Decline and Fall

Besides perfume and cars there are multiple adverts on Spanish telly for food. Particularly for fast food or franchised food chains - Foster's Hollywood, KFC, Domino's - or for quick to eat food - Casa Tarradellas pizzas, Yatekomo noodles. Now I'm not a discerning diner. I was a big fan of Spam, I like crabsticks and I still buy el Pozo meat products despite seeing the stomach turning documentary on TV. But I have to say that the adverts are putting me off a bit. The food is all so shiny and bathed in red or yellow sauce of dubious parentage. Eating with hands squidged over with sauce appears to be a positive thing.

I have a Spanish pal who is very set in his ways. From what I can tell he eats a lot of very traditional Pinoso food. If it's not local then, whether it's at home in a restaurant, he sticks to the tried and tested - grilled meat, stews, rice dishes and the like. I usually meet this friend around 12.30 so, a long hour later, I'm saying goodbye because I have to get home to finish preparing lunch. He occasionally asks what I'm cooking, Chicken and coconut curry I say, or cassoulet or even turkey fajitas and he looks at me as though I'm talking gobbledygook not just remembering what a cook book tells me.

I was telling this friend that we'd had a bit of a disappointment with a restaurant we'd gone to. We'd had some friends visiting who have a house on the coast. We'd planned to go to a local restaurant that does very traditional Pinoso food. Escalivada, pipirrana, fried cheese with tomato jam, bread with ali-oli and grated tomato, local cold sausages and the like to start. The main dish would usually be rice with rabbit and snails (the local paella), a rabbit stew or the big meatballs in broth. As the meal grinds to its inevitable conclusion, after the pudding, they give you mistela, the sweet wine, and perusas, the air filled cakes. Unfortunately the restaurant had a wedding reception that day, no room for us. We chose another restaurant, one we'd meant to try for ages. It was fine. It did lots of straightforward things like Russian salad, broken eggs, croquettes, prawns in garlic, patatas bravas blah, blah as starters. Mains were lots of varieties of fish, pork and beef served grilled or fried and there were also various rice/paella dishes. Nothing wrong with it. Absolutely fine. Eaten and forgotten.

So, back to my friend. I'm telling him about this. He says but surely the traditional food would be nothing new to your visiting friends if they have a house here in the province. I tell him that, on the coast there is plenty of food but that it's, generally, international. In fact I tell him here in Pinoso most of the restaurants serve food that would be equally at home in Brussels, Milwaukee or Nuneaton. He doesn't agree. He says it's easy to get paella on the coast. I know, from past conversations, that he goes to the same handful of restaurants time after time because that's where he can get what he's looking for. A self fulfilling prophecy. I try to explain what I mean. He's thinking of paella made individually, to order. He's not thinking about the stuff that served up in individual portions, microwaved hot as necessary, sold to tourists as the dish before the pork chop and chips.

Not that long ago the set meals, the menús, started with a choice of something like soup (fish, garlic, onion and seafood were favourites), possibly some pasta, maybe a stew like lentejas or cocido, maybe some boiled or grilled veg. The second dish, main course if you prefer, would be meat or fish, a pork chop, a chicken fillet, sardines, a piece of hake, maybe kidneys. The pudding would be ice cream, flan or fruit of the day. The food was hardly haut cuisine but it was something with identifiable ingredients. You could have coffee instead of pudding of course. The red wine was so rough it came with gaseosa (sugary, fizzy water) to make it palatable. White wine was a rarity and beer was beer - that's fizzy lager. The quality wasn't good but it was honest sort of stuff using cheap but straightforward ingredients cooked by someone who was a cook - it often involved using up yesterday's leftovers.

Nowadays the roots of the set meals are still the same but the choice is different. It's difficult to explain in a way but the style has changed, it's less honest. In the past the menú came with cheap ingredients - the cheap cuts of meat, only veg in season or something produced or hunted locally. Nowadays the ingredients are cheap because they are cheapened versions of what would once have been decent quality food - farmed, steroid fed, fish, chicken bred with oversize breasts and veg grown under artificial lighting in huge plastic greenhouses. The food is still rooted in Spain but it's not really Spanish. It's a bit like getting bangers and mash at the local pub in the UK with the sausages made with mechanically separated meat and potato out of a packet. Here it might be rice served with bits of pepper, chorizo and chicken.

