And The Winner Is...

The winner of my Spain On The Road Contest is...

Laurie from Dalla Mia Cucina!

Good job, Laurie, for answering the really difficult questions that were posed on my blog. You will be receiving a season pass to the complete season of Spain On The Road Again on iTunes. Enjoy it with a Spanish snack and my thanks for entering the contest.

No non-US entries, so only one prize was awarded.

Spain On The Road Contest

Spain On The Road contest closes at midnight (your time) tonight, October 12th. See sidebar for details.

Don't Forget To Enter My Contest

Read this post and answer the 3 questions below. Send your response to FNMusings@gmail.com:

1. What is Mark’s last name?

2. What is a lechazo?

3. What is a mojón?

The US resident winner will receive (by email) a complete season pass to the video, Spain On The Road Again, on iTunes.

For my foreign friends, the winner will receive 365 Days in Spain 2009 Picture-A-Day Calendar with text by Penelope Casas.

Both winners will be randomly picked from all the correct answers.

Please include your full name and email address in the body of your email and title your email – Questions on Spain…

(Answers accepted until Sunday, October 12th.)

Mario and Gwyneth In Spain - Episode Two, Plus A Nifty Contest

The next portion of Mario’s trip through Spain with his friends takes them, and us, on a Pilgrimage to Galicia. In honor of this wonderful series, I'm holding an exciting contest with 2 fabulous prizes. All you have to do is to read through this post and answers three questions at the end. (I have no problem with bribing my readers.)

Spain On The Road Again is available on iTunes and I’m giving away a season pass to one reader for the entire current series. You can download all the episodes and enjoy them forever! (This prize is available only for US residents.)

Offshore readers: Same contest, different prize. One lucky winner will receive a beautiful 365 Days in Spain 2009 Picture-A-Day Calendar with text by Penelope Casas. Details at the end.

Episode 2 begins with a road trip with Mario, Mark and Claudia. GP has gone home for a few days. It’s just like your family’s road trip with a complainer in the back seat (Mark Bittman) and a peace maker in the front (Claudia).

Still in Castilla La Mancha, they arrive at the Restaurante Meson Venta de Tiembles.

Espárragos trigueros doesn’t take the edge off Mark’s appetite. They’re so hungry that the conversation lags a bit.

Pisto manchego comes out. It’s eggplant, tomatoes and air-dried deer with runny eggs on top, basically ratatouille with a different twist, they remark. Mario appreciates la cecina, the name for the cured deer. Mark points out that this dish seems to be made with an equal volume of vegetables and olive oil.

That was certainly true when I lived in Spain in the mid-eighties. Every dish was swimming in olive oil, which took a while to adjust to. It’s hard to believe, but I was not a fan of olive oil then, having been firmly rooted in a butter-based cuisine. Now my olive oil usage probably outnumbers my butter cooking by 1000 percent.

The star dish of this little meson comes out - carne a la piedra - raw pork on a plate, accompanied by a sizzling hot plate (not a hotplate, but a clay plate that’s really, really hot). The chef rubs a big square of bacon on the plate to grease it and add flavor and then places the meat on top to cook it. Interesting. Many cuisines have cook-your-own meat dishes, but few as spare and perfect as this one.

After tasting, Mario says this reminds him of the meat he used to eat in his high school years in Spain. I like the idea of this dish. It’s muy tipico.

They drive through Avila - a beautiful walled city with a magnificent Parador right in the walls. They continue on to the Ribero del Duero wine growing region for a great meal. Mario and Mark are singing. I may have to turn it this off, but the countryside is so lovely. They arrive at Bodegas Valdubón. They admire a bunch of Tempranillo grapes, the most prevalent ones from that region.

Vegetarians will probably want to stop reading here. Amidst a beautiful vineyard, Mario makes a barbecue with morcilla – a sausage made from pig, its blood and rice, cumin, salt and pepper. He’s also cooking a leg from a lechazo – milk-fed lamb, no older than 25 days old and lamb chops.

