When Cooking Feels Foreign
No ranch, no sage. Now what?
Surprisingly, cooking is one of my biggest challenges in Spain.
In theory, cooking isn’t all that different in Spain than in the U.S. Find a recipe (or not). Buy the ingredients. Cook the meal.
Except when you’re overwhelmed by the newness of everything in your environment, cooking becomes one more chore to overcome.
For the first few weeks we were here, Will and I bought a lot of things we could make quickly: frozen pizzas, sandwich fixings, hotdogs, chicken fingers. None of it was very healthy. Yet the overwhelm was real, and we did not have the capacity to add “cooking healthy meals” to our days.
With time, I was ready to get back in the kitchen. (I am our primary cook in the household.) I signed up for Hello Fresh boxes to help get me back on the right track. (Yes, they sell them in Spain!) Three meals a week was very doable, and we’d get healthier foods back in our diet.
I learned to cook by helping my mom in the kitchen. She didn’t use many recipes. She was a country cook. Most of the time, it was a little of this and a little of that, and poof! We had dinner. Every Saturday morning, she’d put on a pot of pinto beans that we’d have for our lunch alongside a slice of cornbread, macaroni and cheese, and a glass of sweet tea. On Sundays, we often had pot roast with potatoes and carrots, cornbread, and more sweet tea.
My mom was a special education teacher. In the afternoons, she tutored after school for a little extra money. By the time she got off work and arrived home every evening, she was exhausted. So, dinner was nothing special most nights, but it was always tasty. Every summer, we raised a vegetable garden. Mama canned and froze the surplus, which supplemented our grocery bills. It also tasted much better than the stuff bought off the store shelves.
I spent my summers with my mom in the kitchen and the garden, watching how she threw dinner together using the potatoes, broccoli, and corn we’d gathered that morning.
By the time I was a teenager, I was cooking independently. And I was getting better and better all the time.
As an adult, I could whip together a meal like my mom made in very little time. In my 30s, I discovered Hello Fresh and Home Chef, which added a little variety to our family dinner routine.
Then we moved to Spain.
You know that feeling when the managers at the grocery store rearrange the store, and you have no idea where anything is anymore?
That’s how we felt whenever we walked into a grocery store during our first weeks in Valencia. We couldn’t read the ingredients on the labels, and foods had different names than we were used to. We didn’t understand the layout of the store. It was exhausting simply trying to buy something for dinner.
With time, it became easier. We learned the names of our favorite groceries, how the store was laid out, and how much we could expect to spend on a big trip compared to a smaller one.
There are still differences when I break out a recipe I want to replicate here versus how I made it in the States. Some of those differences include metric system measurements and weights, temperatures in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, and some spices I always had in my kitchen in the States are not really used here. That means finding a substitute or ordering it from somewhere online – usually a store specializing in American products.
I’m looking at you, sage. Sage is used in breakfast sausage, which isn’t common here, so if you try to follow a sausage recipe, the flavor sage gives it will be missing. While spicy foods are everywhere in the States, they aren’t a “thing” here. Neither is GASP ranch dressing.
Like everything else we’ve had to relearn, we’re relearning our kitchen. The good news? The ingredients are fresher and higher quality, and the flavors are spectacular. You don’t need to visit Whole Foods to get that sort of quality in Spain. Your local Mercadona, Consum, or SuperCOR will suffice.
Food is the complaint I’ve heard the most from our kids. With time, they’ve talked about it less and less. I used to love Reese’s peanut butter cups. I no longer miss them, and when I see them at a candy shop, I usually don’t buy them. It’s hard to explain, but when high fructose corn syrup isn’t a major ingredient in many, many foods, your taste buds change. What once was flavorful now has a fake taste to it.
Cooking and eating in Spain has been a journey, but I’m happy to be on it. I continue to learn how to make things to my family’s liking, and we’re all healthier for the changes we’ve made while living here.