It might be the puddings, the afters, the sweets that most highlight this change. The list of puddings after a Spanish menú del día is, no longer, three or four items. You will be offered any number of possibilities and every single one comes out of a packet that has been in the refrigerated display. More choice, less quality.

It's a real shame that those people chose that day to be married but I'd still like to wish them the happiest of lives together!

Lunching out

We're going to have takeaway for lunch. I'm almost beside myself with excitement. Well no, not really, but it is a bit of an event. At the moment almost anything at all different is an event. Of course Maggie is going back to work tomorrow so that will be a big change. With the easing of our confinement we could even go and get a beer outside a bar. I'm not sure how keen I am on that. Great to get a beer and to watch the world go past but it's still a world full of masks and latex gloves and having waited eight weeks I don't want to be too previous. Latex, of course, can be quite interesting. I once went to a club in the West End where everyone wore latex. I'm amazed to this day that they let me in wearing my interview suit but I think it was along the same lines as the Sioux not killing the geologist from the wagon train because they considered he was slightly mad grovelling amongst the stones and mumbling to himself. I talked to a bloke in the club, Skin Two, who I initially thought was really fat but then he undid the ankles on his one piece suit and all the sweat ran out and he was much, much thinner. Latex gloves are more reminiscent of internal exams and dentists than a subculture though and I'd prefer that they weren't an everyday part of my life.

So we don't really have to decide about how much advantage we take of the more relaxed movement from tomorrow, with our area being given Phase 1 status, but today we're still pretty much locked in. I can go and get pre-ordered food though perfectly legitimately. It's not takeaway in the same spirit that Madrid chose to look after it's "free school meal" youngsters by sending TelePizza and McDonald's with chicken McNuggets. They eventually stopped that but not before the President of Madrid defended the food saying something like "I'm sure the kids will enjoy pizza and burgers".

No. Eduardo, our local restaurant in the village has a big sign outside to say that they are doing takeaway. And when they're on form I think the food at Eduardo's is good. Anyway I'm all for supporting a local business and you don't get much more local than our restaurant in Culebrón. We're getting croquettes, gachamiga (a sort of doughy, garlicky pancake) and paella with rabbit and snails. I've just realised. The big paella pan will be hot and it could potentially scorch the carpets in the back of the motor so I'd better give up writing and get to lining the boot with cardboard before Eduardo phones.

Enjoy your lunch too.

Mostra de la Cuina del Pinós

I don't know if modern, young Britons still eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday but I'm pretty sure that Yorkshire Pudding is alive and well on the Sceptred Isle. As I remember it pancakes and Yorkshires share the same simple mix - eggs, flour, milk. The sort of things that any self respecting house would have had in the larder at almost any time in British history.

A lot of traditional Spanish food has a similar backstory. When we lived in Salamanca pig products were big in the local cuisine, up in Asturias they use the local beans for one of the traditional dishes and all over Spain there are variations on bread crumbs fried up with tiny scraps of meat which, folk tale has it, was a food for shepherds who ended up with a lot of stale bread. Combining the ingredients readily to hand. It works for speciality foods too. Xixona makes turrón, a sort of nougat essential to celebrate Christmas, and turrón comes from combining eggs, honey and almonds all of which abound near Xixona.

Pinoso, like everywhere in Spain, is proud of its food. The star dish, without a shadow of a doubt is the local paella, only a couple of grains of rice thick and whose main ingredients, after rice, are rabbit and snails but flavoured with local, easy to find, products like garlic, thyme and parsley. Even the cooking style, over open fires fuelled with bundles of twigs from pruning the vines, adds those subtle, but essential, tastes.

Second up in local fame is, almost certainly, a rabbit stew served on and with shreds of a thick pancake, made from wheat flour, water and salt, which goes by the name of gazpacho - the same name as the completely different cold Andalucian soup. There are lots of other local foodstuffs from wine and sausage to cakes and biscuits. With an eye on promoting tourism Pinoso has an event to celebrate the local food.

