Country town + medicine = yum!

Two posts in one day, AGAIN!  Man, I am on a roll.

Anyway, I just wanted to gloat about how awesome my life is.  Everything is coming together like the pieces of a jigsaw, revealing a delightful village picnic scene or perhaps a cute picture of some little puppies or some such jigsawish thing.

The reason I feel like this is that studying medicine while living in a country town has proven to be a valuable aid to eating delicious meals.  We'd been tooling around various delis and supermarkets in search of ham hocks or bacon bones to make my famous (famous in my house) Asturian bean stew with, but we'd had no luck.  Everywhere we went people said to us, "No we don't have them.  Only in winter."

That makes no sense to me.  People want to eat soup all year round, not just in winter.  At least we do.  What happens to all the leftover hocks from making the Christmas hams?  Do they get thrown out?  Or perhaps they are exported to the northern hemisphere where it is cold now.  Or maybe they are frozen and stockpiled by sinister giant lizards from outer space.

Anyway, we ended up wandering into the little wurst-haus down by the sea and explaining our woes to the lovely people who run it that we always chat to whenever we go there.  Since they found out we are medical students they always give us an update on their health and also on their daughter who is studying nursing and, by all accounts, absolutely loving it.  And they went and got a hambone from their fridge and gave it to us for free as a Christmas present!  How nice is that???

Once I had the hambone home and the beans were on the boil, I went to pop the hambone into the pot.  But the bones were all sticking out at funny angles and it wasn't going to fit.  So I took a small paring knife, cut through the joint capsule so I could rotate the head of the femur freely in the acetabulum, then found and cut the transverse acetabular ligament, and the hambone(s) now fit in my pot very nicely.

Who'd have thought that watching videos of hip replacements would ever be useful?

By the way, my apologies for the ongoing ham theme of this blog.  It's really not intentional.