Churros

As Promised....Churros on Sunday!

There were a few things that Adam used to entice me to Tarifa, one was the fact that everyone has churros and chocolate after church on Sundays.  Being as I'm not overly a sweet fan, this one intriuged me more for the ritual than for the thing itself.

However, when Sunday came I was surprised to find out that I actually really liked the churro more than I thought I would, perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention to the fact it was deep fried, something which always features on my guilty pleasures list. 

Wherever we buy food here in Spain we are purchasing a pico pico amount compared to the locals, ie when we asked for a portion for one we still got more churro wrapped in the paper package than the 2 of us could eat...but still.  

So after asking what the difference between the 2 types of churro was (basically it's like a long, deep fried donut), we found one batter was boiled first and the other wasn't, we got a bit of each.

The next best thing I liked was the fact that you can bring your churros to another café to have your hot chocolate (we actually had coffee) and not only do they allow that, but they will bring  you a plate for them, AND give you one of their packages of sugar to put on top.  

The ones with ridges are boiled first, they seemed slightly healthier.

So as we waited for the coffees I started to tuck in, and again, sitting in the café, watching families strolling with children in their Sunday best we took in the European ambience and relaxed.

Oh ya...also to discover another Spanish food ritual (for there are many)...Cake Sunday Afternoon!! 

More on that later.

First Meal in Spain

We have been in Spain for 5 weeks now and I’m finally able to catch up on the blog.  We’ve been busy finding a space to start teaching and working on our new website.  Both of which are coming along nicely.

But looking back we always knew that arriving here after our 8 hour flight to the UK, 3 hour wait in Gatwick, 4 hour flight to Malaga and train ride into the hotel (whew) that our arrival in the middle of siesta would make finding our meal tricky to say the least.  And that’s not even mentioning the 10 hour time difference…what meal should we be eating at 16.00 Spain / 2.00 a.m. Vancouver time?? 

We had the vegetarian meal on the flight to UK, and some of Mercedes’ cookies saved us from the scary packaged breakfast muffin, along with some Bircher museli in Gatwick, but now we were hungry.  And nothing was open.  And we didn’t know where we should be going anyway.  Our legs were barely moving and we knew that we would likely end up eating somewhere after a long walk, and after the meal find ‘the’ perfect place 5 minutes around the corner, but we had to stop. 

We saw some people eating on tables outside in a place that was still serving food…the fact that legs of ham hanging from the ceiling were the decoration was actually something that we expected.  The place was clean, busy and most importantly at this stage open.  

Hmmm...which one shall i have?

It also served what we though we might end up eating, which is the famous vegetarians put together meal in Spain, omelette, potatoes, bread, cheese (Manchego of course) and a mixed salad.  Actually, we had to send back the insalata mixta and asked to have one without tuna.  All of the above drenched in olive oil, with more on the table to add.

Happy to be here!

Aside from the fact that we hadn’t eaten eggs for a couple of years the food was perfect.  For some reason the waiter even gave me some sachets of ketchup, which is pretty much unacceptable in Spain, and I wouldn’t have asked for, but I guess somehow my North Americaness was showing. 

We took the components and made sandwiches and had ther rest as they were.  It was truly satisfying in all ways, the quality of the ingredients was excellent (ignoring the tinned sweetcorn that is implied in the mixed salad).

Afterwards, enjoying our caffe con leche with UHT milk, in a size that allows the flavour of coffee to shine, in the ambience of the narrow, cobbled, pedestrian streets we were happy to be back in Europe after the long journey.  

And there wasn't a more perfect place around the corner!