Good day to you, reader!
How time flies when you are busy and having fun! I realize that almost an entire month has passed since my last post, and even that one was a wee, patchetic one relying on a meme to try and entertain you.
Next week I am moving onto the fish station, so I'm currently spending my last days in the world of the meats (and my stint in meats was cut short by an enexpected, very cold week in England), but I'll tell ya what I get to do there! The next paragraphs are not vegetarian friendly.
A weekly thing for me at the meat station is to clean up 5kg's of mollejas, or sweetbreads. They are super tasty, but smell gnarly when raw, and then you get your hand in a massive pile of them and proceed to cut the gross white bits off (I don't actually know what they are, and to be honest, I'd rather not know). Sometimes you'll find wee pieces of bone.
Andra Mari also serves squab, and as such, they need to be prepared. Luckily we don't need to pluck them clean, but when we get a batch in they still have their heads on, so the first thing you do is get your knife and cut it off garnished with a nice crunch. And then chop the tips of the wing off, then remove them and it's legs and then the breast and voila! Nice squab ready to be served. Omnomnom. Also it's a very ugly bird, rivaling a turkey for thw title of ugliest bird.
We also have tasty, super yummy oxtail which gets coated generously in salt and fried and then stewes in a delish red wine sauce for a few hours and then it's tender and yummy. Sometimes the tails come in from the butcher's still hanging together because the butcher hasn't put his knife through it properly.
For some reason the eriz del mar, sea urchin, is served from the meat station. This is very unfortunate, as cleaning them is the most disgusting and frustrating job to do. First you need masses of tissues so when you have a tight grip on the damn thing it doesn't pierce your hand. Then with your knife you pop the little thing that keeps all of it's meat inside. That's all fine, but then we have to scrape the hole bigger, and a lot of the time the shell breaks (though it's a lot easier getting the meat out if that happens), which is poop because we serve the relleno, filling, in the shell (puke). Once that's all done, it's time to go for the meat. You just want the orange meat, which is surrounded by a lot of mierda. And it all smells awful. I was so close to actually throwing up when I cleaned roughly 50 sea urchins. Worst day of my life, I tell you. Then the cleaned meat gets made into a relleno, with veg and salsa bizkaina. You couldn't get me to taste that even if you paid me.
As I've mentioned before, the amount of oil used is large. So large in fact, that if we have an oil fire on the grill, no one bats an eyelid because it happens all the time.
It's hard to believe that I'm going back home to Finland in less than 7 weeks. Time has gone by so fast, and these last seven weeks will go just as fast (and I'm only working six of them, I have the first week of May off, so my cousin Alice and I are hitting Barcelona, holla!). I am looking forward to going back, I get to see my friends and family, and I get to graduate. But I will miss Spain and Bilbs, I like it here. Also I can get a can of beer for 0,22€.
Now I'm going back to the Great British Bake Off.
