Palacio Real de Madrid

So in Madrid, every building more or less looks like this:



Our first night there, we met up with a future friend of Dan's, a Madrid native who will be attending business school with him next month.  As we exclaimed over the beauty of his city, he smiled sheepishly and said, "I must admit... I like it very much."

We walked around a lot in Madrid, and went to the Prado and the Reina Sofia (Madrid's Met and MoMA, respectively), but decided after seeing the badass exterior of the Royal Palace that we should get up early to check it out on our last day.  I'm glad we did.  Most of the palaces we saw in Spain were old, intricately carved Moorish castles, so it was cool to see one in a totally different, equally (or even more) opulent style, made even cooler by the fact that it's still in use.



The moderate and chilled out King of Spain, Juan Carlos, elected years ago not to live there, but they have royal functions and whatnot.  I hope that he let his kids have sleepovers in the throne room when they were little.

Pictures aren't allowed inside, but I snuck a few.  Here's the modest foyer:



The throne room had a ridiculous ceiling:



Many of the rooms have no real function but rather a theme.  This one was "porcelan."  Others had crazy embroidered walls, or birds everywhere, or ancient jillion dollar cellos in each corner.



And finally the apothecary, which looks suspiciously like a Diagon Alley health food store:



Doesn't it seem like there should be little gnomes flying around, gathering the appropriate wolfsbane and nightlock from the drawers and mashing them together to cure your magical ailment?

Also, our tiny, aggressively hip room in Madrid had a light setting called "It's Sexy Time."

Yay Madrid!

Madrid & Toledo.

Tienes Un Amigo

Dan and I saw Toy Story 3 last night, and it was wonderful.  I'm trying to think of something wrong with it.  Eh, if I try hard I can think of a few nitpicky things, but the movie was so good I'm going to forget about them.  Pixar, man!  The only thing wrong with that company is that they only release one movie a year.

Their Ken, apparently based on "Animal-Lovin' Ken" from the late 80s, was particularly inspired.

Aaaaaand We're Back

In Spain, wine is $1.50-$2 a glass.  Wine is less expensive then water.  Spain is a good place.

We had several incredible meals and no bad ones, but for now I'll just show you some montaditos from Quimet & Quimet, a tapas bar in Barcelona that we went to on our last full day, and the site for my favorite meal.  I read about Quimet & Quimet in an Amanda Hesser article like eight years ago, and since Amanda Hesser has never steered me wrong (hello, almond cake), I figured that even though it was fairly out of the way, we should give it a try.  Even though it only serves conservas - preserved food (canned, jarred, or pickled).  And is completely out of the way.  And I don't even like most preserved food; it sounds fishy.  But still.  We went.

We went at the tail end of lunch time (a little before 4; in Spain lunch doesn't start until after 2) and it was still packed, with both people and stuff.  Every inch of the walls store wine or tins of anchovies or olives or langostinas packed in oil or brine.

There's no menu; you basically tell the guy an idea of what you want and he interprets.  We noticed a table of Spanish ladies ordering with great confidence and also receiving piles of great-looking food, so we pretty much just pointed to their best-looking selections, and the bartender (do I call him that?  He was mostly preparing food, so "bartender" sounds wrong, but since all of the food is room temperature and uncooked, "chef" doesn't work either) went to work.

We started with a cheese plate.  On the upper right you can see a raw-milk cheese that has been aged for less than 30 days: illegal in the states.  This was my first taste of the stuff and I'm still jonesing.  Why didn't I spend the entire trip chowing down on such a treasure?  The brown things in the middle are candied nuts of some kind, cheese's unlikely best friend, as it turns out, and the yellowish blob on the left is a jellied something that resembled Jell-O salad but tasted like an angel came down and licked the inside of my mouth.

