Washing up

I don't like washing up. I don't like chopping and dicing either. It always seems to me that the time necessary to prepare a meal and clean up after it is disproportionate to the five to ten minutes required to eat it. On the other hand I resent paying proper restaurant prices. I hum and hah about spending 100€ on a pair of jeans or a bit for the camera and then happily spend half that amount on food that will be costing me money in sewage charges only hours later.

Maggie likes restaurants though and I enjoy the experience of abandoning our English speaking existence for a couple of hours. I'm a big fan of the cheap set meals - the menú del día - available all over Spain. Between 8€ and 12€ for three or four courses with the booze and coffee thrown in. Set meals, though tend to be formulaic. Similar starters, mains and puddings the length and breadth of the land. There are a growing number of slightly better but more expensive set meals but when the quality of the food is an unknown quantity they can simply be standard fare at inflated prices.

Now Spaniards enjoy eating and they are convinced that Spanish cuisine is the best in the world. For evidence they can point to the list of the top 50 restaurants of the world. Three Spanish in the top ten this year for instance as against one in the UK; five Spanish in the top 50 against three British.

In general though Spain isn't foody like the UK. There are cookery programmes on the telly but they are pure demonstration rather than the plethora of food based UK TV programmes. And there are no celebrity chefs go ice dancing programmes either because, with the possible exception of Ferran Adrià, there are no celebrity chefs.

If we do decide to spend a bit more money on a meal the emphasis is usually on traditional dishes prepared with good quality ingredients. So it's paella in a greasy spoon with the telly on and paella in the place with Porsches parked outside and the waiters in grey and black. Recently though, maybe because of the financial crisis, we've noticed a trend towards "25€" degustación menus in the upscale restaurants - a tasting menu. More courses than the traditional set meal but absolutely no choice. You get what you're given. Probably by UK standards the meals are not very adventurous (bear in mind that I haven't eaten in a UK restaurant in eight years now) but putting grapefruit and strawberries in the salad, serving deep fried aubergine crisps or adding a sweet drizzle to a savoury food is pretty adventurous in these here parts.

There are a couple of these degustación type of restaurants near our flat in Cartagena, one of them is probably the place I have most enjoyed a meal anywhere in Spain. Today, just outside Pinoso, we went to a similar sort of place. Brilliant setting, good service and a different menu. A traditional sort of crisp pancake spread with a sweet onion paste, small mushroom stuffed peppers covered in a corn sauce, pork cheek in a fig sauce then grilled chicken with home made all-i-oli followed by a cheesecake.With coffee, water and a bottle of decent local wine the whole lot came in at 62€ for the two of us.

Who knows, one day when I ask one of my students what their favourite food is they will mention something with a beetroot drizzle rather than paella, lentils, tortilla, steak, spaghetti or pizza.

Toast for breakfast

In Pinoso, in Cartagena and in Culebrón, if there were a bar, a typical breakfast food would be toast. In Alicante and Murcia that usually means a portion of a bread stick (they always ask if you want half or whole when you order) toasted and with something on top. By far and away the most popular are either oil and salt or grated tomato. Adding a slice of ham is optional and not standard but very common.


In Madrid on the other hand if you ask for toast in the morning it's usually a thick Mother's Pride type slice served with butter and jam. Down in Seville the breadstick type toast usually comes along with a three sectioned dish containing grated tomato and various fats (sobrasada and lard are common.) In Catalonia they seem to rub the tomato directly onto the toast rather than grate it first and rubbing the bread with garlic as well as tomato is very common.


So, this morning we were in la Rioja, in Santo Domingo de la Calzada to be precise. "How do you do the toast around here," I asked, "Do you have it with tomato?" The girl leaning on the bar didn't look too sure. Shell shocked by my appalling pronunciation I presumed. Then she asked her mum who was in the kitchen - "Butter and jam," she said,  "Did we want sliced bread or normal bread?"

Interesting little regional variation I thought.

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 or rabbit stew?

The Junta Directiva

I haven't commented on the Neighbourhood Association meal for a couple of years so I will this time around. To be honest I could simply repeat most of the text on the link above down to the menu except that there were no lupin seeds this year. It's not quite true, there were a couple of things that I noticed as different.

I had an interesting conversation with the President of the Association, not in its content but in the fact that it took place at all. The last time we spoke for more than 30 seconds she commented that, unlike my wife, I couldn't speak Spanish and that I should be ashamed of myself. This time she was at pains to compliment me on the way that I expressed myself and was able to string an argument together (we were talking politics.) I liked that. I like compliments about my Spanish.

