Breakfasting

This last weekend we popped over to Murcia to see las Cuadrillas in Barranda. The event is principally a folk music event with bands on every street corner but there's also a big street market.

We were looking for breakfast and there was a stall in the market selling migas. Now migas come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but the ones in Barranda seem to be fried flour and water crumbs with lots of sausages and vegetables mixed in. Because it's broad bean season the beans were offered as garnish; migas con habas. Migas are nice but the stall also advertised Spanish, run of the mill, sandwiches or bocadillos which use the bread we Brits call French sticks. The migas were still being prepared so we were able to queue jump by asking for a couple of the sandwiches. The man serving on asked what we wanted to drink. Tea, the drink of Gods, wasn't an option, in fact options were few and far between. The question was really, "Do you want a red wine?" So we breakfasted on red wine. Early morning wine drinking seemed a little strange to us but we know an elderly couple in Culebrón who would never consider any other breakfast drink. Just stop to think about the area and its history and it's quite easy to see how wine could become the all purpose cheap and plentiful drink. 

We learned something new about coffee, perhaps a more universal breakfast drink, while we were in Barranda. I thought I knew what café de puchero was. I thought it was just poor person's coffee made in a big pan to make the most of the grounds. Another stallholder put me right. It is a poor person's coffee but the Murcian variety is, so we were told, made with chicory and then flavoured with lots of sugar and aniseed. In my youth I knew people who had grown so accustomed to the wartime rationing workaround of chicory essence for coffee that they still preferred it to real coffee.

In an earlier blog I mentioned that I went to see a foundation which curates varieties of citrus fruit. They keep alive, literally, the sort of oranges, lemons, grapefruit and limes that don't sit well with the unblemished, uniform and visually attractive produce required on supermarket shelves. On the day of my visit I arrived a little before kick off time so I popped into a local bar to get a coffee (not a wine). I was surprised to see lots of people tucking into a late breakfast of a bocadillo with salad, monkey nuts and olives. There is a bit of a cultural gap between what we Britons think of as breakfast and the Spanish almuerzo which is the first substantial meal of the day. Breakfast for many Spaniards is a very light affair and almuerzo is more a sort of mid morning fuel stop to make up for that. The almuerzo I saw on that day is called bocadillo con gastos or esmorzaret in the local Valencian language.

Gastos, as an everyday word, means something like an outlay or an expense. The use of the word in the context of food comes from the idea that this sort of almuerzo was paid to the daily farm labourers as a part of their wage package, a fringe benefit. Workers took the sandwich from home but the landowner of wherever you were working threw in the drink, wine, and something that probably came from the land the labourers were working. Apparently the esmorzaret is currently having a bit of a resurgence with lots of trendy eateries which are doing modern versions with big, mixed sandwiches. 

When I was checking up on this I came across a piece which said that these sort of gastos should not be convinced with the traditional picaeta. Now anyone who lives in Pinoso will know that there's a bar here that bears that name, it's closed at the moment but the bar is emblazoned with the name. Picaeta is another Valenciano word and it's, apparently, what the rest of Spain calls aperitivos. The little things that you eat as a preprandial - traditionally a few peanuts or olives, pickled veg, lupins (those yellowy oblate spheroids that look like beans) and suchlike.

As I was checking bits and pieces of this entry I was surprised by the number of articles about breakfast traditions. The way they rub the tomato on the oiled and toasted bread in Cataluña, the grated tomato and toppings on toast in this area, the sobrasada and paté in Andalucia or the propensity for butter and jam in Madrid. I resisted though. Maybe I'll do the same the next time I'm offered wine for breakfast.

Form and substance

In the run up to Christmas we bought a couple of coca from the women running the Caritas stall outside the Parish Rooms in Pinoso. The coca were cooked as we watched and wrapped in silver paper. For two we paid one Euro. I like coca and I wolfed mine down. My companion was not so keen. Mind, she's the sort of woman who doesn't like digestive biscuits. She likes something a bit fancier. She calls coca fat pies.

