Piedrahita

This past weekend was Vero´s birthday, so we decided to celebrate in Piedrahita—a small town buried in the mountains two hours north of Madrid (in Castilla y Leòn), where she has a cozy little house tucked away on the edge of town.

We arrived around 9 pm on Friday night to a house FULL of people, and smoke. It probably felt so full because most of Vero´s friends are guys, and probably felt so smokey because all of these guys are chain smokers. I thought I was going to know some of them, as I have already met a handful of this crowd, but as it turned out I didn´t know a single one. I spent all weekend trying to figure out their names…

I am pretty bad with names as it is, but this motley crew only made things all the more difficult. Not a single person went by solely one name, some of them having as many as three regular nicknames and a set of at least five rotating ones that were probably invented just this weekend. For instance, there was Roberto, who often went by “Solero” (his last name), but also responded to “Dutti”, when the real “Dutti” (Hector) called him that (which he indiscriminately called everyone, even though it was really HIS nickname…). Even the dogs had several names. This all has to do with the fact that they LOVE “tonterias”—silly things that have no meaning. They like to invent words, and sometimes will find that they haven’t said a single thing of importance for over an hour, just rambling on in the direction of word association. This made things pretty difficult for the gringos of the group, who were constantly lost in the chaos and confusion of these tonterias. I think we made a pretty good effort though.

Anway, Saturday was really cool, for a few different reasons. We all woke up with mad hangovers and spent the first two hours of the afternoon lying around and taking things slow. Ah, how I love Spain. We always take things so slow. When we finally mustered up the strength to seize the day, about half of us headed up to the mountain for a mild hike through the “campo”. It was an unusually warm day, probably about 45 degrees, and it really felt like it was October. The leaves were still crisp on the ground, which was wonderful but confusing. Of course I packed the wrong shoes, so I was thankful for these dry leaves as I trekked around in my ragged chucks. Anyway, Saturday was also cool because I was able to witness the makings of “migas”—which Dimas, Pilar´s father, made a few months back. I may have already mentioned them, but if not…”migas” is a traditional Spanish food that the shepherds used to make in large quantities, because there really is no other way to make it, before heading out for long periods to the fields. The word “migas” literally means bread crumbs, and these bread crumbs are what make up the base of yet another delicious poor man´s meal. When I first ate “migas”, I had been watching Dimas prepare all week for the Sunday lunch that, for whatever reason, Carmen allowed him to be in charge of. Each afternoon I would find him sitting at the kitchen table, crumbling old French bread into a giant metal stir-fry pot. I sort of thought that things went so slowly because he is an old man, and old men tend to do things at this pace. But as I found out on Saturday, this was not the case at all. “Migas” takes A LOT of time.

Even with at least 10 sets of hands helping at all times, it took at least 6 hours to prepare. First, all the bread had to be crumbled into tiny bits. There were 20 of us, and I will estimate that we used at least 10 loaves of bread, probably more. After this was done, all the “treats” were chopped up---garlic, red and green peppers, mushrooms, and finally, all types of chorizo. Each of these, in this order, was then cooked and stirred in hot oil, for probably 40 minutes, and then removed before the next ingredient was added. When it was finally time for the bread crumbs, everything was thrown back in the pot and mixed together, with the final, key ingredient—grapes. YUM. Probably one of the best meals I´ve ever had—even, amazingly enough, better than Dimas´s!

I forgot my camera this weekend (:()..but I did take some pictures of the whole process with my cellphone, which I will see about uploading later this week.