Ode to Jamon (Ham)

Pata Negra: Translation? Black pig ham legs (and lots of 'em)

When Delora lived in the States, she thought ham was beneath her.  She remembers a childhood filled with nightmarish holiday meals at her Aunt's house, featuring molded ham from a can decorated with maraschino cherries.  Those days ensured that Delora would never voluntarily eat pink meat again.

Delora at the Ham Museum Store.  

Photo courtesy: Tay

Delora first tasted Iberian Pata Negra de Bellota at a friend's house just after arriving in Spain.  Eager to avoid appearing fussy and priggish, she took a big bite and was delighted to find that the Pata Negra didn't even taste like meat -- it tasted like nuts! Delora found herself hogging the whole platter of pricey meat as though making up for a lifetime of Pata Negra deprivation.  Later, when Delora couldn't stop craving the stuff, she did some research and this is what she found: Iberico pigs roam on grazing lands in Western Spain populated by encina trees (holm oak) and are only allowed to eat acorns.

If you want to know more about Iberico Jamon de Bellota, read this article: Guardian Article

Their meat is high in Omega 3 fatty acids!  It's actually healthy to eat the ham here (and good for Delora's recuperation diet!)  Some marketers people call Iberico pigs "olives on legs", or something cute like that. Plus, they're are massaged with a special oil every night after being given a pint of beer.  Wait, that's Kobe beef. Okay, there's no massaging pigs here, but Delora personally guarantees that if you can ever get your lips on a piece of this stuff, it's worth the ticket to Spain.

Look what my friends have in their Spanish kitchens:

Spanish Status Symbol

(Delora wants one of these badly and imagines that she would cover the hoof with a little American flag bandana.)

And if you're a vegetarian?  Lucky for you, there are a variety of vegetarian ham products available for you!  The entire snack food industry has capitalized on the country's love of ham and has added a line impossible to find in the states: Fritos con jamon, Doritos con jamon, potato chips con jamon...

Delora's Medical Condition

Delora is deciding whether to use the best Spanish surgeon or the best English-speaking Spanish surgeon for her abdominal hernia. She looks in the mirror one more time to confirm her diagnosis and, as she runs her finger over the pink bump, she wonders what in the world she's been lifting to cause such muscle strain.  She carries a 14 pound dog up the stairs when she refuses to walk, but that shouldn't bust a gut.

Delora decides to show the hernia to her daughter, who had one repaired when she was 6 months old.  She says look, this is what a hernia feels like!  This is what you had fixed when you were a baby!  Delora's spawn wipes a finger over the lump and offers a different opinion: what you have, she says with a smirk, is a blister from the button on your jeans.  Then, like Matlock, she re-zips her mother's partially unzipped jeans and shows how the button matches where the hernia is located.  While Delora is relieved at not having to speak to a surgeon in Spanish while undergoing anesthesia, she is a bit chagrined.  It's true, Delora's skinny jeans have been tight lately, but Delora believes that jeans fit best after a second wearing when the shrinking effects of the dryer have been reversed. Then Delora detects a bit of faulty logic: Delora doesn't even own a dryer in Spain.

When Delora takes a mental inventory of her last few weeks, she can point to several culprits for the hernia weight gain. Delora has always been a card carrying believer in the old adage, When in Rome, do as the Romans.  Adapting this personal motto to her time in Spain has meant that Delora has emulated the Spanish and allowed herself to eat several more meals per day than she does in the United States!   Here's a typical day: For breakfast, pastry and coffee (or -- for Spaniards only -- chocolate and churros,  before going to sleep -- at 6 AM.)  The next meal is served at around 11:30 AM when the Spanish enjoy a light sandwich or tortilla.  Lunch is from 2 PM until 4 PM where there is bread (no butter), a first course, and a second course, followed by dessert.  At 7 or 8 in the evening one enjoys a merienda, a mini meal, before heading out for a late night dinner at 10 PM. Delora has noticed that the Spanish love potato chips, and while she has denied herself this pleasure for years, she now feels that eating chips is a cultural experience and must be indulged.  As Delora's friend, Taylor, will tell you, Delora is now often heard furtively piling sour cream and onion chips into her mouth while speaking on her Vonage phone.

Part of Delora's recuperation from her non-operation involves an adjustment in wardrobe to looser clothing  to avoid irritating the stitches from the hernia non-operation blister.  Another part of the healing involves figuring out which diet strategy can work with the heavy-on-the-jamon-and-chips, five-meal-per-day plan.