Another thing was that I needed to open a bottle of beer and I went in search of a bottle opener. The abnormal thing there was that I felt perfectly comfortable just searching through the detritus of the serving area till I found one. It may have taken six years or so but I realised that I didn't feel out of place or uncomfortable in just helping myself. Nobody jumped up from their seat to help the helpless and hopeless foreigner as has happened so many times before either. Maybe it's because when someone else had explained to me, in mime, how to use the press tap on a box of vermouth to pour it out I had said that I was English not stupid. Was I being assertive or just plain rude?

The AGM after the meal was the normal riot. As usual when things got heated the language changed to Valenciano. A bit of bad feeling about who should supply wine for the village events and a bit of argy bargy about whether the summer meal should be self or outside catered. The discussion about the stall at Villazgo was more relaxed though there were some barbed comments from the President about who had to put the work in each year. The discussion about a charabanc trip also had two definite camps, one for a cultural type outing (we've had trips to a musical in Madrid and to a an area with limestone caves and touristy villages) or whether it should be a mad night out in Benidorm. The compromise was to find out the best deals on both and then to see who would sign up for what.

Good fun as always.

Going to Eduardo's

There's not a lot in Culebrón apart from houses. We have a post box, a winery and Eduardo's. Eduardo's is the local restaurant.

Eduardo's restaurant is quite a strange place. Big. A huge barn of a building. There are seldom many diners. Often, as we pass by there's just Eduardo's van outside. No sign of customers.

I like Eduardo's. We can walk there. I can drink wine without fear of killing people on the way home. The food is traditional, not very special and cheap. Maggie doesn't like Eduardo's at all, she thinks the food is poor and she doesn't think it's cheap. It was she who suggested we went there today. Surprisingly there were nine other diners.

Getting food at Eduardo's is not straightforward. There is no advertised set meal and there's no written menu to choose from. We have to ask. Eduardo mumbles. Nowadays we have some idea of the range on offer but always, if there are other customers, Maggie looks across and asks why it is that we weren't offered whatever it is that they are eating.

We chose a bottle of red wine and a big bottle of water to drink. For food we started with toast, toasted over the open fire, served with white dripping and pink dripping. A cholesterol bomb. Sometimes there is ali oli for the toast but not today. Next a plate of crisps and almonds. Then a very basic salad of lettuce tomato and olives though we were offered a bit of tinned mackerel to go on top which we declined. We asked for fried cheese, and got it though the usual tomato jam accompaniment  had been substituted by bitter orange marmalade. Main course was the traditional, to these parts, rice, rabbit and snail paella. I'd fancied a rabbit stew but Maggie looked askance at the proffered choices of lamb or chicken and so I joined her in the paella. Nowhere will cook a paella for fewer than two people. We both had pudding and I had a coffee though Maggie didn't. We both had a shot of something to finish. I thought it was the local mistela though Maggie said it was something horrid that tasted only of sugar. Total price 24€ or 12€ each.

A taste of Blighty

We're having a very British weekend in Culebrón. We've just had lunch at a new bar restaurante run by Britons on the outskirts of Pinoso. It's now called Rafael's and it's using the building that once traded as RústicOriginal. I used to work for Rustic three or four years ago. It was strange to be back in the building that was so familiar and yet so different.

The place looked good, the staff were very welcoming, the Spanish translation of the, all British, menu read pretty well and the food was tasty, well presented and reasonably priced. All in all it was a very acceptable if not outstanding meal.

In the UK, when I lived there, I used to often eat in those chain pubs. I'd read the menu and think that the "freshly caught North Sea cod covered with organic wheat batter and accompanied by rough cut, blanched and deep fried potatoes," sounded good. I was surprised when I got fish and chips. In Spain menus tend to be straight forward, at least in the inexpensive places. The listing is basic: pork chops, chicken breast, hake etc. and things don't generally get more complicated than descriptions like steak with pepper sauce.

Back at Rafael's I noticed that the young man who served us was keen to correct our sloppy descriptions of the food. I don't remember exactly but I do know that when we got to the puddings he stressed things like stem ginger and black cherries when confirming our order.

I was transported back to the Boathouse in Peterborough.

Down the village on a warm summer's evening

20€ a year to join the Village Association. A bargain. Subsidised meals, sometimes a trip and the always enjoyable AGM where nothing gets done and nothing is resolved.