The idea of this event, called the Mostra de la Cuina del Pinós, is that the town's restaurants, five this year, offer the same food on the same day - meatballs on Tuesday, stew on Thursday etc. Every day of the event they also serve the same entrees (slices of sausages and pipirrana). They are allowed to let their imaginations run wild on the four starters and on the puddings. The price has gone up over the years but it's still a very reasonable (given the quantity and the quality) 30€ per head (well except for one restaurant that has broken ranks and is charging 40€).

I'm not going to describe most of the dishes but just for any Spaniards reading the main courses are: Gachamiga, Fassegures del Pinós, Ajos Pinoseros con conejo y "picat", Gazpachos con conejo y caracoles and Arroz con conejo y caracoles. Still time, as I write to book up for a feed.

So we went on Thursday, the Ajos Pinoseros day. We thought we knew what we were getting and we expected a sort of fry up of rabbit and wild garlic. We were completely wrong. The obvious ingredients of what we ate were rabbit and chickpeas served in a shallow dish with a fair bit of gravy or broth that you spooned ali oli into. Ali oli is a thick emulsion that we Brits usually describe as garlic mayonnaise. I really enjoyed it and I thought we'd eaten but, as we downed the cutlery, we were presented with a soup in which floated croutons and pieces of boiled eggs. That was the picat and my guess is that it uses the broth from cooking the rabbit.

Now I know that describing food dishes isn't particularly interesting but why I noticed it was that it was a bit like the cocido that Maria Dolores cooked for us just a little while ago. We thought we knew what we were getting but we were wrong. Still so much to find out and so many calories doing it!

Blood, fuet and tears

What goes into a paella is a bit of a moot point. Valencian paella usually contains white rice, meat (usually chicken or rabbit) garrofó (a sort of bean), saffron and rosemary and, of course, olive oil. There are plenty of variations but most of them replace or add to the meat with, say, snails, seafood or fish and the beans with maybe artichokes or cauliflower. You may remember that, a couple of years ago, Jamie Oliver the British chef, suggested a paella made with onions, carrots, parsley, red pepper, tomato puree, chicken stock, frozen peas chicken thighs and chorizo. He received death threats from enraged Spaniards. They were appalled by the recipe in general but especially about the inclusion of chorizo. I suppose it is a bit like calling something made from quorn and onions in a soy  sauce gravy topped off with mashed yams a Shepherd's Pie. I doubt though that the British newspapers would be able to mine the rich seam of national outrage in defence of the Shepherd's Pie.

Unless I'm very much mistaken chorizo is now commonplace in the UK. So popular, so common, that the pronunciation is no longer the chorritso of a few years ago to something much closer to the Spanish - Choreetho. Chorizo is made by coarsely mincing pork meat, adding seasoning and paprika before pushing the mix into sausage skins which are hung to cure in a nice dry place. Apparently this type of curing without smoke and without salt and where the meat sort of gently rots down is called fermentation curing. Anyway, however it's made chorizo is plentiful in Spain. Any supermarket will have it in a variety of shapes and forms. Some is cheap and some isn't, some is spicy and some isn't, some is obviously produced in huge factories and delivered in articulated lorries and some is made carefully by someone who would be happy to do a radio interview about it.

Stick with me whilst I drift.

In choosing a book I generally work from reviews and lists published somewhere - "Our top ten picks for the beach this summer", "Fifteen new Spanish writers you should get to know" and so on. It is remarkable how many of these books seem to be set in Catalonia or to include Catalan themes. I read the latest Isabel Allende the other day. Nowadays she's a US citizen but I still think of her as Chilean. Her story, about Spanish Civil War refugees taken in by Chile, was full of Catalan words and characters. The book I've just finished was going to be about Catalonia because it was originally published in Catalan. The story is set amongst country folk in the High Pyrenees. There was lots of description in the book and I noticed that in amongst the myriad food references several places smelled of cheese and fuet.

Fuet is a thin, dry cured, solid, pork meat sausage flavoured with black pepper, garlic and, sometimes, aniseed. It has a white appearance, as though it has been sprinkled with flower, though the white is actually a fungus. I'd never particularly associated fuet with Catalonia though, when I thought about it, the name is obviously Catalan. So chorizo is a sausage and fuet is a sausage.

