder that we haven’t seen it or thought of it before. It is hard to explain in writing, but perhaps I can get Nora to draw a picture so that I can include it in another post.

On the subject of fruit, we also like that we can go to one of countless little fruit stores (fruiterias) in our neighborhood and buy an enormous amount of fruit for quite cheap.

9. Cheese

We were really looking forward to Spanish cheeses and had spent the past year sampling every kind of Spanish cheese that we could find at Whole Foods. It has been harder to find good cheese here than we anticipated. The grocery store has lots of cheese, but they aren’t labeled in ways that make it easy for us to figure out which ones we might like. In the US, we loved Manchego cheese. But here, since Manchego is a region, there are dozens of Manchego cheeses, with no easy way to figure out which ones we would like. The situation is perhaps akin to cheddar cheese in the US. Imagine a whole aisle of cheddar cheese, but instead of adjectives that are familiar (sharp, very sharp, mild, aged, Cabot, Vermont, etc.) there are adjectives that are more difficult to interpret (curado, semi-curado, or no adjective at all). We know the difference between oveja (sheep), cabra (goat), and vaca (cow) cheese. But even though we’ve tried a bunch, we haven’t been able to find the perfect cheeses yet.

We have recently been going to some of the local meat markets, which also have some cheese. We ask for cheese that is “fuerte” (strong) and then get some samples. So we’ve made some progress. But we think that we need to take a field trip to downtown Madrid, where there are some more well stocked cheese stories. So more on this in the future.

I will say, however, that we did find a little stall in a food market that specialized in feta cheese. They had about 10 varieties of fresh feta. I bought one and have been enjoying it on (you guessed it) a baguette. And soon I’m going to see if I can sneak in some feta cheese into our regular pasta with sun dried tomato meal and see if anyone other than me will eat it.

10. Membrillo

Just a brief note on this one. Membrillo is a kind of homemade Spanish jelly that is made out of quince. It is (yet another food item that is) yummy on good bread. You can find it in the US at Whole Foods – go to the cheese section near the Spanish cheeses and ask if you don’t see it. It is a bit more solid than typical jelly and thus is somewhat hard to spread. But a very nice taste combination is to take some cream cheese (or other soft cheese), spread on bread, and then put membrillo on top.

Two other food items that we are worth discussing here. First, those with knowledge of Spanish food might be surprised not to see ham on this list. Ham is a big deal over here. When you go into the grocery store, there is an entire section where there are (no kidding) hundreds of hams for sale, including 50 whole legs of ham hanging from the ceiling. There is also a chain of cafes and stores here called Museo del Jamón. Spaniards are extremely serious about their ham. In fact, there really isn’t a “foodie” culture here (that we have encountered) about anything other than ham. Most of the ham that people eat here would be called prosciutto in the US. We have been overwhelmed by the options for buying this kind of ham so far. We’ve had some that is probably rather cheap – it was rather chewy and almost like ham jerky – not a big hit. But we’ve been told that the better hams are very different and wonderful to eat. But does “better” mean buying a few grams of ham that costs 10 euros per kilo? 20 euros? 100 euros? 500 euros? Stay tuned.

And second, the fish here is amazing. Even run of the mill grocery stores have an incredible selection of very fresh fish of all sorts. Yes, we are smack in the middle of a large country – hours and hours from the ocean. But people here really like their fish and buy lots of it. Unfortunately the more adventurous fish that I might want to try (e.g., there are dozens of types of small whole fish that could crudely be called sardines that people eat here; there are lots of different types of mussels, octopus, and squid) wouldn’t fly on our dinner table. So I will have to continue eating fish when we eat out.

Lazy Sunday

We had a fairly lazy Sunday. It was a beautiful day -- mid-80s with a strong breeze. Fall has finally come to Madrid! It feels odd that mid-80s would mean fall, but that's really what it feels like after weeks of mid-90s; it even set off my (Heather's) craving for apple picking.

While it was nice to have warm weather this far into fall, by the end it was getting to us; when one is in the shade (or pool) the mid-90s in Madrid are not bad at all. But when one is walking to fetch the kids after school (4:00) under the beating sun, the mid-90s are pretty awful.

In any case, after pancakes and apartment clean-up, Nora and Nathan went with Jon to a soccer match; Seth and I took the bus around the Alcobendas loop. Such is Seth's dedication to buses that he waited patiently almost 40 minutes for the bus to arrive, never complaining once. After regrouping for lunch, Nora went down to the courtyard and spent the next 5 hours running around the complex with friends; Seth napped and then went downstairs to run around with Nora's friends, whom he adores; Nathan went to a friend's birthday party, at which Jon gathered all sorts of good intelligence about the Jewish community in Madrid.

Also, Seth threw a pretty good tantrum at breakfast today -- it brought back memories at Nora at her toddler best. This one was triggered by something so small it wasn't noticable by the rest of the family; the content mainly included Seth writhing on the floor, screaming "I can't get up! I can't get up! Help me!" for about 20 minutes. Occasionally he'd rise to his knees and then fall back down only to writhe and scream some more. I can only imagine what our Norwegian bachelor neighbor must be thinking.

Finally, since we've been here, Seth's gotten in the habit of saying the same thing to us at bedtime. Based on similar data from our older children, one might imagine he'd say something like "I love you to the moon and back" or "Come back to check on me and leave the light on and the door open" or even a plain "Night night Mommie." But here's what Seth actually says:

"When I wake up, I want tiny money, and more tiny money, and more tiny money, and more tiny money. And breakfast."

Every night, like clockwork. The tiny money is actually a centavo -- 1/100th of a Euro. The EU learned its lesson from the penny (which costs far more than one cent to produce) and the centavos are indeed tiny.