A Place of Brightness: food

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Eating Baby Eels in Madrid

That's right. That's what I did. Only I didn't know it at the time.

We once again spent time with my Romanian mother-in-law in Bucharest. But we planned three nights in Madrid on our way home.

Madrid is known for Tapas. The legend is that workers used to spend their paltry wages on a glass of beer or wine at lunch, since they could only afford one thing. Productivity suffered and the king decreed that restaurants had to give a piece of food with every drink. And so, they began to create little snacks that they put on top of the drink (tapa = top) when they served it.

We arrived in Madrid ready for anything. Our first night, we found a place serving tapas we did not at all understand. We saw something that looked to be a piece of bread with shredded fish atop it, bathed in some sort of white sauce.

Let's dig in! We ate it. It was good. We ordered another.

We visited Toledo the following day, and we joyfully ate a shredded fish tapa there as well!

The following day we had booked a tour of "Tapas and Flamenco," in which our guide took us to family owned establishments before a wonderful show.

And the first place we visited, they were offering those "Shredded Fish" tapas. And our guide finally described what we had before us.

Those were not pieces of shredded fish. They were baby eels.

I will admit to you all. I loved them. I ate them again even after I learned they were baby eels.

I do not, however, think I would have been able to bite into that tapa and greedily eat it, had I known it was a piece of bread with a swarm of baby eels atop it.

And so, ignorance, in this case, was bliss...

In Saecula Saeculorum, the 4th Novel in the Valquist Series

In this fourth novel of the Valquist Series, Andrew Valquist is retired (?) from the National Security Agency and teaching Latin at a Classical Academy in the Washington DC area. But in the world of espionage, looks can be deceiving. He's not necessarily happy with the role he has played in all this, but the school was actually a joint NSA/MI-6 Project in which four young people have been unwittingly prepared for a mission to travel back in time to ancient Rome to retrieve information from a library that may save the modern world from certain destruction. They know they have to at least try to save humanity, but can they also save each other?

Next Stop: Spanish, the 3rd Novel in the Valquist Series

This third novel in the Valquist Series can be read as an espionage action-adventure in its own right, but also you can use it as a way to either brush up on your Spanish or learn functional Spanish for the first time! John Valquist needs to learn Spanish. But he's in luck, since his uncle Andrew is a language expert and a former (?) spy who is taking him on a vacation to Spain so he can study the language. In Next Stop: Spanish, you have the chance to see and study the words John studies, and then watch him add more and more Spanish into his dialogue as the story progresses. During this vacation, they get pulled into espionage intrigue (why do these things always happen to the Valquist family?). In the dramatic conclusion, John will need to put together everything he has learned to save his uncle!

Amor Vincit Omnia: the 2nd Novel in the Valquist Series

In this second novel of the Valquist Series, Keith Massey takes you into the halls of the National Security Agency, where he himself worked for four years after 9/11 and an Arabic linguist. You follow our hero Andrew Valquist, as he starts work as a new recruit at the NSA. Little does he know that on his first on the job, he's about to fly off on an unexpected overseas assignment. He'll be even more surprised when he learns that his background in ancient Latin will be crucial to the mission!