Spain has lots and lots of sausages. If I were to buy chorizo I know there are choices to be made. Any old pig or the little Iberian black jobs? Fed on commercial feed or raised free range on acorns? Basically the cheap stuff or the quality product? On the other hand I just buy fuet. In the same way as I would never associate hot dog sausages, Wieners, with quality meat I've always presumed that fuet was in the same sort of class, made from the the scrag ends. If I were to think about, and I never had till I read Irene Solà Saez's book, I would imagine fuet being produced in an enormous factory stacked with giant killing machines where all the workers wear hairnets and white wellies and smoke a quick ciggy at break time. The sort of place that, every now and then, is infiltrated by undercover journalists who film heartless workers laughing as they do something disgustingly barbaric to terrified blood spattered pigs standing in their own excrement. But, maybe not. If the Pyrenean houses named Matavaques and Can Prim smell of fuet and cheese there must be quality stuff to be had.

Practical research is called for.

When the weather is fine

Summer began at six minutes to six last Friday. Just a few minutes later we arrived in Santa Pola on the Mediterranean coast. It was pure chance, we'd been nearby doing some shopping and we thought why not?

We didn't do much. We parked next to the beach, walked around the corner to an area that has been developed with bars, cafés and restaurants alongside the marina and had a drink. The sun was shining with that early evening hazy shine. Some people were wading in the water, others were swimming. The sea was sparkly. The expensive and not so expensive boats in the marina bobbed up and down and made those tinkling, ringing sounds that moored boats do. The bar was comfortable, modern looking with light filtering through blinds and awnings. It was a bit pricey with slim young servers and ice cold (alcohol free) beer. Say what you will about far off exotic lands but the Med takes some beating when it's on form. It was one of those moments.

A couple of days earlier I'd already been to the coast, showing a pal around my old stomping ground of Cartagena and, this weekend, we went to see friends near Altea. In fact, one way and another we've spent the whole weekend close to the beach. On the train back from Alicante to el Campello the night-time beach glittered with the life of small campfires raised by friendship groups to celebrate the summer festival of San Juan.

I've written before about the magic of the Mediterranean summer in Spain. It really is something. It's not just the sun, it's not just the brilliant blue skies and the pure white light. It's not the heat or even the ice cold beer but summer here is something really special. It has sounds, it has smells, it has a temperature and a way that the atmosphere behaves, how the air shimmers. It even has a dress code.

Summer engenders a behaviour, it fills the telly with adverts of people eating and drinking together but the truth is that you only need to pop to the coast to find that's a reality and not just some ad agency marketing tool.

Ninety days to the 23rd September when it all ends. Ninety days I hope to enjoy to the full.

And all things nice

I think, in my youth, I was misled about treacle and cocoa. Treacle, in a Heinz treacle pudding, isn't the same treacle as the bonfire night Parkin. Cocoa, rather than drinking chocolate, is the pipe and slippers staple that goes with the "You've been a long way away, thank you for coming back to me," of Brief Encounter, rather than the stuff I drank from the machine at Halifax Baths. This came to mind as Maggie and I sipped on a hot chocolate at the Christmas light turning on ceremony in Pinoso the other day.

Hot chocolate, the sort that is made either with proper cocoa powder or, more usually here in Spain, by dissolving low grade chocolate in hot milk or a hot water and milk mix, is thick enough to stand a spoon in and usually sweet enough to dissolve teeth on contact. In these here parts the chocolate is usually served with a sweet bread, called toña. Toña tastes like the doughy part of the French buns sold in the Yorkshire of my youth but Maggie seems to think it's more like the iced buns of Liverpool. Iced buns and French buns sound substantially similar to me. Chocolate y toña is served at lots of events. There is sometimes a pretence that it's for the children but the people at the front of the queue, with the sharpest elbows, are the grandpas and grandmas rather than their generationally removed descendants.

