Too much of a good thing

When I stumble upon something delicious, I will happily go on eating it.

And eating it. Until I light on something else.

Take mashed avocado on toast, for example – I munched through it for breakfast throughout August, sprinkled with dried chilli and salt, and good slugs of olive oil. I extolled its virtues and hangover-busting benefits to anyone within earshot. I squeezed my way around every single one in the supermarket, only to be frustrated upon returning home to find that my ‘perfectly ripe’ ones were actually grenades disguised as avocados, at which point I would hopefully shove them in a bowl with some reluctant bananas and wait.

It is good though, you should try it - if I haven’t forked it into your mouth already.

Last week we went to Spain for a holiday with friends, culminating in a beautiful, intimate wedding in a white Castillo on top of a hill. Every element of the celebration was laid back and like an old romantic film: the perfect reflection of our friends.

From the minute we got off the plane into the startling heat all I could think about eating were big red Spanish tomatoes, the kind that make a salad all on their own. During the week we had them every which way, accompanied by onslaughts of garlic and olive oil, and punctuated by the occasional slice of jamon or a grilled sardine (a lovely place on the beach called Neptuno did the ones in the picture over a firepit in an old boat – worth a pic I thought). One of the best ways was pan con tomate, the bread lightly toasted and then rubbed with garlic and tomatoes until they shredded away, leaving a faint tomato smear and a few pips.

The BSG’s mum has gamely put up with us now for the best part of a month, whilst the dust in our house flies around. The other night she made a sort of romesco salad, with tomatoes, red peppers, toasted peeled almonds, basil and garlic and it has been sitting out stewing in its oil, accumulating flavour ever since. Well, until just now that is, when I put it onto my toast for lunch, closed my eyes and was briefly transported to that Spanish hilltop. Bliss.

I think I’ll just pop down to the shops and get some more for tomorrow. And the next day…

Barcelona – Part 1

Homer has a reputation for lofty turns of phrase, and has provided me with the perfect term which aptly encompasses the reason for this prolonged silence, for which I can only apologise. When Lisa tells him that the Chinese words for crisis and opportunity are the same, he proffers Crisitunity.

Unfortunately, Miss Simpson was misinformed; after thirty seconds of delving on the internet – extensive research indeed – it turns out that this is an urban myth. A bit like the one where wiry, adorable, geeky Paul from the Wonder Years became Marilyn Manson and, like that one, I so want it to be true.

You see, my day-job and I have recently parted company due to the godforsaken state of the economy: elements of the critical right there. BUT I have a few things that I have wanted to do for a while and now it seems that the right time has been thrust upon me.
First + second = a crisitunity. *Thanks, Homie* (in a gravelly-Marge-voice*).

I’ll admit that, despite the dominant ‘silver-lining’ genre of discussion, that week - which we’ll call Week R - was fairly shitty (sorry Gran) but, riding on a white charger to my rescue came a weekend in Barcelona with the BSG, booked months beforehand but so perfectly timed. I left my worries behind when Easyjet shut the doors at Gatwick. And then told us that we’d have to wait an hour for a take-off slot. Behind Ryanair. (The BSG did his meditative deep-breathing exercises.)

We touched down in the drizzle. But no matter - two days of eating, drinking and eating and drinking ensued, with a few sights in between. Routes were generally conceived in a join the dots pattern, the dots being the zinc-topped bars where we sought refreshment. Thanks to a finely tuned cultural clock (a very good condensed Rough Guide) we would turn up at each restaurant ten minutes before the rush, but still at a time the late-living Spanish found less funny than the 7pm slots filled by the Americans.

After throwing our cases at the bed in our hotel room we turned on our heels and made a BSG-line for the Boqueria. It didn’t disappoint these two Barca beginners and we quickly found a table in one of the many establishment around its fringe. At 5 o’clock it was a late lunch, even for the locals, but we happily washed down grilled octopus and prawns a la plancha with frosted bottles of cool cerveza, ignoring the rain.


   

















Artfully losing ourselves in the Gothic quarter we took in some gargoyles, the other Cathedral and followed our instincts towards the harbour. But by golly sightseeing is thirsty work; now it was time for another drink. Again the guidebook came up trumps and led us to a Xampanyeria (Cava bar) in an old garage in Barceloneta which served, unsurprisingly, cava, by the coupe. They had the BSG at cava, and they had me at coupe.