Coca has nothing to do with soft drinks or narcotics. Coca is a sort of thickish pancake made with flour, water and olive oil, salted to taste. You make a dough, separate off a small ball shaped lump of it, squash it down with the heel of your hand to make a vague circular shape before frying it up on a plancha which is an oil coated flat hot surface. You couldn't get much simpler. There's another traditional food around here called gachamiga made with just flour, oil, water and garlic. In most of the village fiestas there will be competitions (traditionally for men) to cook gachamiga in a big wok like pan over an open fire. Indeed lots of the traditional regional dishes of Spain are based on what's to hand. Think fabada from Asturias, paella from Valencia, migas in Extremadura, cochinilla in Segovia, calcots in Catalunya or tortilla de patatas everywhere. It's a bit unlikely that Jijona would have become famous for Christmas turrón if they hadn't had access to plentiful supplies of local almonds, honey and eggs.

Peasant food, simple food, cooking with what you have to hand applies equally well in the UK and, probably, all over the world. Think Yorkshire pudding - flour, eggs and milk. Fry instead of bake and the Yorkshires become  pancakes. Shrove Tuesday, Pancake day, is the feast day before the God fearing population plunged into the denials of Lent on Ash Wednesday. The food of the feast being so simple says something of the society in which that tradition was forged. I don't suppose most young English people would have a clue about Pancake day now. Young Spaniards like pizzas and burgers too but they seem happy to eat both the traditional fare and the more recent introductions. I have no idea whether that will last. Everywhere we see example after example of invasive species driving out the local species.

I was reminded of the coca though when we went to the artisan Christmas Market in Murcia city. We bought some little biscuits. There were four or five in a pretty cellophane bag tied off with a ribbon - they cost four or five Euro. The biscuits were multicoloured, they had patterns iced onto them, there were various different fillings; they looked really scrumptious. They were nice enough but they definitely looked better than they tasted.

I understand that substance over form is an accounting term but it does seem that so often nowadays that form is much more important than substance. Double plus good to the women of Caritas and their coca then.

Botillo and friends

Last week we went on holiday. We stopped off at a couple of places but our destination was Finisterre, the End of the Earth, in Galicia.

When you travel in Spain, which usually means that you will eat in a restaurant, the choice of food is simple. If you were to travel to Valencia for instance you would probably order paella, if you were to come to Pinoso the paella would be the rabbit and snails variety. Go to Cartagena you might try caldero. In Asturias the first choice would probably be fabada and in Cataluña you might try calçots. Eating the regional food is something that Spaniards do when they visit and it's something we mimic.

We were in Ponferrada, which is still in León but closing in on Galicia. There was something on the set meals list called botillo which turned out to be a reddish ball like thing full of bones, lumps of fatty pork seasoned with paprika all shoved into a gut skin and served with cabbage, potatoes and chickpeas. It is an experience I won't be repeating but the experiment is always worth a shot. 

Now, although she would deny this, Maggie is a bit of a picky eater. She doesn't like fish, she's not at all keen on most veg. and with severe limitations on what sort and style of meat. This can cause problems. For instance Finisterre has a fish dock. This means that its restaurants tend to major in things harvested from the sea. What's more that the offer is quite traditional. There must have been ten or more restaurants in a line and all of them did fritura which is, usually, several varieties of deep fried, and often battered seafood and fish, served by weight. It's a big thing in several Spanish seaside towns. Go to Santa Pola and watch big family groups devour kilos of fried squid and cuttlefish. As well as fritura Finisterre also does barnacles, razor shells, crayfish, lobster, clams, scallops, sea bass, cockles, mussels and so on. Now I wouldn't like to suggest that these restaurants don't have steak or chicken and chips but asking for those things is a bit like ordering egg and chips in a Chinese restaurant. If you're in Finisterre then the expectation is that you will eat fish. We ended up in a pizza and burger place having a conversation about why, using the same basic products, these restaurants choose not to vary their offer and so compete. It's not a huge leap to, for example, clam chowder, seafood pasta, ceviche, curried scallops, crab cakes or scallops with a bean salad. But that's not what Spanish restaurants do. All the eateries offer the same food and the same basic recipes. The repetition of set meals featuring codillo, empanada, pimientos de padrón, lacón con pimentón, callos con garbanzos and churrasco throughout Galicia was almost complete.

Spain is full of great cooks and splendid restaurants but the majority of them, at least the ones within our financial reach, offer cheap and plentiful food as their staple. There are places, lots of them, that offer something more contemporary, more adventurous, but they are nowhere near as ubiquitous as the chop and chips places which is a shame.

