"Ok let me start with a preamble... Since I moved to Madrid, Spain I've noticed an excellent tradition/custom/trend to put ham on just about everything. Couple this with the fact that EVERYTIME you order a drink you get served a snack, sometimes involving pork. That being said, the sandwich I am about to share with you actually has no pig on it, but it's still well worth it.
Now i'll give you a little story about the place I went to have the excellent sandwich I am about to describe. There's this abandoned apartment building right around the corner from me in Madrid. Ever weekend me and my housemates/ friends Javier and Pilar go and get some 25 euro cent beers there until they shut the doors relatively early for Madrid (around midnight or 1 depending on how many people are there). So we decide to check out some of the local cafeterias to the abandoned house, and this little dirty place is open. We are on our way to a nice buzz and decide to spend our money drinking, but we agree we should come back to check it out in the daylight (nursing a hangover, most likely). So the next day we return, and it gave me a little perspective. Upon entering I noticed, this place was not for the faint of heart. There were mountains of cigarette butts on the floor, crumpled up napkins and spit surrounding the anthill cigarette ashes and some salty looking characters. it was around noon this time (on a sunday) and there was a mother with a little one year old girl there. The mother looked like she had spent the morning drinking, and so did the one year old. Me and Javier decide to take a seat at the cleanest table we could find, which incidentally was really no cleaner than the floor. we order ourselves a delicious Mahou cinco estrella (it'd be equivalent to a fancier budweiser) and the woman behind the counter hands us a plate of olives, potato salad, and deviled eggs all at no extra cost. They know how to treat drinkers here. we enjoy our beer and decide that the typical, lomo y pimiento isn't going to suffice today. we decided on making a sandwich. I said, "Javi, you know what would be killer right now? some lomo and cheese" (I'm in that phase of learning spanish where I am somewhere in between saying a sentence in spanish and english... everyone understands me though) He then suggests to add tomato to it, to which I wholeheartedly agree... we order the sandwich and as we're waiting the place quickly turns into a circus. We look over and there's this salty old man who is clearly deaf with his hearing aid in screaming across the counter to the woman working the griddle... I didn't understand all of it, but I think he was trying to get a coffee and a tostada (toast with tomato spread, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper). The woman with the kid has the kid now screaming at her for coca cola. Which the woman is more than happy to give her to shut her the hell up, and now there is a line of little old ladies forming next to the gambling machines waiting to lose some money. On the other end of the counter there's this big mafioso looking mother fucker just sitting on a stool smoking a cigarette staring at me as if I was breathing his air on purpose and then some black guy came in to try to sell me a magic glowing orb and some bootleg DVDs. I decided to go to the bathroom and had to go to the basement to do this. as I go downstairs, I find a private room which could be the owners personal place and there's like a gaggle of children down there doing god knows what. Somewhat creeped out I go to the bathroom and do my business and head back up to my sandwich being completed. I sunk my teeth into it and I must have looked pretty foolish because Javi looked at me as if he had never seen a grown man eat before. tool. Anyway. here is the sandwich which apparently warranted giving you too many details on my surroundings at the time.
you can call it whatever you like, but here's what it is: On a piece of Spanish Bread (I'd say 10 inches, they would say 30 cm) you place three to five THICK cut pieces of griddle seared LAMB... that's right... seasoned and delicious it's one of the nicest, juiciest meats I've ever had. You can take one bite of the sandwich and taste the love. Then you add 3 THICK cut slices of Havarti Cheese (it's one of the native spanish cheeses, although feel free to substitute with Curado or viejo, which means cured and old, or aged, respectively). These cheese are delicious. Never too salty, definitely never bland, and they melt well if you want to warm that shit up. Take a tomato and, you guessed it, thick slice that shit. Three pieces, or so should do the trick. Make sure to drizzle a bit of Olive oil on it and ingest fool it'S A GODDAMN DELICIOUS SANDWICH. Note in the picture the obligatory beer in hand, and an olive, anchovie, pepper concoction on a toothpick. It was glorious"
No comments:
Post a Comment