The camera work is kind of annoying, because we can’t see Mario boning and butterflying the leg of lamb that well. He says by boning it, it will cook a lot faster and butterflying it makes it cook more evenly. Claudia squeezes grapes over the meat.

They treat the lamb chops with lavender, sugar, grapes. Mario is cooking on an outside fire, stoked with dried grape vines. He places the food in a cage contraption. The lechazo y morcilla con hierbas is looking really good. Mario turns the cage over.

“Things that grow together go together”, says Mario - the lamb, the local red wine, herbs…clipped vines on the fire.

They set off for Galicia and arrive at a local hotel. Gwynnie comes back. Okay, this chitchat is not that intriguing. Breakfast is served - a Pudín de Pan (here's an example) and fine bread, eaten with olive oil. Galician flour is apparently very good quality. Gwyneth is eating stuff that you KNOW she never eats. I just don’t picture her slathering oil on bread for breakfast.

They go in 2 cars to Santiago de Compostela. The road, known as El Camino de Santiago or The Way of St. James, leads to the shrine where it’s believed that St. James is buried. Pilgrims have walked this route for 1000 years.

Mario tells Gwyneth that Galicia is a great place from a chef’s point of view, because of its amazing shellfish. Santiago or St. James was the patron saint of fisherman.

Both pairs walk some of El Camino. As Mario and Gwyneth walk, they find blackberries. They point out a mojón, a pillar that marks the distance to the shrine at Santiago. It has a relief of a shell, which is a symbol of the pilgrimage. They also see stones placed on top of the mojón, which indicates how many pilgrims have passed by.

Mark tells Claudia he’s hungry (for about the hundredth time.) He also tells her that blisters, thieves and priests were the three enemies of the pilgrims. The four had agreed that the first pair to reach their inn would cook dinner, so Mark and Claudia are taking their time.

Mario and Gwyneth arrive first and start cooking a capon in lots of wine. They also cook greens with lemon and garlic.

Another dish they work on is bacalao or salt cod, which is found all over Spain. Mario and Gwynnie cook it by slowly simmering it in olive oil. It is to be served with the grellos or turnips greens. Bacalao con grellos is also accompanied with a smoked paprika vinaigrette, a salsa de pimenton.

Meanwhile, Claudia is talking her time showing Mark the old town of Portomarin. As they stroll over a newer bridge, they can see the remains of a medieval one and some ancient houses peeking out from the Rio Miño. We don't see them arrive at their stop for the night. I guess their rendezvous dinner will be shown in the next installment.

This episode shows why Spain is so remarkable. It’s old and grand and so much history is still available to be walked through, observed and tasted. Mario has offered us a wonderful way to get a piece of that without leaving home.

Spain On the Road contest (answers accepted until Sunday, October 12th):

Answer these questions and send your response to FNMusings@gmail.com:

What is Mark’s last name?
What is a lechazo?
What is a mojón?

The US resident winner will receive (by email) a complete season pass to the video, Spain On The Road Again, on iTunes.

For my foreign friends, the winner will receive 365 Days in Spain 2009 Picture-A-Day Calendar with text by Penelope Casas.

Both winners will be randomly picked from all the correct answers – one a US resident; the other, not.

Please include your full name and email address in the body of the email and title your email – Questions on Spain…

¡Buen provecho!

Mario and Gwyneth Do Spain

Sometimes we forget that Public Television is where it all began…well, where food television began. The history of this form of educational enlightenment began in earnest with Julia Child and The French Chef and carries on today with Lidia's Italy.

Another new show, "Spain...On The Road Again", has been getting tremendous buzz, mostly because, rightly or wrongly, an Oscar winning and gorgeous actress is involved.

This visit across and all around Spain, exploring local food, is Mario Batali’s brainchild. He takes Mark Bittman with him, who gets better with each column and each book that he writes, (but he does come off a bit curmudgeonly on this show).

Mario is a great appreciator of Spain’s cuisine and culture and he is the perfect guide. But Gwyneth? I have to admit I wasn’t so sure about her participation. She’s so annoying beautiful and way too thin to be someone from whom I want culinary instruction AND, on top of THAT, she speaks fluent Spanish! How obnoxious is that?