Making do, eating and mending

I maintain an impression that our bit of rural Spain is still quite traditional; a society that repairs things. Just check the roads at the moment with the tractors out for harvest. Most of the small ones look nearly as old as the blokes driving them! Whenever I think of this make do and mend culture I think of my sunglasses. In Cambridge, in 1984, I bought my first pair of Ray Ban Aviators. At the time the company was still Bausch & Lomb and their sunglasses were a superior product. So twenty years later we're new to Culebrón and one of the pad arms came loose on the sunglasses. I went to the local optician to see if the specs could be saved. The optician soldered the piece back in place whilst I waited and charged me nothing. Last year I threw the same sunspecs on the floor and trampled on them. The nose pad came away again. I went back to the same optician. This time she sucked on her teeth, suggested I bought new and only grudgingly sent the Aviators away for repair. They took a couple of weeks to come back and cost 15€. Still not a bad result.

A couple of weeks ago we went on a walking tour around Yecla. The historical story telling was complemented by music. Lots of the sites to be visited were in a maze of narrow winding streets. The guide, and the flautists, were repeatedly drowned out by noisy mopeds with pizza delivery boxes strapped behind the saddle. I reckon everybody in Yecla was eating pizza that Saturday. In Pinoso there is a points scheme which eventually earns you a free pizza for returning the empty box. It's obviously to curb the problem of boxes littering the streets.

I'm coming apart at the seams and my feet hurt most of the time. People spoke well of sandals made by a local Ilicitano firm called Pikolinos. I forked out a good number of Euros and bought some. They were fine, comfy and classic, perfect for an old bloke. I'm not easy on shoes though and, disappointingly, after a couple of months the stitching gave way in a key area and the sandals became unwearable. Now Pinoso is a shoe making town so I wondered where I could get them fixed. I didn't know a cobbler and my questioning of quite a few locals about the whereabouts of a shoe repairer drew a blank. I'm still sure there will be somebody but I didn't find them. More than one person laughed at the idea of repairing shoes instead of just buying new. In the end I got them fixed in one of those franchise places alongside a hypermarket.

I quite like the adverts on the telly. I mean, how did they know that I needed something to clean the gunk from the rubber concertina seal on the washing machine? On those TV adverts, amongst the cars and mobile phone networks, there are lots of ads for food. I've mentioned legions of time that Spaniards are deeply interested in food. The adverts on the telly aren't for quality products, they're for the sort of stuff that comes in packets, the food, loaded with sugar and grease, of industrial conglomerates. For instance one of the Spanish MasterChef hosts is currently advertising pasta. He suggests that the perfect complement to the pasta is a Bolognese sauce. Even with the perfect lighting of TV advertising the sauce looks like the sort of stuff blasted by high pressure hoses off the broken bones of nameless animals and reconstituted into meat shaped meat in a factory full of infernal machinery. There are adverts for Just Eat where happy families grin at perfectly shaped hamburgers, colourful salads and pizza slices that seem to make people show off their teeth in Julia Roberts style smiles. Children swoon and whoop with joy before non chocolate eggs and young adults find their enjoyment of video games and sporting competitions greatly enhanced by crisps made from reconstituted potato or instant noodles flavoured with powder from sachets.

It's not the end of the world or anything, though actually it might be a small example of the route there, but we older people notice change more.

The washing machine cleaner doesn't work by the way.

Food habits

Patricia and Jason have just opened a new Bed and Breakfast business here in Culebrón - the Sunny Vista Casa Rural. They've done a really nice job on it too. It looks great. As a double celebration, for both the opening and for Patricia's birthday, the owners hosted a party. Never ones to miss out on a knees up Maggie and I turned up at around 3.30 pm, in the middle of Spanish lunchtime, when most locals would be eating at home. Later I was both surprised, and pleased for the Batram's, that so many of the villagers put in an appearance.