Can Paixano is a crowded, rowdy, standing-room only joint where you have to holler over the counter for your drinks at the perennially patient and smiling staff. The atmosphere is brilliant and the fizz and delicious hot entrepans and tapas are robust and apt foil to the sheer quantities of booze being quaffed: you have to order food with your drinks. The floor, strewn with discarded sandwich wrappers, testifies to this fact. There being no time for indecision you just choose anything from the huge wooden menu boards and hope for the best. We did and weren’t disappointed with plates of sizzling chorizo and morcilla. It’s as cheap as it is filthy at under a Euro for a glass of the house stuff (not surprisingly it is full of international students.) We’d had such fun that in our two-day stay, we made the trip twice.
















Then it was onwards, through the thunderstorms, to Cal Pep….

No one puts Baby in a corner*

A little bird told me recently that, though indeniably delectable and certainly pleasurable, there is no nutritional benefit to sweet corn. Whilst I am not absolutely religious when it comes to healthy eating (in fact I am very much a believer in the ‘little bit of what you fancy does you good’ mantra) this made me feel a little bit sad about it. Surely something so redolent of sunlight and basic wholesomeness had something going for it? It is a vegetable, weren’t they all supposed to be good for us?

So, I decided to do some research on behalf of this long-loved hunk; I felt I owed it. My favourite food as a child, it was always reliable, slathered in butter, great fun, even when in haste you burned your mouth to get to it. When we were small, Mum and Dad would offer the luxury ‘on or off the cob’ service, dependant on our moods, or how many milk teeth were loose at time of eating (between the four of us kids, a few came out this way).

The BSG and I have had a hankering for the husks recently, so I was absolutely delighted to find that they provide good amounts of vitamins A, B3 and C, fibre and folic acid, though as the name suggests there’s a fair amount of sweet starch too. We will keep crunching, guilt free. Purists may say that melted butter is the only way to have corn, but my favourite is how they served maïs on the street in Chiapas in Mexico – boiled, slathered with a slick of mayonnaise, powdered with red cayenne pepper and some lime juice squeezed over. Extraordinary. Their season is right now so go and get them!

Saturday dawned powdery blue and bright, and the BSG and I had the perfect day. London was in a good mood, full again after the holidays and at its bustly best. A trot around Borough Market slapped our senses awake, followed by a walk along the river and turn around Tate Modern, before lunch at our favourite tapas place, Barrafina in Soho. There was a short queue so, to pass the time, we opted for a Cruzcampo, a welcome quencher and in a frozen glass no less, and some emerald pimientos de padron, charred and sprinkled with generous flakes of salt. Of these, one in every ten or so is a hot one – has queuing ever been so much fun? Don’t be deterred, the wait never lasts long, or, in this case, long enough.

Our friend and fellow food adventurer G joined us for lunch. If skiing were eating, he is far more of an ‘off-piste’ person than I am. Perhaps it has something to do with having resided in Japan; he and the BSG encourage one another. This time, however, we stuck mostly to the piste (there was some octopus), with gloriously oozy ham and cheese croquetas, pan con tomate, chorizo and watercress, and an utter mouth party; morcilla, a blood sausage, with piquillo peppers topped with a quail’s egg. You couldn’t eat a lot of these, but this size they are hugely memorable. We lucked out with an outside table, but sitting inside at the bar you can see how beautifully these simple dishes come together in the kitchen, each chef knowing their own role…they even have one devoted entirely to the tortillas, done in tiny pans, little wonder then that they are so delicious.

The lazy late afternoon was passed in the lovely Albion pub in Islington, followed by the pizza competition to end them all. We bought our (yes a bit white and ugly) bread machine last year amidst much doubt that it’d get used – not only does it churn out delicious crusty loaves on a regular basis, but it makes the springiest pizza dough you could wish for. I am not knocking the many fine pizza establishments in this city, but to my mind nothing beats a homemade one….I don’t think we have been out for a pizza since.

Three days on from the sun and it feels like a different season altogether; there is a chill in the air and today the sky is slate grey, the rain coming down in rods. Last night the BSG knocked up the first autumnal supper, a risotto made with bacon and radicchio finished with parmesan and sage, the result was pink and beautiful like a leafy woodland floor. Possibly the best risotto I have ever had…

Watching him with a glass of wine in one hand as he stirred away, had we known then the sad news that the legendary Keith Floyd was gone I would have insisted that the BSG cook it out on the balcony in a high wind and a bow tie. My photography skills don’t yet run to risottos, so I will have to practice in order to do them justice. “A loving close-up on this please, Clive…”

(*A tenuous title perhaps with regards to corn, but it is a very sad day and Patrick Swayze’s death cannot go without a mention: it is hard to get him into a food blog. I’m off to watch Dirty Dancing…)