So, we liked the cheese plate.  But it took a back seat to these:

Montaditos.  Delicious little open-faced sandwiches, piled with a seemingly random, not-particularly-appetizing-sounding combination of ingredients that EXPLODE IN YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH.  OH MY GOD.  IT WAS SO GOOD.  That middle one there is a yogurt spread topped with slightly smoked salmon, then drizzled with honey and soy sauce (for a while I was like, I must get this "soja sauce" they are using.  What is "soja sauce?  How have I never heard of it?).  Doesn't that sound gross?  I know.  Dan almost started crying with joy when he tasted it.  That bottom hunk of tasty is some kind of pate heaped with delici-fied onions and topped with a balsamic syrup.  It may have been the best thing I've ever eaten.

I washed all this down with two $1.80 glasses of perfectly drinkable wine.

I think Quimet & Quimet should franchise.

HOLA!

In Spain.  Will not be blogging until end of honeymoon.  Smooches!

--Señora Kaminski

Celebrity Sighting: The Big One

I don't get excited for any old celebrity.  If you remember, I FREAKED OUT when I met Victor Newman from The Young and the Restless, but for Harrison Ford I was like, eh, he's paunchy.  The best sightings are people who have either been a part of your life since forever (see above), or who have had a fairly profound effect on your life.  

So you can imagine the feelings I was dealing with when I saw Ina Garten.

If you don't spend a lot of your income on cookbooks, or watch a lot of Food Network, you may not be familiar with the Barefoot Contessa.  I'll just say that if I've ever made you a meal, you owe this woman a debt of thanks.  And since my meals are probably half the reason Dan married me, I do too.

Anyway, I saw her while waiting for Dan around Union Square.  We'd been planning on dinner at House, which was closed for a party, so I figured I would at least check out Casa Mono, an apparently incredible Spanish restaurant nearby.  They had two seats open but wouldn't hold them until my party was complete, so I was waiting on the corner when I saw her sitting in the window.  I... lost it a little.  I think her husband noticed me staring creepily as I stood outside the window, gawking.  For like twenty minutes.  Dan was pretty late; by the time he arrived the seats were gone and it was just as well; I think if we'd eaten there I would have spent the entire meal staring and then Ina's powerful husband Jeffrey would've threatened my life.

She looked just like she does on tv.  Shiny hair, large button-down, ninja pants.

Sorry I was being all creepy, Ina!  I hope you enjoyed your dinner!

I love you!

Frygate

Anyone else read the fairly brutal M.I.A. profile in the Times magazine this past weekend?  The writer was masterful in passive-aggresively painting Ms. Arulpragasam as a big ole twit by contrasting her fairly grandiose political "power to the people" statements with her consumption of luxury foodstuffs.

“I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

M.I.A., however, proved somewhat less twitty then the writer had imagined, as she was recording the interview herself and has since used that recording to point out that said truffle fries were ordered by the reporter, and also that more than one of the quotes were mashed together from separate parts of the interview.  Ugh, you can't trust anyone anymore!

But I don't care about much of that, actually.  I thought that the article was a great read while simultaneously still enjoying "Paper Planes," two full years after it came out and was totally overexposed.  I am so enlightened.

Also, the article was followed by this picture, which depicts the exact feeling with which I wish to live.

MAWWIAGE

So.  I got married on Saturday.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, I'm done playing it cool.  Our wedding was the best day of my life.  When I walked into a room full of nearly everyone I love, and felt them stand up and just beam at me, that sealed the deal. I cried happy tears my whole way down the aisle.  Then we had a ceremony and I grinned my way back up.  Doesn't Dan look handsome?

My mommy looked beautiful:

The bridesmaids were no slouches, either:

And even the KP girls managed to brush their hair and smile:

I have so much to say about this whole weekend!  So I'll be recapping it in bits over the summer (and probably really get going with the posts once I get pictures back from our photographer).  Until then, I'll be riding this wave of Happiness: Extreme for as long as possible with my Mr. Right.

****major kudos to Dennis Kwan for the pics above.