Forty some years ago I had a Spanish couple stay with me in Peterborough. They flew into Heathrow so I took them for a pub lunch in Windsor. "You'll have to try British beer," I said, to Jaime. He literally spat it out. "It's hot," he said, "like broth." For the rest of the holiday he would only drink lager. He never complained about the taste of that terrible, 1980s, fizzy, British lager but he did complain about its temperature over and over. Oh, and he was nearly as peeved at all the spicy food we ate like English mustard, horseradish, chilli sauce, curry and brown sauce. More recently my pal Carlos took a holiday in the UK. He and his family enjoyed themselves. Carlos was really impressed with the concept of pies and he thought gravy was a splendid invention. They couldn't understand why there was no bread on the table though - there nearly always is in Spain. He said they had to ask over and over again. We all have our ways.

Back at Sunny Vista I was talking to someone alongside the table loaded with food: quiche, potato salad, coleslaw, ribs, cocktail sausages, crisps, nuts, salads, burgers, enormous prawns, chilli con carne and lots more. Several of the Spanish neighbours were there too, plate in hand, eyeing up the food. I explained a few things - sausage rolls for instance - but I thought most of it was obvious enough. I realised afterwards, when someone asked me if there was any ham (Spanish type ham), that they thought it was quite an exotic spread. They were as lost as I am when friends in the know order up lots of Indian side dishes and I have no idea what they are.

Food is a common topic of conversation here. Spaniards like eating and generally have a poor opinion of British food. When I'm asked, by Spaniards, about food in the UK I used to rack my brains for the traditional foods, the sort of stuff that I ate when I was a lad, the sort of stuff that my dad liked. Shepherds pie, apple crumble, bangers and mash, steak and kidney pudding, trifle, cauliflower cheese, corned beef hash, Irish stew and the like. But that's not really what Britons eat nowadays is it?  We eat food from everywhere.

We Britons have been happy to plunder the world for food for ages. Chicken chasseur, Wiener schnitzel, sashimi, goulash, paella, souvlaki, chana dal and the rest are there on the supermarket shelves. Finding a Vietnamese, Lebanese, French, Greek, Mexican, West Indian or Italian restaurant is child's play in the UK. The student Spag Bol and the Thai green curry are just another recipe in the "Come around to dinner," cookbook.

Indian food, for instance, is hugely popular amongst Britons. My guess is that your average, middle class Indian, living in Mumbai, wouldn't recognise the food on offer in most UK High Street Indian restaurants. Indeed, whether it's a High street restaurant, a Waitrose ready meal or a Jamie Oliver recipe the food with an Indian name is really, very much, British food. It's the same with the rest. Even if chilli con carne were Mexican (it's from the USA isn't it?) then the British version would be British. That's probably why a full English is so disappointing in Torremolinos.

That's not true of Spanish food - Spanish food is till largely something that past generations would recognise. Not that I'm suggesting Spain is some isolated culinary backwater. Spain has lots and lots of Michelin stars and there are gastrobars in any town with any population. Domino's, McDonalds and KFC are everywhere. Most Spanish youngsters seem happy to eat pizza and pasta till the cows come home. Generally though, away from high class restaurants, the multinational fast food chains and cosmopolitan cities Spanish food has maintained its traditional flavour.

And that's why there was so much Spanish attention to the food on offer at Sunny Vista yesterday.

A little more sex please, we're Spanish.

This morning Spanish radio was quoting from an article in the Times. The original impetus for the Times story came from a scientific paper in the Lancet which predicted that Spaniards, by 2040, will be the longest lived nation in the World, overtaking the Japanese. It's not much of a predicted difference - 85.8 years for the Spanish and 85.7 for the Japanese. If RNE 1 can pinch an idea from the Times. which pinched it from the Lancet, I don't see why I shouldn't join in by appropriating information from the freebie newspaper 20 minutos. The prediction for the UK is 83.3 years by the way.

The 20 minutos title was "They drink, they smoke; why do Spaniards live so long?" In the piece it says that more Spaniards than Brits smoke, 23% versus 16%, the alcohol intake is more or less the same and both nations sleep, on average, the same number of hours.

The Times suggested a few key differences. Apparently Spaniards walk more, not in a strenuous way but in the idea of using their feet to get somewhere. To the shops, to school or just the leg stretching evening stroll to greet friends and make sure that nothing has happened to the neighbourhood without them being aware.

The journalist also noted that despite longer working hours in Spain the Spaniards still tend to get in a midday nap if they can. I've never found any working Spaniards who get the siesta, except maybe in the summer holidays, but if the Times says it's true maybe it is.

