The Gingerbread Michigan

Speaking of going global. This is a shot of the gingerbread cookies that I recently prepared using my only cookie cutters, which as you can see, are in the shape of the great state of Michigan - upper AND lower peninsula. Unfortunately the lower peninsulas kept snapping in half.
As you can imagine, they caused almost as much of a stir among locals as when I brought a tray of paper cup Jello shots to a "BBQ" here so many years ago that turned out to be a fancy cocktail party for the Spanish upper crust. Which is not to say that there wasn't any grilling going on, only that the burgers flipped by a staff of white-glove wearing butlers.

If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you!
 (and thank you J, L, L and K)

Forbidden Pleasure Goes Global

 

When you own a restaurant and do all the cooking, you get to the point where you would rather eat just about anything but the food that you yourself prepare there on a daily basis. Instead of making myself one of the healthy salads or other dishes on the menu, I would think of everything in terms of "ugh! If I eat that, I will just have to make more of it later".  The only days that I truly stuffed myself while working were Sundays, when we brought the miracle of Sunday brunch to the center of Madrid...and with it, the forbidden pleasure: smoky bacon dipped in maple syrup. This treat was stuffed into our mouths at a feverish rate while passing through the kitchen - and often washed down with a Bloody Mary. My business partner B was the first to give it this name, a term that we later introduced to many a regular client, "So, Juan, have I told you about the Forbidden Pleasure?".
Well, it seems that many years later this treat (or a slight variation of it) has finally made it to the realm of Spanish "Avant-garde" tapas, as illustrated in this article/recipe that came out yesterday in Gastronomía y Cia. They don't seem to know that it's forbidden, however...