It must be spring, and heading straight into summer, because I’m craving salad. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t eat salad the rest of the year. In fact, we eat salad at home every day. What I mean is that I’m craving colorful, crunchy, large salads as the main dish. And that kind of craving usually comes to me in
spring and summer. It must be (more…)
Going away for spring break is something relatively new for us. In Spain, we had Holy Week holidays, which coincided, of course, with Holy Week and Easter. Even living in the United States, when the children were younger they didn’t notice if we went away on a trip during spring break or not. In fact, it was nice staying in Fort Wayne: the (more…)
If you read my previous post, with the recipe for Monas de Pascua, Easter Sweet Bread, you’ll remember I mentioned that the Easter sweet bread will last for a couple of days, pretty much like with any bread. And like it happens with bread that is not fresh, you’ll either have to toast it and eat it with jam and butter or your (more…)
You might be wondering why I would be posting a recipe for Mona de Pascua now. In my defense, I will say that we ate the monas (also called panquemados) on Easter Monday, as it is tradition in Spain. And also in my defense I will say that Easter started on Sunday, but it hasn’t ended yet. In fact, it will not end until Pentecost, which this year (more…)
This week will culminate in Easter Sunday, which in gastronomic terms means chocolate and special sweets, and an occasion for family celebration. Eggs of every color and material, real and not, and also made of chocolate, inundate our tables, our decor, our stores. So understandably, my first instinct was to make an Easter treat for this week’s post. But this week is also (more…)
This is a very special week in my home city of Valencia, Spain, where every March, Spring and Fallas seem to arrive together. From March 12 to March 19, the city stops its daily business to celebrate this festival. In a ceremony called la plantà, the setting, 700 colorful statues are mounted throughout the city, in every square and street crossing. Fallas is the name of the festival, but it’s also the name of these statues, real works of art, built each year for the occasion. There are 368 children’s fallas and 370 full-scale fallas. These can stand as tall as 90 feet, and they portray popular characters, like celebrities and politicians. The children’s fallas represent cartoon characters. With the unusual political situation that Spain is living at present, many fallas this year portray our most popular politicians, in very humorous situations. Thick hot chocolate for La Fallas is the drink of choice, particularly when accompanying it with buñuelos, sweet fritters (click here for the recipe for apple fritters).
Appetizers are a wonderful invention. So much so that, in Spain, we have created a new category of dish called tapa, or pincho, or montadito (the name changes depending on the region of Spain you’re in) based on small plates, equivalent to what in America we would call appetizers. Tapas can be so flavorful that we like to (more…)
At the end of February and beginning of March, one week holds two birthdays in our family of five. You will then understand that some Lenten promises take a break, and we pause to celebrate. Two cakes, two special meals, and a whole week of anticipation and celebration. This year, in fact, those two birthdays are (more…)
I’m multi-tasking as I write this, trying to get tickets for our trip to Spain as well as writing this post. I’m looking forward to our trip, and as they say, getting there is half the fun! This includes trying to make sense of the dates available for every member of our family, accomodating summer jobs, work, soccer camps and (more…)
This is not the post I was going to do for this week. In fact, this post was not even planned. What was planned, and what is almost finished, (as you will soon see), is a different recipe, of one of my favorite tapas. But Matthew came home this weekend, almost by surprise (we had known for just a few days), and we had to celebrate. Add to it (more…)