Then, of course, there's the famous Mediterranean diet with lots of fruit, veg, olive oil and red wine. Well, again, if that's what the journalists say I suppose it must be true but, to be honest, I don't see much of that diet in restaurants or in the answers I get from my language students. On the other hand the British newspaper reports that Spaniards don't eat the ultra-processed foods that we Britons do and that I go along with 100%. Anytime I go to an "English" supermarket here in Spain I'm overcome by the number of things you can buy in packets. Compare the goods at the checkout in any "normal" Spanish supermarket and you will see the raw materials of food making rather than the finished product.

The last of the lifestyle differences was that Spaniards have more sex than Britons - 2.1 times a week instead of 1.7 times.

And one last thing, not really a lifestyle difference but flagged as relevant. Some researchers in Vermont did a study of the ten most spoken languages in the world looking for lexical differences. Apparently it's Spanish that has the highest number of happy, positive words but, as the research was done in the USA, it's likely that their language sample was as Mexican, Guatemalan, Peruvian and so on rather than just Spaniards.

Wispy light and more

The first time I ever caught the sense of a conversation going on around me in Spanish was on a bus in Granada. I'd always thought that Spanish conversations were probably about Goethe or something equally profound but that one was, in fact, about whether peas should or should not be an ingredient of some stew. Food is a topic of conversation close to the hearts of many Spaniards.

One of the things that crops up in those food conversations is the Mediterranean diet. If you were to ask me what the Mediterranean diet I'd have to say that I'm not quite sure. I know that it includes more fish than meat, cereals, pulses, nuts, vegetables, fruit, wine and lots of olive oil but I'm a bit hazy on the details. We live pretty close to the Mediterranean. In fact yesterday we were in Santa Pola and if we'd chosen to we could have gone for a paddle, so I should know what the diet is but I don't. One of the confusing things about it is that lots of what seem to be traditional Spanish foods look remarkably unhealthy. Surely things like chorizo, the white bread sticks, the deep fried pescaitos, the peanuts dripping in oil, the cheese, the croquetas and all the rest can't really be part of a healthy diet?

Back in Santa Pola I asked if they had any sangre, blood, to go along with the beer. I'm not sure what sangre contains exactly apart from blood and onions but it looks like liver and it tastes yummy (though Maggie disagrees). It's not so available away from the coast which is why I was taking my opportunity. There wasn't any so I asked for Russian salad instead. Ensaladilla rusa is a staple in lots of Alicante and beyond - a sort of potato, egg, tuna, carrot and pea salad held together with mayonnaise. Tasty certainly but healthy?

Actually, I know exactly what I think of when the Mediterranean diet is mentioned and it has nothing to do with the food. The Mediterranean diet is a bronzed Anthony Quinn peeling and eating fruit directly from his pocket knife, it's him eating, and laughing with his friends as he drinks copious quantities of wine around a sun dappled outdoor table against the azure blue background of the sparkling sea.

I read an article in el País yesterday which seemed to reach a similar conclusion only they made no mention of Quinn nor Jean Reno in the Big Blue who would be my other point of reference.

El País told me that back in 1953 an epidemiologist called Leland G. Allbaugh published a paper about the, then, normal diet on Crete. Cretans ate a very basic diet yet they were healthier than Americans. A medical doctor, Dr. Ancel Keys, saw the research and spent years trying to work out why. He did research in seven countries and, to oversimplify, came up with the  conclusion that saturated fat in diets was a major conditioner of heart disease along with cholesterol and high blood pressure. Whilst he was involved in the early years of the survey Keys and his wife published a book called Eat Well and Stay Well. Later, in 1975, they published a second book called How to Eat Well and Stay Well: The Mediterranean Way. It was, apparently, that book which led to the term Mediterranean diet coming into everyday use. But the “Mediterranean Way” was more than particular foods and cuisines or eating patterns. It involved aspects of lifestyle and the economy, such as walking to and from work in physically active occupations like farming, crafts, fishing and herding, taking the major meal at midday, having an afternoon break from work. In short the food was only a part of the traditional Mediterranean  lifestyle.