The Final Report

Sometimes when Delora listens to people talking fast in Spanish she is like the animal in the Far Side comic picking out a few select words: blah,blah,blah,blah,blah, GOOD BOY!

This is how Delora listens to her Pet Detective and her interpretor at their final meeting.  They sit in a cramped office, like William Hurt's in the movie Body Heat, amidst stacks of papers and mementos crowding every surface. He is polite, professional, and deferential when offering a beautifully typed, albeit thin, report on his best paper stock. Delora pretends to follow along as he reads each hand-stamped page.

With the saddest possible face, he reports that Thunder is most probably not dead, blah, blah, since very reliable records are kept in the city of Madrid regarding animals that have been injured or killed. He confirms the area he has searched, blah, blah.  He is sorry that he hasn't been able to find Thunder. After all, he too, is the owner of a miniature dachshund, blah,blah. THEN, Delora hears the one Spanish word that peaks her interest:  blah, blah, FINCA, blah, blah!

Que?  Delora perks up.  Por Favor, una finca?  Then, blah,blah our PD explains that he believes that Thunder Perkins is probably living happily on a finca somewhere outside of Madrid! Delora's heart skips as she realizes that she has been duped by, quite possibly, the smartest male dauschund on the planet.  Here she is, like William Hurt in that second to last scene in Body Heat, realizing that Kathleen Turner didn't actually die in the fire! She had planned to dupe him all along!  Delora flashes back to a few clues from Thunder, the canine Kathleen Turner, and now it all makes sense: Thunder's guilty look that final day together on the couch; the chicken left in his bowl signaling his loss of appetite, or a diet designed to enable slipping out of a harness; ears perked with interest at the mention of an invitation to a finca!  Now it all makes sense.

Delora recalls friends who had, in the past, smirked a little when Delora reported signs of Thunder's high intelligence.  But what dog of average intelligence manages to escape from a harness and get himself furloughed to a finca outside of a city he's never liked?  What dog with less than a gargantuan IQ manages to plot an escape from a Chica he dislikes?  Other humans have underestimated Thunder for years, but not Delora.  She alone realizes that Thunder Perkins has figured out a way to get to a finca, before Delora herself has!

Delora can barely keep it together as she politely thanks the PD and gathers her things.  Delora smells a rat.

Thunder's Cost Justification Analysis

Delora thinks back to her salad days in New York City selling computers at IBM.  She remembers spending months of rigorous training at IBM school in Atlanta.  Besides dancing nightly at the Lime Light, she remembers learning everything she could about computer components, accounting and how to cost justify just about ANYTHING!  Cost justification at IBM, of course, was all about how to save people money doing things they could do faster (and cheaper) with computers.  Overtime, Delora has modified the meaning of cost justification.  Now she uses this skill to justify spending more money, when alot has already been spent.


With Thunder missing, there is an unspoken question in Delora's household.  The question is:  How much dinero will Delora and her husband spend to find their lost dog?  Delora ponders the variables. She acknowledges that if she had lost a TIMEX watch, with no emotional value, for example, it would be cheaper and easier to buy a new one for $79 than it would be to place an ad and hire a private detective.  Then Delora thinks about how much she would spend if she lost her nice Grandmother.  Then, there would be no stone unturned, no expense spared to find her, right?

Thunder's cost justification analysis falls somewhere in the middle...

It starts like this:

Puppy ($900)

Then you add this:

Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

8 years of medical care from Paul Newman's homeopathic Veteranarian - $$$

And this:

Playmate for Thunder

And this:

8 years of Organic food from Paul Newman's homeopathic Veterinarian -  $$$

And this:

Quarterly dental scrapings from the Homeopathic Veterinarian's

 dog whisperer from California who can clean teeth and improve dog breath without anesthesia.

And this:

Inevitable Dental work with general anesthesia to remove a few teeth - $$$

And this:

Dog Trainer to teach dogs how to sit after 3 months of weekly lessons - $$$

And this:

Halloween costumes - 2006

And these:

Accessories

And this:

Sportswear to commemorate World Series Win (t-shirts, home and away colors, scarves, etc.) -

And one of these: 

Flight to Spain - $


With these sunken costs, Delora believes she can properly cost justify one more ad in the paper!

Boarding School Conference Call

SON 1: Why do we have to have another conference call when they've already interviewed us once?

DELORA:  They want to see how you're handling your experience in Spain.  They might want to know if you've matured at all since they've seen you, or why you think you'd be a good fit at their school...

SON 2: Can I tell them they have the hottest girls in their catalogue?

