Spain Vignette 3: Eating in Spain

It’s something of a mystery to me why people in Spain aren’t all morbidly obese, but they’re not. They’re not LA-thin either, but they are what you might call average for the most part. I’m surprised because there are just so many opportunities to eat in Spain, and so much of the food is fried. Here are the possible meals you can eat (according to my ever-trusty guidebook and what I saw):

Breakfast: early in the morning, usually consisting of coffee and a pastry.
Second breakfast: (mmm, hobbits) sometimes a sandwich and a beer, usually around 11 a.m.
Lunch: usually a long affair, from say 1 or 2 to 4 p.m.
Tea: tea/coffee with a snack, usually around 5 or 6 p.m.
Pre-dinner: tapas at a bar or restaurant, around 7 or 8 p.m.
Dinner: in true Spanish style, dinner is not eaten until 10 p.m. Many restaurants will start serving at 8 or 8:30, but they are not crowded at that hour and this seems to be mostly for tourists.

The food is all great, but not exactly light. And I simply could not start eating dinner at 10 p.m. That goes against every weight control tip I’ve ever heard. Here is a typical rundown of how we handled eating:

Breakfast at the hotel around 9 or 10 a.m.: Most hotels have a breakfast buffet of some sort. I tended to eat something like juice, toast, garlic mushrooms, a croissant, some pastries and maybe a slice of ham or some eggs if I were feeling the need for protein (what can I say, I lurve carbs). Lord Kissington would stick more to the protein thing, but we both tended to eat a hearty breakfast (far more than normal for us), since we would head out after breakfast for lots of walking and sightseeing.

Around 1 or 2 p.m., we would stop somewhere for lunch. This was generally a sizable meal. Some things we had: assorted tapas, paella, fish stew, pizza (not the best). Lunch was always accompanied by drinks, sometimes a bottle of wine, or just glasses of wine for me and beer for LK. The wine was always good, even if it was just a glass of the house wine, and usually quite cheap, maybe 1.50 or 2 Euros a glass.

Depending on how full we were after lunch, we might head back to the hotel and take a siesta (really trying to go native here). In the mid to late afternoon, we would often stop at a bar (or sometimes the hotel bar) for a drink or two (this whole drinking all day thing is really a lot of fun and made all the museum visits much more palatable to Lord Kissington).

We usually ate dinner around 8 or 8:30. Most days we had a pretty big lunch, so dinner was often just tapas. Of course, eating 9 or 10 tapas isn’t exactly a light meal, but whatever. A couple of times, we went for more formal dinners.

Here are some food items I loved in Spain:

Toast: European white bread is just so much better than American white bread. Is it because they don’t use preservatives?
Croissants: because croissants aren’t unhealthy enough, they like to make them even better in Spain by coating them with a layer of sugary goo. Yum.
Octopus: I’d only ever had octopus in Japanese restaurants, and I wasn’t very impressed, as it always seemed rather tough. But octopus in Spain is amazing. Sometimes it’s fried; sometimes it’s sautéed in olive oil and garlic.
Tiramisu: Nope, it’s not Spanish. We ate lunch at an Italian restaurant once and I had this for dessert. Delish.
Sevillian-style chickpeas: Chickpeas in a sauce, apparently cooked with pork. Amazing.
Fish stew: I had a couple of different varieties of this. My favorite had cod in it.
Wine, wine, and more wine: Did I mention the wine?