This is the best though. The meal the weekend before the Fiesta. The food is sometimes good and sometimes ordinary. Sometimes I feel to be a part of what's going on and sometimes I feel like an outsider. But whatever happens, for me, it is the quintessential image of summer in the village. Much more intimate than the Fiestas, so much more Spanish than the November meal

The neighbours are there. It's warm. The lights are strung up from the village hall. There is hubbub as everyone talks and laughs and drinks and eats and comes and goes. A little oasis of people enveloped by the dark summer evening.

Even when I don't enjoy it I appreciate it and last night I did both.

Hamming it up

My Spanish students have a lot of trouble with the English words jam and ham. Which is the one that comes from pigs and which is the fruit preserve? Just in case you're not sure ham is the pig product.

Britons and Spaniards also have a different idea of a ham. Mention ham and Spanish people immediately think of a cured ham, similar to Parma ham, for which the catch all term is jamon serrano or mountain ham. Back in Huntingdonshire my mum would be thinking of boiled ham. Oddly the stuff we Britons are used to is called York Ham - Jamon York - in Spain.

When some English pals asked me yesterday how the jamon serrano ham was produced I realised I didn't know. Now I do.

To paraphrase Mrs. Beaton first slaughter your pig and cut off its back legs. Next clean them up and then store the hams in big piles covered with salt for a couple of weeks. The salt both serves to preserve the meat and to draw off water. Next the salt is washed off and the hams are hung for about six months. Finally the hams are hung in a cool dry hanging sheds for between six and eighteen months. These drying sheds are typically high in the mountains which is why the stuff is called mountain ham. The last phase is to eat it. So maybe a couple of years from gentle snuffling to plate.

The same can be done with the forelegs of the little piggies, in that case it is called paleta.

The main factors that determine the quality and price of the ham are the type of pig and the food it eats.

There are basically two types of pig, the native black skinned Iberian beast, which produces the best quality ham, but only represents about 5% of the total production, and the more intensively reared white pigs like the Large White, Landrace, or Duroc strains and crosses.

The best hams come from Iberian pigs wandering around in the open air feeding and fattened on acorns in the oak groves along the southern half of the border between Spain and Portugal. But the best is also the slowest and most expensive way to produce the ham so the majority of ham you will come across is from the white pigs.

Just like the French and their Appellation contrôlée the Spanish have an organisation that acts as a quality control mechanism for lots of quality agricultural products. The Instituto Nacional de Denominaciones de Origin or INDO (which is normally abbreviated to D.O on the bottles and packets) certifies the origin, production methods and the general quality of things like wine, honey, olive oil and, of course, ham.

There are four recognised D.O. areas for ham.

The first is in the Province of Extremadura very close to Portugal where the ham comes from pure bred Iberian pigs, or Duroc crosses which are at least 75% Iberian bloodstock. There are several quality levels which depend on what the pigs eat and how good their bloodline is.

The second is in Salamanca province around Guijuelo. Again the pigs have to have at least 75% pure Iberian blood. There are two quality classes:  the best is Jamón Ibérico de bellota - from free range pigs that spend their lives eating acorns. The hams hung for sale are marked with a red band. Not quite so good (but still yummy in my opinion) is the Jamón Ibérico - free range pigs that are fattened up with concentrated feeds. Yellow band for these.

The third D.O. are is in the Province of Huelva in Andalucia also bordering on Portugal. The bloodstock requirements and quality differences are much as before.

The fourth and last area includes all of Teruel province though the air curing must take place at more than 800 metres to gain the D.O mark. There aren't any Iberian pigs in Teruel  so all the hams are from white pigs and there are no cork-oak woods either so the little piggies eat commercial feed. It's the climate that makes things "just right" for producing high quality ham.

Traditionally the wafer thin slices (though there is a modern trend to serve it in smaller chunkier pieces) of meat are cut directly from the ham which is stored at room temperature. You see the hams clamped into stands in the majority of Spanish bars. At home it usually comes in packets from the supermarket but even then the ham should be stored and served at room temperature. The ham tends to be served alone or maybe alternated with sliced cheese and, of course, some tasty bread.

My sources tell me it's available in Tesco and Sainsbury.
.

Businesswomen in Pinoso

Everywhere in Spain boasts some dish that is considered to be local and special. The other day in one of my classes there was a gentle argument about whether Café Asiatico, a coffee loaded with a sweet liqueur, typical of the area around Cartagena, had been invented in the Murcian village of Albujón or whether everywhere in Spain had some form of alcoholic coffee.

