La Mostra de la Cuina del Pinós

I could lie. Except for those of you who live in and around Pinoso you would never know. It would be easy to lie about the 12th edition of the La Mostra de la Cuina de Pinós.

Now if my Castillian Spanish is shaky my Valencian is non existent. My guess is that the title means something like "Pinoso's culinary showcase" - the showing of the cooking/cuisine from Pinoso. And this is where I chose not to lie; it took place from the 21st to 26th of February. Long before I got around to writing this blog entry.

The idea is elegant. Five local restaurants chose to get involved this year. Each cooks local dishes using local produce accompanied by local wine. The price is a set 25€ per person. The organisation is tight. The side dishes are the same in each and every restaurant for all six days and the main course is also stipulated by the organisers for each day. So if you chose to go to La Torre or Alfonso on the same day you would get the same main course. The only significant variation is that each restaurant prepares a different daily special to be served after the regulated starter and before the regulated main course. Even there the organisers stipulate that the special should include a particular and different ingredient per day.

The menus featured a lot of snails, a lot of rabbit, several varieties of sausage and the local meatballs. We were in Pinoso for the Saturday and Maggie, always up for a nice feed, forced me to go too. The restaurant we went to, el Timón, was packed to the rafters, the atmosphere was excellent, the noise was that quiet Spanish bellow and the food was plentiful, tasty and as traditional as could be.

Splendid little event.

I could only find the menus as a pdf but this is the link in case you want to have a look.

The photo, which has us in the background, was taken by a local online newspaper El Eco de Pinoso

The day we went to Beni

Benidorm has to be one of the oddest towns in Spain. For a start it looks odd. Far too many tall buildings for your average Spanish town. It also seems to lack any sort of cultural life in the theatre and museum sense of the word. I'm sure that isn't true but as an average visitor all I saw were bars, restaurants, poundstretcher type shops and sex clubs. All of them had that sort of seedy, run down look reserved for brash seaside towns.

Benidorm feels oddly foreign too. Obviously the majority of businesses in a Spanish town dedicated to tourism are Spanish but there are so many British, German, Dutch and even Chinese businesses that it would be easy for any of the nationals of those countries to forget that they had left their homelands.

Benidorm was odd in another, much less quirky, way. At one point on Saturday night we were strolling along a pedestrianised street. There were bars on both sides and planted firmly in the middle of the street were muscly, shaven headed men. I presumed that they were under-employed bouncers being used as early evening leafleteers until the bars got going and their bouncerial skills were required. Every bar had some sort of offer - free shots with every beer, bargain pints of vodka and Red Bull, two for one deals etc. We'd been given a couple of leaflets as we strolled though I suppose for most of these places I was too old. They'd have me down as a customer for one of the bars with the other white haired men where María Jesús would be playing her accordion. But there was something wrong with the way the bouncers were standing; with their lack of movement. Maggie noticed it too. There was menace in the air and I'm still not sure whether it was from the bouncers themselves or because of what they were waiting for.

I can't remember the last time I felt threatened walking the streets of a Spanish town. Last night, in Benidorm, surrounded by signs for British Breakfasts, Scottish bars and roast beef dinners I did. A Spanish couple we talked to later commented on the same unease.

We were there, in Benidorm, with the people of Culebrón, with people from the Neighbourhood Association. Elena, who heads up the Association, had found a deal at a Benidorm hotel. For the princely sum of 27€ per person we got the coach ride from Culebrón to Benidorm and full board in one of the big Benidorm chain hotels for twenty four hours. It was the sort of hotel that has a featured dance band in one lounge and a music quizz in another. There was a two for one deal on most drinks too.

To be truthful we didn't do much except eat, drink and stroll for twenty four hours but that would be a majority pastime here. The weather was excellent, the room was good, the food was plentiful and we were made to feel very welcome. I had predicted disaster but I was wrong. It couldn't have gone much better.

Just one last observation. We left Culebrón at 4pm in the afternoon. It seemed odd to our British sensibility. Obviously, if we British are going somewhere we get up at the crack of dawn and try to get there before the shops open. Probably the timings were linked to whatever package the hotel was offering but none of our Spanish travelling companions thought that a late afternoon start was in the least odd. We'll be there in nice time for dinner they said.