La comida

Schedules are very different here compared to Canada. Here are a few details about mealtimes and food stories to share. :)

8am-10am: Breakfast (el desayuno)
Most likely toast, jam, and coffee. We have trouble breaking the oatmeal and tea habit though... so while we indulge in a toast and coffee breakfast occasionally, oatmeal is the norm in our apartment. After all, toast doesn't get you very far up a mountain.

2pm-5pm: La Comida
This can't be translated to lunch, as it is not the same. It is much more like supper for us Canadians, because it is the main meal of the day, usually with meat, grains/starches, vegetables, and wine/cerveza followed by coffee and fruit for dessert. Most jobs and shops take their siesta starting at 2pm, so 2-5pm or even 6pm is generally for preparing food, eating it, and taking a short nap afterwards. It is fairly taboo to call anyone during these hours as everyone is expected to be at home with their families. Around 6 or 7pm shops re-open and people go back to work for a few more hours.

9pm-12am: Supper (la cena)
It is totally normal to start making supper at 10 or 11pm. This is usually a rich but small meal (meat, cheese, olives, tomatoes and wine, for example).

Now this is obviously a different schedule than what we keep in Canada. But switching to having "La Comida" in the middle of the day makes sense here since everything shuts down at that time. Although if we're honest, we still have a noon time snack and possibly a 7pm snack as well... I honestly don't know how the Spanish routine happens without snacks, but maybe that's just me...

Tortillas
The Spanish tortilla is very different from the Mexican tortilla. Instead of a soft flatbread, a Spanish tortilla is actually a thick omelette made mostly of potatoes, onions and egg. Everyone is very proud here of their "proper" tortilla. Apparently a regular omelette (of just eggs, cheese and veggies) is called a French tortilla, and Spaniards consider it to be inferior to their own version. Fascinating, eh?

Here is a photo of one of our attempts of a Spanish tortilla por la comida:

Other funny food/language moments:
Did you know baking soda comes in various forms? I have never purchased or known you could purchase baking soda in a more granular style. We accidentally bought this version, and tried using it to make a cake. The result: a really strange cake that did not rise and felt weirdly fizzy in your mouth. Unfortunately we had to give that cake up and count it as a point lost to the language/culture learning curve. Upon returning to the supermercado we saw that there were actually TWO kinds of baking soda: a more coarse style that is best for cleaning (a.k.a. what I put into our cake), and an extremely fine style that can be used in baking (which we recently successfully used in some chickpea chocolate chip cookies).

Another day at the store we were buying honey (miel) and saw a jar of "miel de caña" on the same shelf. -Interesting! - we thought. - What kind of unusual new food is this? - As it was not expensive and claimed you could put it on toast, cheese, in coffee, etc, we decided to try it. Upon arriving home and sampling it we laughed the moment we tasted it. Miel de caña is molasses. Not actually a new and unusual flavor. But now perhaps we can make gingersnaps. :)

And my final anecdote for you today: some foods come in unusual and strange quantities here. Yogurt, for instance, is apparently only consumed in tiny amounts. Or at least you can only buy it in tiny tiny individual-size containers. We have only found one store so far that had the very large size of a whole 500 grams, but you had to pay about 5 times the price to ditch the little containers. This does not make sense to me.

On the other hand, if you would like a large jar of Saccharine or Aspertame to use in whatever quantities you want to, this is available. ¿?

Wishing you good food and good company wherever you are!

Hasta pronto,
Candyce