Ronda

Today we drove to the beautiful hill town of Ronda, which Eric and I had been to before. Ronda is built on two wedges of rock rising up out of the land, with a gorge between. One side of the town had sharp slopes down, and the other side has a sharp sheer drop. The town does not have walls on all sides because it would have been totally unnecessary.

We did not get an especially early start. We all had things we wanted to do in the morning... I wanted to lie in the sun a little and swim in the pool. (The outdoor pool is lovely, but utterly frigid. While I was swimming, I thought, I can handle this, it’s like northern Michigan. When I got out, I thought, no, it’s not as warm as that.)

The road to Ronda twists and turns through the mountains. They are very beautiful, rocky mountains – some of them almost completely barren, others covered with brush. Occasionally you’d see a small olive grove, or something similar, tucked into the rock. As a driving experience, it was not entirely edifying. Mostly, Yelena did not like it and began to cry halfway through, and there wasn’t much for us to do but push on to Ronda. (I think she was crying for a combination of car sickness, hunger, uncomfortable car seat, and poopiness; enough to make the strongest baby ornery.)

We arrived around lunch time, and so found underground parking in the mercadillo side of town, and headed to the nearby Restaurante Pedro Romero. The restaurant is dedicated to the art of bullfighting, and sits across the street from the bullfighting stadium, the oldest one in Spain. Lunch (dinner, really) was very good. We started with cream of squash soup, eggplant salad with peppers and prawns, and fried goat cheese (semi-ripened) with apple compote, all good. Yelena ate a little of my apple compote, which was nothing more than an apple cooked until it was mushy – an excellent compliment to the cheese. (I took Eric’s salad as a vocabulary lesson in the difference between “ensalada” and “ensaladilla” in Spain: Eric’s ensalada was a lettuce salad with cooked eggplant and peppers mixed in, garnished with two prawns. Something closer to a baba gannouj would have been called “ensaladilla”.) Our main courses were cochinillo (suckling pig, roasted); rabbit cooked with onions, carrots, peppercorns, and bay leaves; and perdiz escabechada (partridge marinated and served cold). I had considered all three dishes before settling on the rabbit, because other people were having the other dishes. I’m glad I had it – I think it was the best dish, in spite of being difficult to eat (fiddly bones and small hunks of meat). The partridge was disappointing, because not enough had been done to counter the native dryness of the bird. The cochinillo was remarkably strong-flavored (though perhaps it always is, I don’t recall); I found it tasty but a bit too funky.

For dessert, I had the lemon sorbete, which is (despite the multiple translations in the menu) not a sorbet, but rather like a granita, or a New England-style frozen lemonade (assessment: yummy, but a little too acidic). Mila had the chocolate-walnut bizcocho with a sort of crème anglaise (not good, because the bizcochos were, shockingly, freezer-burned). Eli had a sort of vanilla pound cake, sliced and drizzled in orange liqueur (yummy). Eric ordered something called tocinillo de cielo, described as a sweet caramel custard, but literally translating as “little bacon of heaven”. The literal name was quite mysterious until it came out, and suddenly it dawned on me that this large brick-like slab of thick yellow flan, with a brown top, looked quite a lot like a nice hunk of smoked fatback. “Little bacon of heaven” indeed! In any event, it was yummy, and the entire large slab was eaten with everyone’s help. (Well, not so much mine: the texture was too thick for me, and I am picky about texture.)

After lunch we walked around town, crossing the very old “new bridge” to the older ciudad side of town, and wandering here and there, stopping at a cliff-side plaza on the western edge of town, and then heading downhill to cross much older “old bridge” and to take a look at the even older “arab bridge”. The views of the gorge are rather breathtaking from all bridges – lush, green, and unbelievably deep.

We headed back as the sun was approaching the horizon, and it was dusk when we reached the hotel. Yelena fussed less on this leg.

Supper was a nice cold meal of tortilla de patata and ensaladilla rusa purchased to-go from a tapas joint in Ronda, some nice cheeses also purchased in Ronda, cured olives from France, and a bottle of Ribero del Duero Crianza 2002 (from a vineyard called Arribeño). The wine is fairly cheap, and good; the food was all lovely. Ensaladilla rusa (“Russian salad”) is a sort of tuna-and-potato salad made with mayo, carrots, and peas, and it really hits the spot, as does tortilla de patata.

In spite of general intentions to go to bed earlier, we seem to go to bed later every night. Yelena did go to bed without much fuss last night, though Mila did leave her sleeping on the bed and didn’t try to move her to the crib right away.

Labels: journal, personal, spain

posted by Tony at 11:30 PM