Square-shaped happiness

I owe a debt to my Grandma. Little does she know, she's won me scores of friends over the years. In addition to that, she's been the bearer of great happiness, for me and for others, since before I can remember. Great, square-shaped happiness.

I don't know where or when the recipe for what came to be called "Grandma Specials" was first conceived. All I know is that they've been a staple of Schulman family gatherings my entire life, making notable appearances for Thanksgiving and Chanukah. I grew up anticipating the collection of round holiday tins that would be carefully packed with the rest of my Grandma's belongings during her annual trek west, and their steadfast presence on the dessert table during our annual family trips to Florida. It took me awhile to realize that the "Jewish brownie-like dessert," for lack of better descriptors, that my cousin had named as a little girl, were not universally known, consumed, and adored. Luckily, through my frequent travels, I've been able to do a bit of Grandma Special propagating, introducing their culturally transcendant goodness to the rest of the world.

My first Grandma Special converts were during my freshman year at Carleton, and making them became a dependable bribe/thank you for four years. During that time I also took them south to Chile, which won me friends and caring host family members. Most recently, I brought them along to Spanish Thanksgiving, a gathering of about 15 people, Americans and otherwise, on what was otherwise a normal Thursday night in Andalucía. As would be expected, they beat out pumpkin pie, apple pie, and tiramisu (brought by an "otherwise"). Then, about a week ago, they formed part of my present for my "amigo invisible" (Secret Santa) at the school where I teach. I'd decided to give the teacher whose name I'd drawn one ingredient a day, individually wrapped, labeled in both English and Spanish (and with both imperial and metric measurements...or at least approximations thereof). On the last day, along with the part of the present I actually spent money on, I gave her the recipe, handwritten in English and Spanish, along with a note about how important it was to me and my family (all on a lovely handmade notecard provided by an outside source...). The next day, a series of teachers came up to me and gushed over my present and how original and thoughtful it had been. The teacher who'd received it seemed ready to cry when she was thanking me, promising that she was going to make them the next day. Another teacher informed me that a group of teachers was now eager to take me out for drinks and to hang out after the holidays. Yay for bribing my way to friends!

Thanks, Grandma.

A Ham Update

The ham has been moved. Salvador and Katharina knocked on my door tonight to notify me that, due to my fairly high levels of ham-hate, and on account of the ever-more-persistent maggot population, they had decided to move the ham into Salvador's room (conveniently next to mine). So now we have maggots in one room and a ham in another. Whether or not this is a good idea remains to be seen.

In other news, my light bulb exploded today, and I now know how to work the fuse box.

Sweating over ham

There is a ham sweating in my kitchen. It's missing about two inches of meat where poorly-sharpened knives carved their way through many thin slices of flesh last night. The outer layers of cured fat were set aside during the cutting process so they could later be pressed onto the exposed strips before being draped by a clean dish towel. We don't have a drainboard; we use spread-out dish towels to dry our freshly-washed dishes.

Last night, Salvador waltzed in the door and announced to me that he was going to buy a ham and some cheese, and that he was inviting people over. Curled up on the couch working on grad school applications, under a blanket and with my heater-fan pointed toward me, I said that was fine. People started drifting in around 9p.m., and after awhile I gave in and put on real pants instead of the red East tennis warm-up pants I'd been wearing since late morning. Salvador broke out his ham stand (I have no idea what this is actually called, but every single Spaniard ever has owned one). He is somewhat incompetent when it comes to household anything, so one of his friends was put to work setting it up and clamping the enormous ham leg that had been appeared to the board.

Hams in Spain are expensive. Apparently, the best kind you can get is called "pata negra," meaning black hoof. Our ham, we were told, was of the utmost quality; had Salvador not gotten a special price, it would have cost about 400 euros. 400 euros??? 400 euros. Holy crap. I later consulted the price tag that was somehow permanently afixed to the ham's lower shin (do ham's have shins?) and saw that it had costed over 230 euros. Definitely a better deal than 400, but holy crap.... I think the price of ham inflates Spaniards' sense of how good they actually are. To be fair, I've never really liked ham, but even if I did, I doubt I could ever justify spending that kind of money on a piece of meat just because it tasted good. Salvador told us that last year he bought over 30 hams. What the hell do you do with 30 hams?

So our more-than-200-euro ham is sitting awkwardly on our slightly rickety ham-holder. Rafa is somehow elected ham-slicer, and begins to shave off thin strips of meat. I was impressed by the fact that the ham had the ability to become smellier post being cut into. This of course seems obvious, but it was already pretty smelly. It was kind of like a train wreck. Mr. Awkwardly-Propped Ham Leg was shifting with every cut, Rafa was quietly cursing the dull knife, Spaniards were eyeing the slowly-filling plate of ham pieces, and the cured tan outer part of the ham was starting to sweat. I got my camera.

It became clear to me fairly early on that I would not be eating this ham. As I said, I've never really liked ham. I do eat it on occassion, mostly either to placate insistent Spaniards or to add some protein to mediocre Spanish hostel breakfasts. Never before, though, have I eaten ham that was still attached to its foot (or at least not that I was able to see). It was disturbing. There were little toenail-like things not very far from where Rafa was slicing. And then there was the sweating. I don't really like eating things that are still sweating. For a few minutes, I thought of Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which, the author decides to make a meal entirely out of things he has hunted, gathered, and grown himself. Part of this means killing his own meat. He agonizes over whether or not he will be able to bring himself to shoot an animal, and finally decides that, as a conscious omnivore, participating in the killing of his food is the only responsible action he can take. Wouldn't it be problematic to refuse to eat meat only because I was being confronted with the reality of modern meat-eating in a way I never had been before? Well, maybe, but I think the grossness of having a awkward, sweating ham leg teetering under a blunt knife in your living room might override whatever responsibility I might have to face my participation in the systematic slaughter of animals for consumption. So I stood there, snacking on bread, tomatoes, and the occassional slice of cheese, sipping wine, and trying not to come too close to ham sweat. Everyone else seemed to enjoy the ham.

Now I have a new problem: The better part of an enormous sweating ham is sitting in my kitchen. The entire apartment smells of cured ham sweat. There are little bits of ham-ooze gathering near a little puddle of ham sweat where the wooden board meets our granite countertop. To complicate the situation, we have recently discovered a small but persistent population of maggots that like to crawl around our kitchen ceiling. I don't do well with anything that looks like a worm. Smaller does not make it better. After dousing the cupboards with bleach, throwing out all open food, and sealing everything in tupperware and ziploc bags, I thought we had a fighting chance of getting rid of them. Today I had to ask Salvador to kill five of them. I have a feeling that the maggots do not share my dislike of 230-euro ham.