We learned last week on Oprah (I swear I didn’t watch, I listened in the car) that Gwynnie eats what she wants, but she exercises mercilessly in a specially built building on her property with a fancy trainer, who trained her good friend Madonna. (It didn’t help that Oprah kept asking her all these gossipy details that makes us want to dislike her all the more.)

Back to Mario, he’s smart, I’m sure he figured the more buzz he got, the more people would watch and I guess that’s a good thing.

What I love about Spain is that it's still refreshingly Spain, no matter what kind of global world we live in. I lived in Madrid almost two decades ago, and amazingly, much of my old neighborhood is exactly the same. My corner farmacia still has the same 2 ladies that work there. Many of the shops and restaurants are the same; the vegetable guy and fish guy are still there. It’s quite amazing when you think how modern Spain is in many ways, but even Madrid retains a village flavor. And so it is with the cuisine.

In this first episode, Mario visits the area around Toledo in a province called La Castilla-La Mancha. (Yes, THAT La Mancha.)

Gorgeous scenes from all over Spain start the show with Willie Nelson singing “On the road again”. Mario tells us his culinary beginnings took hold in Spain, where his family had moved during his high school years. After he added his friend Gwyneth to the trip, he needed to find a companion for ”Bitty”, who is a non-Spanish speaker. He chose the knockout, multi-lingual Spanish movie star Claudia Bassols.

Should we care that these 2 gastronomic heavyweights are being accompanied by much younger gorgeous gals, who are not known primarily for their culinary accomplishments? Kind of, but I’m willing to give it a chance and, after all, I’m not a fool. I know Mario will get a lot more eyeballs viewing his show with them on than if he had taken some old coots along.

Oh, wait, maybe I do mind. Mario tells us that the ladies are also planning to get a bit of pampering - don’t they do that enough in their real life, without having to subject public television viewers to it? - on the trip, as well as visit artistic and historical sites. And, voila, we get the obligatory shots of the stunning Claudia having a massage and Gwynnie in a bathtub. Okay, I know it’s better than seeing Mario in either of those settings, but, c’mon, it’s totally gratuitous.

It IS amazing that nakedness and sex appeal inserts itself into the last place you’d expect them: a Mario Batali cooking show.

The trip begins with Mario and Mark touring the fish markets of Madrid at 4 am. The ladies are shown (a few hours later) enjoying the ambrosial chocolate con churros after just waking up. Mark and Mario watch tuna being cut up. Wow, that’s a lot of blood. Mario walks around picking up fish and admiring them. The gals have girl-chat.

Ahhh, berberechos. Mario admires them. I remember those. Mario says they’re like a cross between a scallop and a clam. I think they’re more like claws filled with snail-like “meat”. No, wait, sorry, I’m thinking of percebes. I hope he tries those at some point. Berberechos are like tiny clams.

The “couples” split up. On the road to Toledo, as they travel through Castilla-La Mancha, Mario and Gwynnie give us a bit of the history of the cathedral that took 500 years to build. Mark and Claudio start singing on their road trip.

M and G visit the Cigarrales of Toledo, named for its many cicadas (cigarras in Spanish), which is an old mansion with gardens and vineyards on the outskirts of Toledo.

They meet up with Chef Adolfo Muñoz. He shows them how to make Arroz Con Verduras Y Azafran (rice with vegetables and saffron). He infuses saffron in hot water for the rice dish. The chef uses bomba rice. Remember I told you that that was the rice that Chef Garces uses? It swells sideways, not lengthwise to absorb tons of flavor.

Gwyneth is doing the translating. She’s doing ok, but I’d rather have a chef be the translator than a movie star, but whatever… The chef adds the rice to a hot pan and stirs in the saffron water. Mario is intrigued. Spoonfuls of hot vegetable broth get stirred in. Mario says it looks like a risotto. Gwynnie tells him there’s no oil and to let it go, they’re not in Italy. Mario chimes in there’s also no sofrito. I think he gets it now. It’s SPANISH, not Italian.

Later on, a handful of finely diced carrots and then red peppers are added. They add turnips and more broth.