In 2011, the European Food Safety Authority published a position document arguing that it could not establish whether the Mediterranean diet was healthy or not because it was unable to find a clear definition of what the diet was. The Authority also noted that the inclusion of quite a lot of wine in all of the versions made it technically unhealthy. The Mediterranean diet though does feature as an intangible cultural heritage on UNESCO's list - just like Flamenco or the Fallas celebrations. The definition is not about the food it's about agriculture and tradition, about sharing food and about cultural identity. The full definition is at the bottom of the page

The newspaper article writer argued that the Mediterranean diet was actually more of a process of four decades of hype than an actual dietary regime. Like I said, Anthony Quinn, the suntan, the cicadas singing, the shared bottle of wine. The laughter. Now that was all around us as we ate the ensaladilla rusa in Santa Pola yesterday.

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UNESCO definition: The Mediterranean diet involves a set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food. Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities throughout the Mediterranean basin. It is a moment of social exchange and communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group or community identity. The Mediterranean diet emphasizes values of hospitality, neighbourliness, intercultural dialogue and creativity, and a way of life guided by respect for diversity. It plays a vital role in cultural spaces, festivals and celebrations, bringing together people of all ages, conditions and social classes. It includes the craftsmanship and production of traditional receptacles for the transport, preservation and consumption of food, including ceramic plates and glasses. Women play an important role in transmitting knowledge of the Mediterranean diet: they safeguard its techniques, respect seasonal rhythms and festive events, and transmit the values of the element to new generations. Markets also play a key role as spaces for cultivating and transmitting the Mediterranean diet during the daily practice of exchange, agreement and mutual respect.

Gachasmigas on the ceiling

One of my theories about Spanish food is that lots of the famous stuff is peasant food, made with cheap, locally available ingredients. The reason that it didn't disappear, before that sort of food became fashionable again, is that the Spaniards got richer late. So, whilst in the UK, we started to have more time than money and developed a taste for frozen lasagne, fish fingers and microwaveable chips the Spaniards stuck with piling pulses into stocks and eating rice with rabbit or seafood.

One of these traditional dishes is called migas, literally crumbs. Over in Extremadura, which is where I first encountered it, it's old bits of bread fried in olive oil with garlic and the old scrag ends of leftover meat and sometimes vegetables. In fact there are varieties of migas all over the place with lots of different ingredients but, basically, it's a way to make something out of old, stale bread.

That said there is a local food here, in Pinoso, called gachamiga which is quite different - it's made with water, oil, salt and garlic - and comes out as a sort of thick pancake. I have asked Spaniards about this but I'm still not clear. Over in Murcia they have something called gachasmigas, the name difference seems to indicate that the main ingredient is flour rather bread, but those Murcian gachamigas still have meaty bits in them. Just to make matters worse there is another Pinoso variety called gachamiga rulera which seem to be another doughy and oniony variety whereas in Castilla la Mancha the ruleras are migas ruleras and they seem to include meat. So, now that I've cleared that up for you to the point of the story.

In all the village fiestas around here there is a gachamigas cooking competition. In fact tasting some that Enrique had cooked in the Culebrón edition - that's him in the photo and those are the gachasmigas in the pan - was the first time that I had eaten the thick pancake variety. I ate my second lot in a restaurant just a couple of weeks ago. So, with the fiestas coming soonish and with a bit of impetus from the restaurant I decided to have a go at cooking some. Who knows, maybe I'd be up for the competition?

A few years ago, at the Villazgo festival, I bought a cookbook from the Associación de Amas de Casa de Pinoso - literally the Pinoso Housewives Association. Page 38 for the gachasmigas recipe. Fry some garlic in half a glassful of olive oil, dump the golden brown garlic, add in some salt and a glassful of flour to the garlic flavoured oil, mix in three glassfuls of water, stir it a lot to make a paste and then cook till it's solid enough to flip over. Cook the other side too and eat.

It didn't quite work. I think maybe it needed longer to cook as it was all a bit doughy. The flipping certainly didn't quite go to plan. I ate some but then whizzed it. Maggie, who had wisely stayed away from this experiment, was given a portion as she worked at the computer. She joined me in the kitchen to throw away about half of her serving.

Maybe I'll just go and spectate at the competition this time to get the idea and leave my entry till 2017.