Delora is not amused.

DELORA: Did you all get your SKYPE numbers? I need to email them to the school right now.

DAUGHTER:  Mine is: Dudeit'sLu.

DELORA:  Seriously? Seriously. (To Son 1) And yours?

SON 1: It's MotherRucker.

Three teenagers crack themselves up.

Finca Fantasy: Part dos

Darn if that Finca inviation didn't evaporate when the margaritas wore off!  To read about how Delora and her husband were lured into thinking that they would be invited to a kajillion acre finca to shoot things, then weren't, click here:
http://debinspain.blogspot.com/search/label/Finca%20fantasy

So, fall has come and gone. Heck, winter has almost come and gone. Still, no finca invitation has materialized from the people we met casually at a cocktail party at 3AM who said, "You should come to our finca someday!"

Then some of our best Spanish friends -- we only have two due to our language impairments -- tried their best to let us down easily over lunch the other day.  First, they let it slip that their family had, not ONE, but TWO fincas!  Then, seeing our excitement, our friends told us as gently as possible, that their finca(s) are only for family!  Wouldn't you think that our best Spanish friends in the whole wide world would invite us to ONE of their TWO fincas?  I mean really, who has TWO fincas and doesn't need some friends to fill them up and help kill the deer that have overpopulated them?

Still, I can't help but think that we'll get lucky with someone and get a finca invitation before we move back to the States.  And it's with this optimistic view of the world that I begin my search for the perfect hostess gift.  What to bring to a finca?  As I walk through the charming streets of Barrio Salamanca, I keep my eye out for a statement gift, something to make the Spanish hostess feel she was right to invite Americans to her finca.  The kids suggest we bring a DVD of Bambi along with an orphaned baby deer, but this is too much of a political statement for me.  I'm thinking: what do you bring to a family that has to swallow mounds of deer meat every weekend?  Wouldn't something like gooseberry jam (is that a real thing, or something from a children's book I read once?) compliment venison? Maybe dress it up a little?  Perhaps I could bring some french crepes (venison crepes, how nice!) So my Google friend and I sit down to do some research on what would compliment venison and up pops a recipe finder with 91 recipes! Then I see this...

We have recipes for all the familiar game meats plus the slightly "wilder" animals like bear, turtle, moose, squirrel, and snake.


And with that, my Finca Fantasy comes to a screeching halt. I'm about to hurl just thinking about eatting a squirrel, so if you want to make alligator fingers, rattlesnake pasta or bear tonight, click here:

 http://allrecipes.com/HowTo/Wild-about-Game/Detail.aspx.  
And if you can help me out with some ideas for what to bring to a finca, I'd really appreciate it.  Now if you'll excuse me...

From Pet Psychic to Pet Detective...

If you thought we were crazy to listen to two pet psychics, what will you think of our hiring a pet detective?  I  justify our decision by paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld: we need more troops on the ground! Time is of the essence and we're losing this war against the dognapper.  The bottom line is this: what if Thunder has developed Stockholm's syndrome with his dognapper?  What if he's developed an affinity for the ole grey haired lady and forgotten all about his human birth mother?

Enter the pet detective, a person to follow up on the ambiguous clues left by the pet psychic!  Searching the streets of Madrid for a stone framed wood door, etc., is a full time job.  AND, (paraphrasing Kim in Bye, Bye Birdie) I've got a lotta livin' to do!  Thanks to El Crisis Economique there are a handful of detectives in this city, men who wouldn't have dreamed of looking for a missing canine 2 years ago, who are now willing to switch from tracking errant husbands to tracking missing dogs in exchange for some Euros.  And why not?  Our wise Detective agrees, someone has rescued our dog and decided to keep the little guy. He hasn't surfaced at any of the city's many dog pounds, nor at the police stations, nor at the Vets' offices, nor at the (ahem) dog morgue.  SO... pet detective it is!

In order to cover all the bases we have launched a two-pronged search and rescue mission (paraphasing Rumsfeld or Guiliani...or some other important person in charge of things) to find Thunder.  Here's the ad in the local paper...

See Thunder above to the right? He kind of looks like the dog version of the attorney above and to the left of his ad, doesn't he?

We have not yet begun to fight! 

(Civil war quote? Shoot, who said this? Too lazy to source this quote and too old to remember...Ok...I felt guilty for being too lazy to google a quote... and it's a way to waste some time so that I can't possibly study my Spanish. It's from John Paul Jones to the British during the Revolutionary War.)