Food overload in Donostia with Agur, Limpan and Johannes

Tjena! At the time of writing, being too full to really commit to any in-depth descriptions, here are some hipster food-shots from a weekend of excess, to be continued tomorrow.

Places visited: 
Zintziri Errota, Bakio
Justa, Zumaia
Kokotxa*, Donostia
Zeroku, Donostia

Of pigs, chimps, platypii and men

Do we originate from a monkey and pig experimenting with interspecies sex?

First I thought this was a silly idea; a thought experiment. Then I read more and realised that it mindboggingly makes sense! Religious people might not like it. Although, another way to look at it is that eating pork is kind of like cannibalism, so perhaps the muslims were right all along! And just like humans might come from chimp-pig hybrids, platypii are apparently best explained by hybridisation between a bird and an early mammal. As, of course, aborigines knew since a long time ago.

Cross-cooking part III

It is time for an update to my not-so-regular report on global cross-cooking phenomena. After haggis pakora in Glasgow and dangerous experiments in my own kitchen, the time has come for the Basque country. Just in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, between Europe's finest surfing beaches (south of France and north of Spain), lies Donostia or San Sebastian. Not only is it a beautiful city, to which I am soon moving, but it is also the place with the highest concentration of Michelin stars per capita!

One of the best things with this part of the world are the ubiquitous pintxos (the Basque answer to tapas). In one of the fanciest places serving pintxos, called A Fuego Negro, they have embraced experimental cross-cooking in an awesome way. The basic recipe is easy:

• One part Japanese: a small but delicious piece of ground kobe-beef (神戸ビーフ)
• One part American: let's make a hamburger of it
• One part Basque: it is a miniature, i.e. a pintxo

The result is called Mc Kobe, was brilliant, and can be seen below.

This was the first time I had eaten kobe beef. For those of you who don't know, it is a very special Japanese delicacy, made from cows who get to drink beer during the last weeks of their life, and get hour long daily massages. This makes them very happy and relaxed cows. And tasty. I highly recommended it (both the massage and beer parts, but mainly the Mc Kobe).

Stealing bicycles - Bergen kommune's new strategy for environmental improvment

Bergen has Europe's most polluted air, due to horrible traffic. So what does the city ("Bergen kommune") do? Cuts up locks and removes people's bikes! Because parking them outside is illegal. So this morning mine and all the street's bikes were gone, some previously decorated with stickers that I had noticed ("varsel om fjerning" / "notice of removal") saying approximately "Illegal parking. Not frequently used, thus junk". Not on mine though. It had been standing exactly 2 days. It's hard to use your bike every day in the icy winter streets, so I don't see how this makes them junk in either case. I think I will start stealing cars from the people working for the kommune if nobody seems to be using them at the time. Maybe leave a notice a day before on some car nearby.

Report from the BAGECO Conference

Since yesterday, I am hanging out on the Ionnian island of Corfu in Greece, to take part in the BActerial Genetics and ECOlogy conference (BAGECO; not to be confused by Bagheera). I'm very impressed by the quality of the talks and research presented so far. Compared to the last microbiology conference I went to (ISME 2009 in Australia), lots of people are taking advantage of "next-generation" sequencing technologiey and other relatively new, cost-efficient molecular techniques, like custom microarrays (Geochips) and proteomics. The buzzword (or "buzzphrazse") is clearly "integrated -omics approach", which usually means to combine metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics and metabolomics (i.e. sequencing of genomic DNA, reverse-transcribed RNA, MS-based proteomic analysis and screening for metabolic products.) I don't know if I like the term "integrated -omics" since it is not very descriptive; "Integrated analysis" or something would be better, but that is another topic, perhaps for Johnatan Eisen to discuss on his very entertaining "Worst omics word award" section of his blog. Anyway, the combination is really useful and can provide a more holistic picture of microbial communities. Some examples of really interesting talks:

- Maria Westerholm, from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences: "Molecular Approaches to detect and quantify syntrophic acetate-oxisizing bacteria in biogas digesters". Very clever study to improve the efficency of metanotrophic biogas reactors.

- Giovanni Pilloni from the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Health in Germany: "Degrader community response to hydraulic disturbance in a tar-oil contaminated aquifier". Cleverly, TFRLP fingerprinting with replication was used to confirm the predictions made using pyrosequencing.

- Pedro Soares-Castro, from the University of Minho, Portugal: "Towards the metabolomic engineering of myrcene pathway of Pseudomonas sp. M1 using an integrated -omic approach". Genome sequencing, transcriptomics and metabolomics combined in a clever way.

- Gavin Lear, from the Lincoln University in New Zealand: "Bacteria as sentinels of freshwater ecological health: An exploration of the relationships between antropogenic impacts and bacterial biodiversity in freshwater streams".

Weather report

This has, seriously, got to be the shittiest May ever recorded in known history. At least weather-wise.

Eguzkilore

These "sunflowers" (that really are a kind of thistles) hung to the door or wall of a house are a very common sign in the Basque Country and protect against evil spirits.

According to legend, many thousands of years ago when men began to populate the Earth, it was very dark as neither the sun nor the moon existed. In this constant darkness, people were scared of the many sorcerers and witches who came from the bowels of the Earth in the shapes of bulls made of fire, huge dragons, flying horses, lamia (a kind of mermaids with birds legs) etc.

Desperate, the people decided to ask for help from Mother Earth (Amalur):

- Amalur, we beg you to protect us from the dangers that surround us!

But Mother Earth was very busy and ignored the humans at first. However, they were so persistent that eventually she responded:

- My sons, you ask me to help you and that I will. I will create a luminous being that will be called the Moon.

And Mother Earth created the moon.

At first, the men were terrified and stayed in their caves not daring go outside, but slowly they got used to it. But like the people, the sorcerers and witches who were also afraid at first to see the bright object in the sky, got used to it also and soon started to harass the humans again.

Once again, the humans came to Mother Earth asking for help:

- Amalur, we are very grateful that you have given us the moon but we still need something more powerful because the sorcerers never cease to haunt us.

- Okay, I will create an brighter thing, that will be called the Sun. The Sun will be the day and the Moon the night.

And Amalur created the sun. It was so big, bright and hot that the people had to get used to it little by little, but their joy was great because thanks to heat and sunlight, colourful plants and fruit trees soon grew up around them and the hills turned green. More importantly, the sorcerers and witches could not get used to the daylight. However, they still harassed the people in the night, so once again the humans had no choice but to ask Mother Earth for help:

- Amalur, we are very grateful that you have given us the Sun and the Moon, but we need something more, to protect us during the night.

Amalur answered:

- I will help you again. I will create a flower for you, so beautiful, that seeing her, the creatures of the night will think that it is the sun itself.

And Mother Earth created the Eguzkilore, which to this day defend our homes from evil spirits, witches, Lamia, sorcerers of disease, storms and lightning.

Thanks, Agurtxu and Itsas for sharing this beautiful legend!