Spanish Ham

I love ham. Not just any ham, salty ham, what I call country ham, not city ham. I don't eat a lot of meat. I don't like chicken or turkey, ground beef is not my favorite, but pork, that's where it's at. While Chris and I were in Australia hanging out with the Spanairds, we started to learn about Spanish ham. Apparently you can buy a whole leg of ham, and what you do with that ham is sit it on your kitchen counter til it's gone, which is about a month. It all seemed so strange, but delicious. At ESS we have a few Spanairds there on grants from the Basque Country. One girl, Maddi, is my office mate. At an after work a few weeks back Chris and I were talking to the group from Spain. Of course we had to ask about the ham, and it's all true. We have even seen a Groupon where you can buy a leg of ham. So one day I received an email from the reception desk saying I had a certified package, and needed to be around the next day to sign for it. Here's what I got,

Four packs of honest to goodness Spanish ham straight from Spain! Maddi had called her sister and asked her to send me ham. She said she felt like she had to because it sounded like I loved it so much that I needed some! Needless to say I was super excited! Asier, Inego, and Maddi coached me before I left that day on the Spanish way to eat the ham. It was a Friday, so the weekend was looking good.

We planned 2 meals for the ham, breakfast and dinner. When we got up Saturday, we couldn't wait to try out our ham. We had bought cheese crusted bread rolls to make breakfast sandwiches. Chris poached eggs and we piled on the ham.

 

It was soooo delicious! The ham would just melt in your mouth. It was all we could do not to eat the whole package right then. For dinner we had planned to try out the Spanish way. They had said, never refrigerate the ham, once you open it, you have to finish it. The Spanish way required toasted bread, tomatoes, and olive oil (we also got some Spanish cheese and wine to round out the meal). We had a baguette that we sliced and toasted.

 

We had been instructed to rub the tomato on the bread, not cut it, just rub it on there.

Next came olive oil and ham.

 

 

It was amazing! We had more bread than we had ham, and it would have been a shame to let the bread go to waste, so we opened another pack. We were careful to only eat enough for the bread, and we saved the rest for omlettes the next morning. It was such a good food weekend. I am definitely putting Spain on my list of places to visit. As much as Chris and I love food, how could we not go there? If only I can get Nicole here so she can be our Spanish speaker!

 

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Hungarian dinner

Christine has a good post about our eating experiences here.  This is the old building that caught our eye and made us want to come back for dinner.

The building had been a monastery when it was built in the early 1800's.

When we first sat down there was only one other couple and we felt a bit out of place. Turns out we were just early for the dinner crowd and the dining room soon filled up. It had a lot of charm! The servers were very professional and really good at their jobs. When the food came out, the plates had silver domes, and they all three were removed at once. They did this for all tables, no matter how big the group.

Chris had the "Hungarian Explosion" it had two hard meats, cold duck liver, ham and some veggies, and chicken paprika.

Christine had veggie pasta.

And I had a cheese stuffed banana pepper.

We finished off with some strudel.

Best of all, we had gypsy music at our table!

Here's a little taste.

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Szechenyi Baths

After lunch we headed back to the same bath house we had been to the night before. This time we got more pictures. This bath house is the largest spa in Europe. It taps into two thermal springs. One that comes out of the ground at degrees and the other at degrees. It really is amazing to think that public baths could be so architectural. My neighborhood pool looked nothing like this!

 

 

 

 

(Click here to see where Christine wrote about the baths we went to)

After our healing soak, we followed a path where we had seen a stream of people headed with Hungarian flags. The park we were walking in was really nice with a pretty restaurant sitting on the water.

 

 

 

 

By this point, we could hear music as if on a stage, so we kept heading in that direction

We ended up here, Hero's park. Now there was a man giving a speech. I asked someone what was going on. She said it was the Hungarian president. The election is April 6 and it was a campaign rally.

 

 

We could see more beautiful buildings in the distance, and we kept walking. Christine stopped to consult the book and map to see if we could figure out what they were. Notice the woman behind Christine with the cigarette. I have never been around more smokers in my life than here. I don't even think there was this much smoking in Vegas. Chris would keep a tally of how many cigarettes it felt like we had smoked as the days went on. We decided they must think the mineral baths erased any damage the smoke would cause.

 

We explored the castle a bit before we headed back to the hotel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before we left we had one of these snacks. They are like soft pretzels, but softer, no outside crust, and they are really yeasty. The salt on the outside wasn't giant salt grains, instead it was some sort of glaze. It was super tasty.

 

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Day 2

While walking around in the morning we found a pastry shop that had burek. Burek is one of our new favorite Serbian/Slovakian/Armenian things to eat. We discovered this when a friend of ours who is Yugoslavian brought some to our house. We then found the store in Malmö and set out for our own one day. It's a phyllo dough made into tubes and stuffed with either meat, spinach, or cheese. This shop also happened to have cherry and apple ones. So we grabbed a meat, spinach, and cheese one, found a bench in the sun, and preceded to enjoy the flaky, buttery, salty goodness of the burek.

 

When we got back to the hotel, we found this girl!!

Christine is actually the reason we came. She had a conference in Budapest, and we figured since it was so close and so cheap, we'd be crazy to miss a chance at exploring a new city and seeing our bestie. After we met up we spent the morning walking around the open air market and collecting some souvenirs. I'm sure if you're one of the people that reads both our blogs you'll get some overlap in pictures, but it will be worth it!

 

 

We were constantly amazed at the architecture. All the buildings were so incredibly ornate and beautiful. Spring had certainly sprung in Budapest and you could tell. Even I was only wearing one layer on my legs and a simple jacket, you know it must have been nice out! We met some really friendly and helpful people along the way. I always think that other people won't know where Tennessee is, so when they ask where I'm from, I always say the US. Then they ask where, and I say Tennessee. In the case of the one market we were in, the guy said, "Jack Daniels!" So thank you Jack for making it easy for me to say I'm from Tennessee.

 

 

 

 

At lunch time, we found a sidewalk cafe, and snagged a table in the sun. The food wasn't great, but who could beat lunch in the sun with good friends in a new city?

 

 

 

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