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Note the teeth.
Tonight we ate sheep’s brain served in its own skull.
The waiter told us they chop off the head, cut it in half down the nose and roast it. After we ordered, we downed most of our bottle of txakoli in preparation.
The head arrived, eyeballs and tongue intact. It didn’t taste as bad as it sounds, but it won’t become one of my fave Spanish dishes. The outside was firm and the inside significantly softer, like a piece of seared tofu. Something about the texture bothered me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I remembered this morning: the texture reminded me of undercooked scrambled eggs that made me sick at summer camp one year.
Jackie, with squids and Txacolí
We also ordered the chipirones — squids cooked in their own ink. They smelled very pleasant and tasted like grilled calamari with a rich sauce. I gladly finished those off.
The dishes capped an adventurous day of eating. We grabbed some pinxtos (tastes) in Bilbao’s old town — gourmet bites featuring ingredients like seared foie grois and lobster atop slices of French bread. People bar hop in the evenings, eating pinxtos with friends and washing them down with small glasses of beer, wine or sidra (cider.) We had one of each during the evening.
Stop 1: sidra, pinxtos: fried calamari stuffed with lobster, salmon and salmon mousse, jamón iberico with mushroom.
Stop 2: Mahou (Bud Light), pinxtos: baccalao (salted white fish) marinated in olive oil, pulpo ala gallega (octopus with olive oil and paprika)
Stop 3: Bottle of txakoli, chimpirones en su tinta (squids cooked in their ink), cabeza de cordero (sheep’s brain)
la Plaza Mayor, Bilbao
Definitely got off the beaten path today.
We spent last night in San Sebastian at a guest house owned by an Argentine surfer named Ernesto. He fed us rice with chicken and gave us towels, so we loved him. Before lunch we drove up Mount Igueldo to see the view of the Bay of Biscay and San Sebastian. We reached the top with the tiny town of Igueldo (population: 756) and went down a back road about 2 feet wider than the car.
The road went all the way down the mountain. On the way, we saw farms, cows, horses and one other car. Eventually we found our way back to the city to park downtown and walk up Mount Urgull to see the old fort and giant statue of Jesus Christ that tops it. Incredibly steep, but the views were worth it.
Afterward we got pinxtos, or small servings, of several dishes at a hole-in-the-wall bar in the old town.
We ate: tortilla con espárragos (omelet with white asparagus), albondiga (meatball), patatas bravas (potatoes with spicy sauce), gamba frita (shrimp fried in funnel cake-like dough), solomo (sirloin), con pan.
After a nice paseo, we left San Sebastian (the most beautiful city in Spain, according to every Spaniard I’ve ever met) for Bilbao.
Our hotel in Bilbao is the nicest yet, despite it’s proximity to a street covered with prostitutes. Ah, Europe. The car parked in a garage, we walked 20 minutes along the Ría de Bilbao (Basque) to the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry. The building stands out against Bilbao’s decaying industrial landscape (Josh called it the Detroit of Spain.) Permanent works by Picasso and Joan Miró were removed and a series of videos had been installed. The current installations included works by modern artists Murakami, Richard Serra, Cai Guo-Qiang
Josh enjoyed Murakami because he had seen it before but wasn’t too familiar with his stuff. We almost skipped what turned out to be my favorite: Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait (2006) a 90 minute film that used 17 synchronized cameras locked on Real Madrid soccer player Zidane during a game. The director spliced the shots with televised coverage of the game and interjected a montage of events that occurred on that day.
The Mar Cantábrico from San Sebastián.