I wondered if there was a blog here. About the local food. Not the impressive stuff, not the main courses, like gazpacho, the rabbit stew loaded with a naan bread like pancake, or the local paella made with rice, rabbit and snails or even the made from nothing gachasmigas. I set about Google and came up with an insurmountable problem. Put something like coca amb oli into the search and Google finds, at least for the first 50 pages, things which are almost exclusively Catalan in origin. That's because Valenciano and Catalan are, linguistically, related.

My cooking skills are limited but they far exceed my skill in telling what I am eating. If I had to do that MasterChef tasting thing and to say what was in the food I'd just tasted I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between beef and pork never mind the flummoxing subtleties of herbs and spices. So, just because I've eaten various cocas, doesn't mean I tell you much about them. Maggie describes coca amb oli as fat pie (I think it's a flat bread made with lots of olive oil) but I always think of cocas as being the local equivalent of pizzas, something bready with a topping usually including tomatoes, peppers or aubergines and, often, something fishy. I could well be wrong though.

I thought about it more. There are rollitos, doughnut shaped hard biscuits often flavoured with orange or wine or anis  a sort of pernod or ouzo type drink. I think rollitos have a lot of lard, a lot of olive oil and a lot of flour in them. I like them. Maggie says they are boring but she thinks digestive biscuits are boring too so she's not the best judge. I'm pretty sure they are typically Pinoso though.

Then I remembered perusas. Perusas are what you get at the end of the meal in Pinoso when you have just eaten something traditional like rice. They usually come along with some of the local sweet wine called mistela. Just like the rollitos I like perusas and Maggie doesn't but we both describe them as dust cakes to visitors. They literally melt away once you've bitten into them. Google had no trouble with perusas. The first few search pages had the word Pinoso in the heading. The ingredients are similar, flour, sugar, oil, lots of eggs, anis and icing sugar to dust them off.

So, in the end, I decided there wasn't enough hard information for me to do a blog on the bits and pieces of the local cuisine.

Troughing down

It turns out that I've blogged about the restaurant in Culebrón, Restaurante Eduardo, probably nearly as many times as I've eaten there. So I'll try to keep this short.

Last Sunday Maggie put up less resistance to eating at Eduardo's than usual. There were several possible reasons for the feeble struggle that she put up but I think the main one was that, being Mother's Day, she knew that most restaurants would be awash with diners and Eduardo's is never awash. We had house guests too and I think that Maggie recognises that Eduardo's offers a rich and varied Spanish experience. And so it was. There was the usual reluctance, on the part of the restaurant, to be clear about what there was to eat but, in the end, we got a good meal at a good price. At least I think so. You'd have to ask John and Claire what they thought to get a reasonably unbiased view. Maggie and I have entrenched positions about Eduardo's that are unshakeable before logic or reason.

The thing that did surprise me was that the meal was very Pinoso yet it seemed to be new to our friends. Amongst other things we got entremeses, well generally a selection of local embutidos, sausages, in the way that salami and pastrami and black pudding are sausages, rather than bangers, served as part of the range of food before the main dish. For a main we had been offered gazpacho but Maggie's not a big fan of the local gazpacho. It's not the liquid salad gazpacho of Andalucia but a rabbit stew served with a sort of pancake in the base of the bowl and a dough, based on wheat flour, floating in the stew. The gazpacho rejected we went for rice, for paella.

Now John and Claire are no strangers to Spain so they know what a paella is but the local rice is a bit different to the "generic" paella of the coast. Rice dishes are different all over Spain and the one with seafood or chicken and those flat green beans isn't the one in these here parts. Our rice, still cooked in a paella pan, has rabbit and snails with a dry rice only a few grains thick. It's success depends on the quality of the broth that gives the taste to the rice. Something a bit different for J&C.

Rice over it all looked a bit humdrum - Vienetta, variations on creme caramel, industrial cheesecake etc but there was a final flourish when we got perusas. We call them dust cakes because when you bite into them they melt in your mouth. They disappear. Like dust.

An experience, as always, and, I realised, quite Pinoso.