They start another dish called Pisto Manchego. Roasted vegetables are passed through a food mill. They add olive oil and serve the purée on grilled bread which has been drizzled with olive oil.

We see a bit on nonsense between Mark and Claudia. Back to Gwyneth and Mario, they are being shown a partridge dish. I think Gwyneth looks a bit ill, but that could be me I’m talking about. They carve the breast off the tiny bird, leaving the leg on.

Mario asks if she’ll eat a bird like this. She says she will if she knows it lived a good life and was hunted in the wild. Huh? Doesn’t it die just as much HUNTED in the wild, as any other way? I do get what she’s saying, but it does come off as a bit pretentious.

If you don’t want to eat meat or living things, then don’t. I guess a road trip with Mario makes people do all kinds of things they might not ordinarily do. Oh, she explains further. She doesn’t believe in factory farming of any kind and she won’t support it. There’s no way I can argue with that. Mario doesn’t either.

Back to the chef, who doesn’t seem to care how he got hold of the dead partridge, he dunks the tiny breast quickly in olive oil and wipes it over the grill. Then he puts the breast ON the grill. He braises the legs for 30 to 35 minutes in a stock reduction. Chef Muñoz likes to leave the partridge breast a little rare to give it the taste of the country and where the bird comes from. Gwyneth looks faint. He puts a piece back on the grill for her.

The chef plates the rare breast and the braised legs and adds many of the braising liquid ingredients RAW at the last minute, the herbs and lavender, for example. He drizzles the dish with olive oil. Gwyneth likes it. Mario has the “bird sushi” version. They finish the Arroz with olive oil and herbs. Mario says Holy Toledo, it’s good.

Mark and Claudia drive to Tembleque, 55 kilometers from Toledo and home to Manchego cheese. A really good-looking cheese maker is introduced and Claudia gets to milk the sheep. We see the cheese-making facility and how the cheese gets pressed into rounds and finished in a brine for up to a day. The wheels sit for 3, 4 or 5 months in a cave, until they are ready to eat. Claudia slices the incredibly hard cheese.

More chitchat between the two pairs in their cars... Mario and Gwyneth drive in a convertible and Gwynnie gets screamed at (in an admiring way) by passers-by. They arrive at the Iglesia de Santo Tomé in Toledo to see El Greco’s El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz. Interesting. Not a bad discussion of the painting, before Mario gets hungry again.

Mark and Claudia drive through Consuegra, land of 600 year old windmills. The previous chef’s son, Javier, shows Mark how to make Migas Con Chorizo Y Pancetta. Oil in a pan, then unpeeled whole garlic is stirred in. Javier says the best garlic is from Cuenca. He adds chopped chorizo and pancetta and cooks it until crispy. Then Claudia throws in coarse bread crumbs and cooks it “como el sol de Toledo” until it looks like the sun in Toledo. I like that. The Migas is served with a few grapes and roasted peppers. Mark likes it a lot. He compares it to fried rice. “You can’t ask much more from bread.” Don Q and Sancho Panza arrive and are given food and drink.

The four (I guess Don Quixote and SP had other plans) arrive in Toledo for a birthday dinner for Claudia cooked by Adolfo. Mario tells us later how sick he got from the raw partridge.

Gwyneth goes home and leaves the three of them to go to Avila (next episode).

What did I think of this show? Well, for the moment, I’m willing to put up with the beauty shots to get to Mario’s and Mark’s pearls of wisdom. The hour did seem a bit short on food and actual cooking, though. We don’t really need to see so much car time. We get how they’re DRIVING around Spain. The only virtue to that is to show viewers that they too can drive themselves and they don’t need a formal tour to see this magnificent country.

The itinerary on “Spain…” would be a wonderful route for any traveler. Added to the more mainstream, can’t-miss sites, it would make a trip of a lifetime.

My only caution…look up the itinerary for each episode here NOW, book it and get there before everyone else does…or you may risk a “Sideways” effect, where visiting that good-looking cheese maker is no longer possible; or that charming road with all the windmills that has barely a car on it now, is packed with hungry tourists.