Life between the mountains and the sea
The first time our friend Graeme came to visit us here we met him at the airport and he followed us home in his hire car. We chuckled to ourselves as we wound our way ever higher, up from the coast and into the hills, wondering what his first impressions would be of this wildly […]
Yesterday was a blissful May day. The sun shone, school and work were closed and we spent a long day in the outdoors, putting behind us an April that I shall be glad to see the back of. (You know the kind; stressful.) We headed over the mountains to León, to the municipio of Senas […]
It’s the beginning of September and my trial as a Spanish restaurant cook is drawing to a close. Oh, did I not mention? Well, it wasn’t intentional. Let me explain. As the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. So, when my son started at a local school here last September […]
This photo was taken a fortnight ago outside La Cuadrona bar in the village of La Hermida, Cantabria. It represents a moment of breakfast bliss. Firstly, note the two large cafés con leche. The coffee served in Spanish bars is almost always excellent (these certainly were) and is uniformly cheap (1.10 euro up to1.40 for […]
Last weekend saw the celebration of ‘la matanza’ in our village. Celebration may sound like an odd term for the butchering of a pig, even to meat-eaters’ ears, but if so that says rather a lot about our privileged, pre-packaged lives and the distance we generally keep between us and the reality of the provenance […]
The 25th January was Richie’s birthday and after a nutritious breakfast of flumps (Jack’s marshmallowy and only ever so-slightly self-interested birthday present to his father) the day progressed into a galloping gourmand gourmet odyssey. It was a gloriously sunny day as we headed to Gijon, which with its beaches, restaurants and the best play park […]
A postscript to my Spanish croquetas recipe. It seems that whenever I feel at my most supremely Spanish I awake the next day (or even sometimes the next moment) to find I’ve gone all cliched ex-pat. So, the day after croquetas I find myself cooking sausage, eggs, baked beans and chips. Some kind of deep-seated […]
Today I feel like a real Spanish mamá. I just cooked some croquetas from chicken left-overs. It doesn’t get much more Spanish than that. Well, except maybe if I cooked it whilst wearing a supremely practical blue housecoat. And in a spotlessly clean house….Well, anyway…..today I cooked croquetas. And they were great. Croquetas are a […]
We first heard tell of Fuente La Lloba over a year ago, but we dismissed the tales as a ‘rural myth’. A first class Japanese restaurant hidden in the hills of Asturias, where the hearty fabada reigns supreme? Unlikely… So it was with some trepidation that I asked the barman in the tiny local bar […]
