When in Spain....

Ok I wasn't in Spain. I wasn't even in an authentic Latin restaurant. No, I was just meeting lawyer friend in Clayton, at BARcelona, where other lawyer-types wear tight jeans and look rich. (They capitalize BAR to let you know that they serve booze, too.) But what else they do is partake of rich, fatty, delicious, greasy foods. That's just what you do in Barcelona.

It was happy hour at this young professional meat market, so sangria was on special. But it tasted like 7up with cheap box wine to me, so I skipped it and went straight for the Rioja. Dang, though, a good Spanish red is taaasty!

Now BARcelona offers some healthier options (translate, more veggie, less fat), like spinach with lemon and tomatoes or saffron cauliflower with pine nuts, and both are mighty fine, but I thought, "screw it. I'm about to enter into this profession, so I might as well let 'er rip tonight..." So I just went for it. I know, right? I won't eat fries, but I'll eat a churro... so sue me.

I did the "salad" to take a stab at healthy, but the truth was, it was a cheese/ranch dressing fest. But what can I say? It was kinda yummy! Manchego = yay!

For dinner, esquire and I split the grilled asparagus and the empanadas. Let me tell you a little story about empanadas: these babies are filled with mushrooms, spinach, cheese, and goodness. They are steaming hot, first off, and just out of the fryer. Not usually a draw for me, but it makes the pastry so perfectly crispy and chewy all at once, it's worth it. The sauce is a cumin-garlic aioli. I'm not sure what makes it orange (tomato?), but it's flipping amazing. It's creamy and spicy and sweet and tangy. Those alone make you want to weep. Ok so maybe I'm fry-deprived, never allowing myself to partake; and maybe if I joined my coworkers on fry day once in a while, these little pockets wouldn't have been able to have their way with me so easily. But they did! And I loved it!

But what made the whole meal a shining moment in my history of food consumption, however, was really back to my true nature: the asparagus. There is something beautiful that happens when you grill asparagus. I mean, you can never go wrong with asparagus anyway. But grilled, it gets slightly charred, soft on one side, crunchy on the other, slightly carcinogenic, very tasty, and it kicks it up a serious notch. To top it with a rich tomato sauce, both sweet and savory, and garnish with manchego though, my friends, is just divine.

Then the finale: churros. I haven't seen these since my college cafeteria days. Once a month was "churro day" and big buckets would be put out by the cash registers filled with all flavors of churros. Well dinner friend wanted them, so I obliged. I mean, I'm easy, right? (I really should check the website for the nutritional value of these suckers...)


Anyway, they were caramel and strawberry filled. Wow. The cinnamon alone is enough to make my heart swell (and the grease to make my arteries swell...) but the fruit flavor was incredible. I have abeen a die-hard chocolate/cinnamon pop-tart fan; you couldn't have forced a strawberry pop tart on me for any reason when I was a kid. But now I see the light! There is beauty in fruit-filled desserts! Ok and they were smothered in chocolate sauce, but the fruit + chocolate sauce was, just, wow.

So I neither got charmed nor severely repelled by the lawyer types at BARcelona. No one ever likes a meat-market, and I'm especially sensitive to them being a feminist and a vegetarian, but if I had to go out, and I had to be with those types, and I had to have tapas, and I had to be in Clayton, and I had to eat fried food, I guess there's no other place than this little corner of Spain... or maybe I'm just secretly in love with fatty foods. Dang.