Food, glorious food!

Once again we were blessed with a beautiful sunny day for our Three Kings fiesta, here in our village. As with most Spanish traditions, each year it is very much the same as the previous one, but somehow, that predictability is part of it's charm. As I have recounted the events of the day many times before, (new followers of my ramblings can see this in my January posts of earlier years), I thought this year I would take a different approach and show a series of photos of the food that was available. Sharing a meal together with family and friends is an important part of any Spanish festival, and this one was no different. When I wandered over to the plazza this morning there were noticeably fewer stalls in the medieval market, and rather fewer people around, though there was a very good crowd by lunchtime, but I guess that is an inevitable sign of the times. However, all the usual food stalls were in place so come with me to visit them in turn. (Incidently, because of the number of photos I am using I shall post them fairly small, but you can click on each one to get a larger view if you wish).

So here we will start with two stalls that will not be open properly until later this afternoon. The first is selling donner kebabs and the other Arabian herbal teas and very sweet cakes.

Moving on we come to the man selling potato crisps freshly cooked in olive oil. He was doing a good trade.

The Padilla churros stand was there, but I didn't manage to catch her serving anyone (just chatting!). Churros freshly cooked is one of my favourites. It is a stiff batter which is piped into a vat of hot oil in a big coil, and once cooked it is cut into about 15cm lengths and liberally frosted with sugar, and sold in a paper cone. It tastes a bit like doughnuts, but if left to get cold it can be very greasy. It is still served in many places for breakfast with a cup of very thick drinking chocolate to dip it in.

There are usually two big barbeques at this fiesta. The first one was well loaded with fat pink sausages. orange choritzo sausage, pork ribs, lomo (pork loin) and joints of beef (more unusual as there are very few cows in Southern Spain). He was doing a roaring trade until he ran out of beer! Well with all that meat and dry bread, you have to wash it down don't you?!

The second barbeque was massive with several racks of ribs and strings of choritzo artistically arranged on the top bars. Over the fire there was an assortment of sausages, choritzo, pancetta (fat belly pork), racks of ribs, black pudding and chicken portions. Just to the right of the fire there is a man cutting thick slices off huge rustic loaves on which he spread salsa and slices of serrano ham. There is quite an art to cutting this in wafer thin slices. A good knife helps too. This man was very good at it. We decided to buy our lunch here today. We had met up with my firend Sylvia, so between the three of us we ordered a 'plato completo' which was a plate piled up with pieces of sausage, black pudding, choritzo, lomo and ribs. We had a fork each and tucked in. Being in a naughty holiday mood, we also had a big plate of patatas between us, which were excellent. Chips do not ususually feature on this sort of menu, so fried potatoes were a nice treat, and they are a lot easier to eat than the rustic bread which can be very hard.

Then we come to the 'comida popular' which at this fiesta is usually migas. Here is how it is made.
First light up the fire underneath, and then boil up a vat of oil and water.

Tip in a few sacks of flour and stir and chop until it is all in small lumps. Add a few bags of salt, some meat and garlic and keep stirring until the meat is cooked.

On closer inspection you may just be able to see that the pinkish bits are hundreds of garlic cloves - they don't bother to peel them here. Then there are brownish baby sausages and the orange bits are choritzo. There are probably some cubes of chicken as well. This is served on paper plates around 3.00 and it is free to anyone who is prepared to stand in the queue. I happily queue when it is paella or tortilla, but I am not that fond of migas, which is quite bland and dry, and we were all well stuffed from our barbeque anyway. The custom I can't get my head around is that when you get your portion of migas, you are also given a handful of broad bean pods, and these are broken open and the raw beans are eaten with the migas. I have often eaten raw peas straight from the pod, but I somehow can't quite imagine doing the same with broad beans.

And finally, while on the subject of food, this barrow is loaded up with local produce including olive oil and wine, all donated by local farmers and companies, and the entire lot is offered as a single raffle prize, with all money taken being donated to our village children's charity Asadis. If you buy a ticket, you are given a small cup of aniseed liquor, and a few local almonds and dried figs.

For my 365 photo today I have chosen this one. Grown men dressing up as soldiers in the sweltering sun, to re-enact the scene at King Herod's palace when the three kings stopped there to ask where the new royal baby could be found. To me it sums up the whole day, one of fun, celebration and community participation. The Kings themselves were similarly over-dressed for the weather, but we don't really expect it to be 30º in the sun, in the first week of January! (If you don't know what I mean by 365, pop over to my other blog by clicking here, to read all about it).

There were a few trade stalls in the market, as well as food ones, and there are usually some nice pieces of handicraft to see. One stall had bobbin lace book marks and bracelets and he was selling them at 20€ each! I told him it was too much, but when he asked me how long it would take me to make one and I said I could do one in a day, he said 20€ was not too much for a day's work. He had a point I suppose, but he wasn't selling them all the same. (Perhaps I have missed my calling!) The man I enjoy watching makes jewelry from old cutlery and coins. He has some fairly basic equipment with which he melts, bends and twists spoons and forks into all sorts of bangles etc. He also uses the ends of the handles for pendants, and Chris bought this one for me. I chose it because I liked the colour of the stone on it.