Pinoso lays claim to producing the best longaniza sausages, light cakes called perusas and a thick pancake used to make the local stew called gazpacho. Another speciality is a sweet bread produced in dome shaped cakes dusted with sugar and usually served with thick hot drinking chocolate - chocolate y toña.

Today was the tenth edition of a fair in Pinoso dedicated to the town's businesswomen and women entrepreneurs. It was opened by a local actress called Ángela Boj and there were a bunch of stalls to represent the majority of the local businesses owned and operated by women. It was fair enough but the most popular stall was the one giving away chocolate y toña. I got my ration.

Villazgo

Villazgo is an event in Pinoso to celebrate the town's independence from the nearby town of Monóvar in 1826. It takes place in the town on the Sunday nearest to February 12th and it's one of the nicest festivals that we go to each year anywhere.

Villazgo is a celebration of local culture so the stalls are loaded with local crafts, industries and traditions like wine making, basket weaving and shoe making. In the side streets they organise traditional games, basically the local handball and a version of horshoes called caliche. On the stage the town band plays traditional music and the dance groups like Monte de la Sal don the traditional gear and get up and do dances from the local area. Hundreds and hundreds of people wear black smocks that were the everyday work gear around here for years.

Perhaps the best bit though is the food fair. You hand over a few Euros in return for which you get ten tickets, a tray, a wine glass and a ceramic dish. You then go from stall to stall handing over your tickets in return for local food and drink like wine, migas, gachamigas, rice with rabbit and snails, gazpacho (not the Andalucian one but a meaty broth on a dough base), pelotas, longanizas, morcilla, perusas, torrijes, rollitos de vino or anis and lots more that I don't remember the names of. The only down side to this event is that thousands of other people enjoy it as much as we do and sharp elbows are an essential  element of getting to the food stalls.

The programme for the day has, up to now, only been available in the local language, in Valenciano, and I asked a pal who acts as a go between between we Brits and the local politicians to suggest that it should be available in standard Spanish. The answer he got was that the event was "ours" and I suppose by implication if you don't speak Valenciano then you are not one of us. Nonetheless, Maggie has just pointed out to me that the programme for this year is in Castilian too.

New personal best

There have been high speed trains in Spain for a long time. As visitors to the Seville Expo in 1992, before we met, Maggie and I both went on the one that links Seville and Madrid. Until today that was the last time for either of us.

On December 19th this year the newest AVE or high speed line was opened between Madrid and Valencia with a spur off to Albacete. This now makes Spain the country with the second longest system of high speed rail links in the World, after China.

Albacete is only an hour and a half by road from Culebrón and at just 22€ for the round trip it sounded like a good way to pop into Cuenca for lunch. At one point the speed indicator inside our carriage showed us as doing 301 kph. As the take off speed for a Boeing 747 is 290 kph that must mean today I set a new personal land speed record. The journey only took us 30 minutes and though I can't find any detail about the rail distance between these two provincial capitals the road distance is 160 kms.

To be honest the train wasn't that spectacular inside; it looked like a train. From outside the locomotives are impressive though. Apparently they use the Talgo series 112 on the route. The loco has been nicknamed "the duck" though I have no idea why!

New stations have been built in both towns as the AVE runs on a different gauge to the majority of Spanish trains. The station in Albacete includes a small shopping centre and multi screen cinema. We ate miguelitos there, a cake speciality from the nearby town of Roda. I recommend them.

And the lunch in Cuenca was good too if a little hard on the wallet. I tried another local recipe called morteruelo which is based around hare, pheasant, chicken and pig's liver mashed up into a paste. Maggie played it safe with roast lamb.

Eating at Christmas

Teaching English to adults is a good way to gather local information.

Coming up to Christmas an easy topic is holiday traditions in Spain and the UK. Whilst it's not true that "everyone" in the UK eats turkey on Christmas day it is as true as saying that there are no longer pea soupers in London and that we Brits don't all stop for afternoon tea (still firm beliefs for most Spaniards.)

"On Christmas Day we will have roast turkey, carrots, sprouts and various forms of potatoes followed by Christmas pudding - what will you eat?" The Spanish answer is that there is no answer. If there is any sort of routine it seems to be that the starters will be lots of small dishes and nearly everyone seemed to include gambas or langostinas in their list of starters - what I'd call prawns - unshelled and dead tasty. The queues around the fish counters in every supermarket we've been in over the past week add circumstantial weight. Main courses were as varied as traditional food gets in most Spanish houses - fish is big, roast lamb turned up a lot and various forms of paella were strong runners too. Puddings seem to come with the guests as their contribution.

