At The Butcher

Dear Devon,

The last time I ate your delicious egg salad was the morning after your wedding. Now that I am so far away from you and New York, I was excited to read your last post and to be reminded of that lovely afternoon at your parents’ house. I have tried many times to replicate your egg salad, but never succeeded! Your notes will be especially helpful for future egg salad experiments.

Barcelona is amazing, but I must confess to bouts of homesickness, mostly for my friends and the crisp autumn air of October in New York. I doubt that I will miss the New York winter. Seeing everything in Spanish is shocking, although I suppose I expected it. I am enrolled in an immersion course. I spend the majority of my days trapped in the world of irregular verbs and gendered nouns. But after discovering La Central, a sophisticated and carefully curated bookstore, and its immense selection of cookbooks, I am completely resolved to gain some measure of fluency, if only to share Ferran Adrià’s secrets with you!


I am nicely settled in a small apartment in the Eixample neighborhood. I can see Nouvel’s glowing Torre Agbar from my bedroom window. The apartment is furnished, though I question the interior designer’s choices. At first, the neon peach colored walls seemed a bit abrasive. A week later, my complaints about the color have subsided. The boy who carries my groceries hates the white lamps on our bedside tables. Briefly banished to the living room, his lamp was quickly reinstated to accommodate late night reading. The washing machine that I was so excited about cleans clothes, but boasts neither speed nor efficiency. I am wary of the super rapido cycle, which claims to wash the clothes in 15 minutes. A normal cycle takes 3 hours. And just to clarify, that’s washing, only, not drying, which happens outside on our sixth floor balcony.

The kitchen consists of a two-burner electric stove above a medium sized electric oven and a mini fridge. Not ideal for large dinner parties, but amazingly efficient for cozy dinners for two. I am really impressed with this electric stovetop and must re-evaluate all my preconceived notions of non-gas appliances. I am still in the process of setting up the kitchen, which I find very stressful. Forced to rethink kitchen necessities, I must make several difficult choices like: food processor or mortar and pestle, paper towels or waffle maker. It feels more like Sophie’s Choice than leisurely visits to Sur La Table.

For the moment, I have limited myself to one non-stick pan with an oven-proof handle, a large aluminum cooking pot, two glass mixing bowls, a single wooden spatula, a vegetable peeler, one chopping board, the (requisite) mocha pot, and four knives. I equate cooking with the large pot to cooking on a hubcap, but you can do almost anything with one pan and a good set of knives. I did run into a slight problem when I had to remove the burning hot pan from the oven. An oven mitt will be my next purchase.

No recipes today, sorry to disappoint you. But, I know these shots from a local butcher shop will whet your appetite.