Form and function

I think it was John who told us there was a nice new bar in La Romana so, as we were passing, we dropped in for a coffee. He was right. Lots of right angles, tonal furniture, predominantly white, nice clean lines, modern looking, warm welcome and it was warm in the heated sense too,

The majority of Spanish bars and restaurants are very everyday. There's seldom any attempt to do what they've been doing with Irish style pubs for twenty five plus years in the UK - fishing rods, sewing machines and soap adverts or what all of those coffee shops that sell lattes, mochas and espressos do with overstuffed bookcases, creaking floorboards, chesterfield sofas or roaring log fires. They try to add a certain style. Ambience, well ambience not centred around handwritten notices for lottery tickets, crates of empty bottles and piles of detritus by the cash till, is in short supply in most, though not all, Spanish bars and restaurants. Bear in mind that I spend most of my time in Fortuna, Culebrón or Pinoso rather than Madrid or Barcelona.

On Saturday, as a birthday treat, Maggie took me to an eatery that we have never dared venture into before - partly for price and partly for the Porsches, Ferraris and  two a penny Beamers and Audis parked outside. It's in Pinoso and it has a reputation province wide, food guide wise and nationwide amongst cognoscenti for being a temple to the local rice dish made with rabbit and snails seasoned with wild herbs and cooked over burning bundles of scent giving twigs. The restaurant sees no need for a sign outside and makes do with a discreet nameplate so that diners know they have found the place.

The inside of the restaurant was nothing special. The tablecloths were cloth, the cutlery and glassware were clean and the servers were smart and civil but it looked like thousands of other eateries in Spain. I think it had tiles half way up the wall but then it had the stippled paint, it's called gotelé here but it's like painting over anaglypta in the UK. I wouldn't have been too surprised if there had been a telly on the wall showing the Simpsons. I don't think you could get a similar reputation for being quality eating in the UK without doing something about the decor. Different philosophy.

Down the road, in one of the villages, there's another restaurant with a growing reputation for rice. They have glass walls to the kitchen so you can see the paella being cooked, they have a printed menu (we weren't offered a written menu) and I think the waiters have some sort of modern uniform. The whole place looks like someone had a concept in mind when they talked to the builders and furnishers.

It was a good experience in Pinoso though. We had a good time and although the prices were high they were not frighteningly so. We saw another couple stick to beer and water, a pair of simple centre of the table starters, the rice of course and coffee and they got to pay with a single fifty euro note. Perfectly reasonable. To be honest though it wasn't the best rice I've eaten - a bit over salty and a bit greasy for my taste. The bread and ali-oli, also one of my yardsticks, was good but not exceptional and the salad was served a tad cold.

Now I have an idea for a place that looks great, has good looking young staff and serves only variations on egg and chips. What do you reckon?

It's just rice

I was going to say that we had a famous restaurant in Pinoso then I thought about it. Obama is famous and Shakira too but I don't think that even restaurants as well known as el Celler de Can Roca are really famous. Well known maybe?

So there's a restaurant in Pinoso that's quite famous and it's famous for the local rice dish. I worked for a couple of years in a street very close to the restaurant. Time after time some big Audi or Porsche or Bentley would pull up alongside me, roll down the window and ask politely for the restaurant. My reply was word perfect I'd done it so often

This well known Pinoso restaurant is renowned amongst the locals for the unpleasantness of its owner and the outrageous price of its food. After all it's just rice. I've heard that said by Britons and Spaniards alike. I've never been. Too expensive for my wallet.

I need to take a moment here to make sure you're OK on this rice/arroz concept. Paella and rice are virtually synonymous. The big flat pan that rice is cooked in is called a paella and so the food cooked in it came to be called paella. In reality though paella/rice can vary significantly from the original Vesta recipe. In Valencia paellas seem to have a lot of seafood, chicken and veg. There's a rice, traditionally for Fridays, to comply with the once common "no meat on Friday" of good Catholics. It's made with cod and cauliflower. The rice cooked in fish stock has lots of names - in Cartagena it's called caldero. Down in Elche I think arroz con costra has loads of sausages and maybe chickpeas as well as the rice and the whole is topped off with an egg crust. Arroz negro is coloured with cuttlefish or squid ink. In Albacete they seem to like quite gooey rice, arroz meloso. And so it goes on. And on.