So that is it for another year. The fiesta will continue with dancing in the marquee tonight, but we won't go over again. It is time for me to take down all the decorations and pack them away again, and then we will get back to some sort of normality, whatever that is. If this year rushes by as fast as the last one, it won't be long before I am unpacking them all again!

A Spanglish New Year's Day

A Very Happy New Year to all my followers! I hope you all enjoyed New Year's Eve, however you chose to celebrate it. We always used to spend ours at home because of the younger boys, and the scarcity of baby-sitters on that night, but in later years we had some good times at our son Mike's bar, with lovely live music provided by our youngest son Ben. Since coming to Spain we have tended to go down the road to our local just for the company, but this year we knew we were going out for lunch the next day, so we decided to stay home the night before. We did manage to have the double celebration of the Spanish New Year(11.00 British time) - when traditionally they eat one grape for each knoll of the church bell and toast the new year with cava, and then the English one an hour later. The fireworks around London Eye were pretty spectacular, and I would love to have seen them in real life, but at a time when so many folk are struggling financially, you do have to wonder just how much money went up in smoke during that quarter of an hour?!!

Anyway, on to New Year's Day. Our good friends from the top of the village, John and Eileen, had invited us to lunch at around 1.30, so I went to church as usual but didn't linger too long over coffee afterwards. Chris was waiting for me when I got home and we walked up to our friends' house. They are English, but have lived here for over ten years and have many good Spanish friends in the village so we knew we were in for a 'Spanglish' affair. It turned out that we were the only English guests along with five Spanish couples, so with very little knowledge of the language, Chris was at a bit of disadvantage which he easily overcame by throwing himself into the event and obviously enjoying himself. I managed to converse a bit but I still struggle to understand when they speak to me, but apparently we were a big hit as they kept telling Eileen how wonderful we were! The guests were the village baker Sebastian and his wife Ana, the coffee-shop/bar owners Maria and Pepe, the lady who organises the Spanish side of the village charity Cati and her husband Pepe, Eileen's 'adopted Spanish daughter', as she refers to herself, Nuria and her partner Estoban, and the only ones we had not met with before, Hilaria and her husband Antonio. Until he retired, he used to go to the harbour at Garrucha every day and bid for the newly landed fish in the auction, and then drive to Murcia to sell it to the hotels. He prefers to be called Cabillo which is a family nickname handed down through the generations. They all just love it when the English folk can drop their natural 'reserve' and try to speak to them in their language, and join in with all they are doing. Needless to say there was plenty of drink flowing but I managed to dilute mine considerably with Casera - fizzy water with just a touch of sweetness and lemon which is so much nicer than lemonade or soda water as a mixer. The table was well layed with entremesas (plates of cold meat, cheeses, olives, crackers, bread and so on) and then we had the choice of two hot dishes. The Spanish ladies love this sort of meal and they always sit around the table eating nibbles and all talking at once, and they insisted I join them and chat too.

Our friend's house is a lovely old Spanish village house with lots of small rooms leading out of one another, and under the stairs they have a built-in bar which is John's home when they are entertaining. He used to run a bar, so while Eileen is busy with the food, John sits in his little kingdom effortlessly pouring all his friends their usual tipple, while also keeping a steady flow of music from the CD player and photographing the proceedings! When we had all eaten our fill, the music changed to a Spanish CD, with all the favourite songs on it and everyone had a good sing-song. Sebastian had a superb voice and he held us all together, and luckily Eileen had a file with a lot of the words in so I was able to join in with several of them. Some people started dancing, something else that the Spanish all love to do, (so does Chris!). Here I am after being guided (or pushed) through a pasadoble by Cabillo, who barely came up to my shoulders but who had a very big heart! He kept banging his heart and saying "Now you are my family; I am your brother". His party trick was to balance a glass on his head, so Chris had to have a go and then tried one on his knees etc. So Pepe then started the idea of using a plate (Chris used the dish of butter and I don't suppose I need to tell you where that ended up!) Then it was the ladies turn. Having just recovered from this hilarious stunt, some of the women went to the kitchen and returned with anything that made a noise, such as a saucepan and its lid, glasses and so on. An empty bottle and a fork were thrust in my hand. There were even a couple of people with castanets and a guitar that no-one could play, and we proceeded to march up and down the street making as much din as we could and singing a song that was something to do with welcoming the New Year. We managed to disrupt folks evenings in a couple of bars down the main street, but it was obviously a local custom and everyone greeted us with smiles and hugs. We managed to keep going until around 9.00 and then we went home, and having just settled the animals we went to bed and slept soundly! We have made some lovely Spanish friends and the New Year has well and truly arrived.

We took quite a few photos, but lots of them were not very clear, but I will put the better ones in a folder on my gallery. Feel free to share the fun by clicking here. There is also a 12 second video of my dance with Cabillo below this post. Just click the white arrow to view it. It is dark but it gives you an idea of just how much noise 14 people can make in a small room even as they are enjoying themselves!