Oh, and it's Christmas Eve and Christmas Day when the families come round with the same alternating year pattern of in laws for one of the dates and your family for the other much as we do with the 25th and 26th.

Nobody but nobody mentioned popping out for a curry though one of my students said that as there would be forty of them this year they had booked the meal at a restaurant to save on washing up.

Good morning

Sunday morning and I was strolling around the garden with a pot of tea in one hand and a cigar in the other. Down the road I noticed the "higos chungos" glowing red against the broad green leaves in the early morning sun. I finished the tea and went to take some snaps and then had a look at Wikipedia. Apparently they are not called higos chungos but higos chumbos -  though it's apparently a common mistake. Chungo means something akin to dodgy, dicey or nasty and higo is fig; seemed reasonable enough - a dodgy sort of fig. We'd definitely been told they were called chungos.

Apparently the plant is Mexican in origin. The leaves of the cactus are eaten like vegetables and the fruit, well as fruit. In Spain the leaves are used as animal fodder but in my search for information I came across lots of Spanish recipes and childhood reminisences of the "We always used to get these as children when we went to see my gran at Christmas," type.

As we never got around to eating the thousands of ordinary figs that grew in our garden I don't imagine we'll be braving the spines of these prickly pears as part of our Christmas diet.

Jijona

When I was a lad I fell over regularly and often bumped my head. I have no idea why as I hadn't discovered cheap brandy then. Anyway, my mum would rub the bump with butter. Again I have no idea why unless she was on the brandy herself but I suppose it meant that I got some sort of attention and that made me feel better.

I have no doubt that when lads fell over in the 1950s in Alicante their mums would apply olive oil. The stuff that's to hand. Using whatever is to hand happens all over the World.

In Jijona which is in the hills behind Alicante they have a lot of almond trees and hens and bees. The result is that the town is famous for a sort of nougat called turrón which is made from almonds, eggs and honey. There are two traditional types. The tooth breaking variety has whole almonds set in a brittle mass of eggs and honey whilst the soft one, that drips oil, the has the almonds reduced to a paste along with eggs and honey plus extra almond oil. Turrón and Christmas are inseperable in Spain.

It was a nice sunny day today and a Sunday afternoon drive seemed like just the ticket. We set off for Alcoy after seeing a programme on the telly last night extolling the virtues of the countryside around there. When we passed the sign for Jijona we changed our plan as neither of us had ever been there. We expected to find the town bustling with people buying in stocks of Christmas turrón but instead the place seemed to have been abandoned and it took us a long time to find an open bar never mind a turrón seller.

I suppose we'll just have to be satisfied with getting our turrón from the local supermarket like every other year.

Getting a taste

Sometime back in the summer Maggie heard about a winery and restaurant very close to the town of Yecla and, consequently, close to us. Now this is Maggie's idea of the perfect trip out. So we went to get lunch. For some reason, I now forget, it was closed. Elephant like this little excursion has been lurking in the back of Maggie's mind. Today was the day to act.

Smart sort of place. The bodega is a big, low looking, modern building surrounded by vineyards. The restaurant is upstairs. Enormous windows with a view to the hills beyond, clean modern look, lots of wood, good sized tables, crisp white linen. The sort of restaurant where they don't leave the wine or bread on the table.

The menu was full of the Spanish equivalents of all those compotes, drizzles and terrines - lots of things that sounded dead interesting. We couldn't decide. So we took the easy way out and went for the "menú degustación." Basically these menus are an opportunity to taste a range of things from the restaurant's range but in reduced portions. I think it was four starters, two mains and a couple of puddings, two bottles of wine plus water, bread and coffee. At 35€ not exactly cheap but rather nice with all that over the left shoulder service and what not. Some things weren't detailed on the menu, "Were those flowers that we just ate?" "No sir, they were artichokes frozen so that they could be cut into wafer thin slices and then deep fried." Crikey.

It's only the second time that we've tried one of these tasting menus and both times the restaurants have been real winners. So, the next time you're in our neck of the woods I'd suggest you give them a go.

On the doorstep but new to me

There's a programme on the telly here called Cuéntame como pasó which has followed the story of a family through the Franco years and into the dawn of the new democracy. Two of the actors from the show have been eating their way around Spain on another TV programme. This week they were in Alicante our home province.

In Elda the screen brothers went to an, apparently, famous restaurant called La Sirena. I'd never heard of it but we checked it out today. There it was only a handful of metres from the bus station that Maggie and I used several times on our trips to and from Ciudad Rodrigo. It looks promising - crisp and modern, definitely worth a try.

