Life in Culebrón

I mentioned last week that we tend towards the things that we grew up with. I was thinking about this again when we went to a British shop to buy sausage. I'll explain later. At any traditional till in a Spanish supermarket, particularly in rural areas, you will notice that the person in front, generally, has ingredients and not the finished product. We're not talking extremes. Spaniards buy crisps, not raw potatoes. It's very unlikely though that they would buy a ready made lasagne. They cook from the raw materials. There are nowhere near as many packets, cans and jars of prepared foods as there are in the UK. I've been making the midday meal for a while using a British cookery book. The book often lists a packet of this or a jar of that as one of the ingredients. As those packets and jars are not available I have to buy individual ingredients to simulate the packet or the can that the recipe suggests. Sometimes it simply has to be a substitute because, Jim Lovell and ...

Have you ever noticed how things can be difficult to find in Spanish supermarkets? It seems to me that these Spanish shops arrange their products to a logic that I didn't share and I've had to learn.  Imagine I want peanut butter. My Britishness tells me to look for it with the jam or honey but my recent experience tells me to look for it near the chocolate bars, near the Nutella. Peanut butter isn't a good example because peanut butter is about as Spanish as celebrations on the 4th of July. Nonetheless, the next time you're in a Spanish supermarket, provided you're not Spanish, look around and I'm sure you'll find things that don't quite mesh with your idea of where they should, logically, be. Why aren't the crackers with the pitta and other bread substitutes? Why is the juice distant from the pop? Why are the kitchen and toilet rolls not alongside the cleaning products? In Pinoso we have quite a few supermarkets and each one of them has a differen...