It's a franchise

Murcia City has changed a lot over the years. It feels citylike now - it hustles and bustles. The first time I went there I thought it was a dusty hole. If I tell you I arrived in a friend's Lada Niva you'll realise just how long ago that was.

We were there yesterday and we wanted something to eat. The place is alive with tapas bars and trendy looking eateries. I quite fancied a place called Tiquismiquis (which means something like fusspot) or maybe Moshi Moshi (I don't speak Japanese so I don't know what that means) but by the time I'd found a bank machine we'd passed those places by and we were footsore so we went to a Lizarran instead.

Lizarran is a franchise. They have little tapas, generally bread mounted snacks, stored inside cooled display cases. each tapa has a toothpick driven through it. You bung a few tapa on your plate and when you're settled a server asks you about drinks. When the place is realtively busy they usually come around with additional hot tapas. Other things are available for order too but basically the fare is tapas on sticks. When you're done they count up the number and style of toothpicks on your plate and charge you accordingly. It's hardly cordon bleu but it's usually pretty acceptable and it's easy.

We considered 100 Montaditos as well. Cien Montaditos is also a franchise. In there you choose a table and in the centre of the table is a pen and a list of the montaditos which are basically mini rolls or sandwiches. You mark how many of which you want on the list and hand it in at the bar. They fill the drinks order straight away and give you a shout when your montaditos are done. Cien Montaditos is also usually pretty acceptable and it's easy.

Searching, as ever, for a blog entry it struck me that both were franchises. I did a bit of Googling and I was amazed how many everyday Spanish businesses are, in fact, franchises. It's not just the opticians, dentists, fast food chains, parcel carriers and quick jobs on the car businesses. One of the big supermarkets, Día, is a franchise and there is apparently a bread shop with over sixty varieties of bread - never seen one of those but it sounds good. There's another one that sounds like an equivalent of Wetherspoons with dirt cheap beer; never seen that either or I would still be there. But my favourite on the currently booming franchise list has to be a language school. If I were to work there maybe I could have a uniform and a zero hours contract like those people who work in the burger bars.

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?

Tales of turrón

Turrón is made from almonds, honey, egg whites and sugar. It's an Alicante speciality which is now produced all over Spain. Turrón, has no specific English equivalent, though for shorthand I often describe it as nougat. It's not much like the pink and white chewy nougat I knew as a youngster though. Turrón is associated with the town of Jijona which is about 70 km up the road from us. I wrote about it ages ago in a blog.

So we were going back to the UK for Christmas. I'd made a pact with my family about not exchanging gifts. We did, nonetheless, take a few Spanish Christmas goodies - mantecados, polvorones and of course turrón. I'd forgotten that I hadn't made the same pact with Maggie's family who showered me with expensive gifts whilst I had neither socks nor bubble bath in trade - it was terribly embarrassing.

The make of turrón that Maggie bought was called Pico which is a good quality if everyday brand - she bought the hard stuff and the soft one. It's maybe a bit less than half the price of the best brands which can cost as much as 9€ for a 300g bar. It was traditional enough though for me to notice something that I've missed in ten years of wolfing it down. I realised they had different names. The crunchy stuff was called Turrón de Alicante and the sort that oozes almond oil was Turrón de Jijona. Nowadays there are tens of flavours of "turrón" most of which have nothing to do with the original concept. So we have chocolate flavour, milk flavour, crema catalana flavour, strawberry flavour etcetera - the list is nearly endless. It was seeing the two traditional types side by side in matcing packets that made me realise the simple difference.

For some now forgotten reason turrón came up in the conversation with our builders. They sang the praises of a turrón produced by a local factory which processes nuts. It's obvious enough when you think about it. They work with almonds, there is lots of local honey and chickens live everywhere so the raw materials were to hand.

Intrigued I bought some when I went to pick up a gas cylinder (excellent isn't it? - nuts and butane in the same shop) and I notice that it has the quality mark to say that it's made to the standards of some regulatory body. That was news to me too and it explains why some of the most famous brands are made in places like Santander and Gijón which are miles from Alicante.

The trouble is I can't eat it. I gained two and a half kilos in the four days in the UK. It's time for penance - the hair shirt and flagellation of portion control. Mind you Christmas is far from over in Spain and just a little each day couldn't do much harm could it?