The lads also popped into a chocolate shop called Torreblanca which (according to lots of web reviews) is the best chocolate shop in Spain. The bloke who owns it made the cake for the last big Royal Wedding. I'd never heard of it even though it's just 25 minutes from our front door. We bought a few cakey chocolatey things there this afternoon which I can still taste as I type this entry. I thought they were good without being exceptional. Maybe some of the 3€ a throw was because they came in a nice gold box with an interesting typeface!

Then there's the ice cream. Helado de Mantecado for which Santa Pola is, again apparently, famous. Now Maggie and I lived in Santa Pola for six or seven months. We never tried this ice cream. One of our pals has lived in the town for nearly eight years. I texted him today - "Where do you get this ice cream?" I asked - "New one on me," he said, "I'll investigate."

In the process of my Internet searches for information about restaurants, chocolates and ice cream I came across a review of a restaurant in the next village down the road, Chinorlet. We went to the Chinorlet Fiesta in August and we saw in the New Year in the village yet we didn't know this restaurant existed.

Do you reckon it's a product of being in a foreign land, is it hype or do we just go around with our ears and eyes closed?

A theory

Someone described the Spanish Education system as being different to the English one in that the Spanish is inflexible in curriculum but flexible in terms of behaviour. In England it's the opposite.

Maggie likes to eat out. I'm more interested in getting fed. Dining against eating. We haven't eaten out for a while so today we were in a nice restaurant; nice that is till the bill came when we found we'd paid 30€ for seven prawns!

We were watching the food being delivered to the communion party upstairs and the birthday party downstairs - pelotas, gazpacho manchego, ham and cheese, plates of sliced sausage, rabbit paella, prawns, deep fried cheese - all the local staples and all very nice. It reminded me of a conversation I've had with several of my Spanish students learning English about food in the UK. It's an almost unshakeable Spanish belief that Brit food is poor food. I tell them about the popularity of eating and cooking food in the UK and about the availablity of food from all over the World. My theory though, a very generalised theory with lots of exceptions formed whilst watching all that food go by, is that in the UK there is an incredible choice of food but lots of it is pretty ordinary whilst in Spain choice is severely limited and very regional but quality is often high. Or, thinking on the hundreds of chop and chips meals I've eaten here, maybe not.

Double egg, beans and chips please

We're not in Culebrón at the moment. We're in Asturias and it is raining quite a lot. Asturias is on the North coast of Spain just a bit across and down from Cornwall. We came to have a look at the village of Lastres because a TV programme we like, Doctor Mateo, based on the British TV series Doc Martin is filmed there. Lastres was a bit grotty and the few restaurants that there were were remarkably pricy. Instead we had lunch in Colunga just a few kilometres along the coast.

We had Fabada Asturiana which is a bean stew with black pudding, spicy blood sausage and a fatty bacon like substance. We should have drunk cider along with it but I stuck to water as I was driving.

Everywhere in Spain boasts some sort of traditional food and whenever tourists turn up in the region they ask for the local speciality. So, in Valencia you'd order a paella, in Extremadura it would be migas (breadcrumbs and fatty pork), in Galicia you have no choice but to eat either octopus or pimientos de Padrón (small salted fried peppers) and so it goes on all around Spain. Now this is fine if you pop out for lunch to Segovia one day and want suckling pig but if you are wandering around a province it can become wearing to be offered the same food in every restaurant you go into day in day out.

Luckily we've only got another day to go here so we can eat the other speciality - chorizo in cider and then we're off to Soria, or at least we think we're off to Soria where, as I remember, it's another sort of bread and sausage based dish served with fried eggs.

Rice and seafood

Clicking castanets, bulls, frilly frocks - the clichés associated with Spain. Most seem to be linked to the region in the South of Spain called Andalucia but one of the things typically Spanish, paella, is associated with this area and more particularly with the area around Valencia.

Paella is a rice dish. There are tens if not hundreds of varieties from the chickpea and sausage ones baked in the oven to the rabbit and snail one we eat around here. However, the variety that both Vesta and I think of as being most usual has yellow rice, seafood and maybe some chicken along with a few bits of veg to add colour - the paella mixta.

On Sunday as we left Valencia we stopped off at the Albufera, a big wetland area. The water is used to flood paddy fields to grow short grained rice. Just across the way is the Mediterranean teeming with life.

Ah, ah - rice and seafood and veg all in the same place.

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.