So around Pinoso our rice is thin, quite dry and with rabbit and snails. With my mum being here we've been to a lot of restaurants. Most of them cheap and cheerful. She wanted something better when we were in Culebrón. I took her and her pal Sheila to a restaurant called Elías in Chinorlet village very close to our house. Our welcome was very iffy and we were finally given a terrible table but once we were under way the service was excellent and the food a revelation.

Good wine is wasted on me. I'm of the "I like what I like" school. It's normally the same with food. But as I tucked into the traditional all i oli and tomato paste on toast I wondered if I could ever eat the normal supermarket all i oli again. I'd seen the cooks preparing it (If you don't know what all i oli is think of it as garlic mayonnaise) in the glass fronted kitchen as we waited for a table and I thought the whole rigmarole of rice cooking over wooden twigs and garlic being ground in a pestle and mortar was a bit pretentious. I have to admit though that it tasted fabulous. When the rice came it looked just as usual - not like the stuff you get in a ten Euro menú place - like the stuff from a decent mid range restaurant. It didn't taste like it though. I could actually taste the wood smoke that they go on about, the mix of tastes was just right, the rabbit and the snails (hunted not reared - yes they breed snails too!) were, well, just right too. It was a taste experience, a revelation. I now understand all the fuss about paella being the pièce de résistance of Spanish cuisine. Even my mum, who had suddenly declared that she didn't like rice after we had ordered the food but before it came, was won over.

Pinoso featured on a TV programme about the rice and other local foods in a programme called "Cooks without Stars." The man talking about Fondillon wine is Roberto from Culebrón. What a media star.

'Til the only dry land were at Blackpool

I've been to some cold places in my life. England in January isn't that warm; the Isle of Lewis and Stockholm are often colder but they are not uncomfortable places. Culebrón on the other hand is uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. Outside it's about 7ºC and it's midday. The house isn't set up for it. Wind whistles under the doors, through the windows. Marble and tiled surfaces don't help. Built for summer, not for winter. The only warm place in the house is under the shower. Outside, the sky is blue, the sun is shining. Wrapped up, with gloves it's warm enough. But inside the chill soaks through your bones. Down in La Unión I haven't yet started to close the windows at night or use a heater but here. Brrr!

Our local petrol station has no petrol, no diesel and no gas bottles. Everyone says that the owner can't pay his bills so the oil company won't deliver except for cash payments. The next nearest petrol stations are at least 10kms away. The car wash is still in business though. I used it today rather than plunge my hands into a bucket of cold water.

The local bodega on the other hand was doing a roaring trade on Sunday. I think, though I'm not sure, that the farmers who produce the grapes which make the wine, have a running account with the bodega shop. They buy things on tick against the money they are paid for the grapes they harvest. The shop sells groceries, things for around the farm, workwear etc. It's an interesting place.

In the Santa Catalina district of the town, one of the older and possibly poorer parts of Pinoso they are having a fiesta because it's her day on the 25th. I plain forgot to go to see the street bonfires on Friday evening. Yesterday I was going to go and watch the flower offering and have a look at the mediaeval market as I drove back from the cinema but I changed my mind when I noticed that the temperature was hovering around 2ºC and there was a chill wind blowing. What fun in drinking a micro brewery beer or eating a chorizo roll with hands frozen by the cold? I did pop in today though.

There's a circus in town. I half wondered about going. The camel and the strange long horned cow type beast parked outside the big top looked very mangy and very out of place. I arrived to take a few snaps just as the Sunday matinee crowd came out. There wasn't much of an audience.

I'm just back from lunch down in the village hall. It was the Neighbourhood Association AGM. We always have one of the local paellas with rabbit and snails and gazpacho, a sort of rabbit stew with a flat form of dumpling. It's always the same. The meal started late, there was applause when the metre and a half paella pan was brought into the hall from the outside kitchen where it has been cooked over wood. There was plenty of drink and the actual meeting was sparsely attended and very disorganised. For the first time ever, and despite being the only foreigner in the place, I didn't feel too lost. I laughed when I didn't understand and I voted knowing what I was voting for despite the chaos. It looks like we're off to Benidorm again in March. Everybody else was drinking the very fashionable gintonics (gin and tonic) but someone found a bottle of whisky for me. I drained it. My typing may have suffereed.

The title, by the way, is from three ha'pence a foot by Marriott Edgar. Snaps on the Picasa link at the top of the page.

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It rained and it rained for a fortni't, 

And flooded the 'ole countryside. 

It rained and it kept' on raining, 

'Til the Irwell were fifty mile wide.

The 'ouses were soon under water, 

And folks to the roof 'ad to climb. 

They said 'twas the rottenest summer 

That Bury 'ad 'ad for some time. 

The rain showed no sign of abating, 

And water rose hour by hour, 

'Til the only dry land were at Blackpool, 

And that were on top of the Tower.

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

Rice with rabbit and snails

We went out for lunch with our old pals John and Trish today and we went to a reasonably decent restaurant in town. We had, probably, the most traditional meal in Pinoso and I was a bit surprised when it seemed to be something a bit out of the ordinary for them.

Then I checked the blog and found that I've only once made reference to it here on this blog. A wrong to be righted.

Rice, cooked in a paella pan is a standard meal all over Spain, all over the World come to that, but the famous paella, the one from Valencia usually has prawns, other seafood and chicken. The one in these here parts comes with rabbit and snails. The meal in and around Pinoso goes something like this.

First you choose an assortment of bits and bats to start that are put on the table for everyone to share. Toasted and oiled bread served with some alli olli and grated tomato, salad, olives and nuts come more or less as standard. The rest will be to your choice, whatever they have on today plus some staples, usually things like small fried squid, clams, dry cured ham and cheese or, one of Maggie's favourites, deep fried cheese with tomato jam.

The freshly cooked rice itself will be served with a flourish. The big paella pan will be placed in the centre of the table on a scorched mat or holder of some kind or if there are a lot of you it will be popped onto a small stand placed beside the main table. It is essential that you make appropriate cooing noises at this point. If the pan is on the table you will be asked if you want plates as it often makes sense to eat directly from the pan (more room for the wine glasses!) Throughout the meal each passing waiter will check that the food is good. The appropriate and only answer is smashing - "Muy rico!"

The main course despatched there is the regular range of puddings. Once upon a time the choice was flan (creme caramel), ice cream or seasonal fruit but nowadays it's just like going to a Harvester in that the pudding list is extensive and sickly sweet.

At coffee time though there are a couple of last minute flourishes. Normally they will plonk a bottle of smeet wine, Moscatel or Mistela on the table though today we got Fondillon - thick, syrupy sweet wines. Sometimes, often, you are offered an alternative like Orujo de Hierbas - a spirit distilled from the left over pulp of wine making grapes flavoured with herbs - even better when you get offered both. Along with the digestif come perusas. Maggie calls them dust cakes. A sort of individual sized sweet bready cake full of bubbles and dusted with caster sugar.

And that's it. A light snack that, along with the habitual after meal conversation will take you from the normal sit down time of 2pm to around 4 or 4.30pm. Only a couple of hours to go before you can get yourself a few tapas to hold off the inevitable hunger pangs before you chow down to your evening meal at around 10pm.

Big John

The weather in Culebrón remains warm. It's been up and down a bit, temperature wise, but at the moment we're a tad over 37ºC. When I've done the gardening the temperature doesn't seem to be too much of a hindrance so long as there is a cooling drink to hand. The sweat that dribbles into my eye sockets and then splashes onto the inside of my sunglasses to dry into salty smears makes precision work more difficult but there is always the compensation of feeling a bit like Big John Wayne wiping his forehead way out West.

We've just taken our house guest, John Leigh, to Novelda, a nearby town, where there is a very nice Art Nouveau house. When we arrived parking was dead easy because the town's fiesta is under way so all the shops and businesses were shut. Luckily the house was open. A bit of a bonus was that there was a bike race going on around the streets.

I've been on a bike once or twice in my life; they seem like hard work. The route is always uphill and every time there's a gale force headwind. Those cyclists must have been feeling the heat but, worse than that, for them no John Wayne compensation - I mean can you imagine the Duke in Lycra?