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A few images from a long sunny Sunday walk. Still wearing sandals!
How was your Sunday?
mid-october sunday walk
14 Sunday Oct 2012
Posted in culture, food & drink, sevilla, spain
Category Archives: food & drink
market & tapas tour update
10 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in food & drink, sevilla, work
Some pics from this morning’s Market & Tapas Tour. Have to say that I am really enjoying these and, as I am back home by 3 pm, I can also manage an evening Sevilla Tapas Tour if need be (doing lunchtime and evening tapas tours on the same day is a challenge as there are only a couple hours between them). These morning tours also have a different pace and there’s more walking, which is nice. Am now working on my next project, which I hope to start up in the new year. Stay tuned…
el aljarafe
20 Monday Aug 2012
Posted in 20th anniversary, food & drink, sevilla, spain, summer, tapas, trips
El Aljarafe is Arabic for “knoll”, and is the name for the cluster of villages dotting the hills just outside Sevilla. I rarely venture out there other than to go to IKEA (in Castilleja de la Cuesta), mostly because it’s a pain to get to by bus. It would actually be fun to do a day trip to some of the little villages out there some time if I can convince someone with a car to do this with me. But I digress…
I’ve only been to Salteras once, about 12 years ago, when I was invited to a special lunch at one of the “parrilla” restaurants there. About thirty years ago the first one – La Bodega – opened in Salteras and was such a great success that soon other places started copying its “formula” of offering a simple menu based on BBQ grilled meats served with “papas arrugás” and “mojo picón”. These are small potatoes boiled in a small amount of very salty water leaving the skins wrinkled and sparkling with salt, which are then dipped in a spicy Canarian sauce. Soon Salteras was full of these establishments and became THE place to go for fabulous meat & potato meals. Since then the menus have become more extensive while the number of restaurants has diminished. Now there are about five left and yesterday I decided to go out there and try one out.
After a bit of online research I chose La Resolana because I liked the look of their website and I especially liked that they had a “tapas corner”, which meant that Peter and I could try more dishes. So we trekked down to the bus station just in time to catch the 1pm to Salteras and when the bus driver pulled out of the station and put on some rock-a-billy music it started to feel like a proper Road Trip. We got held up for awhile in a village just outside of Camas when the main road became blocked by a funeral procession. I’d never seen this before and got one of those odd “I’m living in Spain” moments as I watched a crowd of at least fifty people walking slowly behind a hearse, with half a dozen pallbearers in the lead. It was a sad and beautiful sight.
If you go to Salteras from Sevilla by car it would take you about ten minutes. The bus takes about 25 minutes (or 35 with funeral) and we stopped in places I didn’t even know existed. Luckily we had been told which stop in Salteras to get off at, which ended up being just a few minutes walk to La Resolana. And well, we had a wonderful lunch. As it was a hot afternoon in August the place was pretty quiet, though I’m told it’s always packed out during the rest of the year. I can see why. The service was great, the food excellent, and at one point when a Twitter friend asked me exactly which part of the pig “pluma” comes from (yes, I tweeted the whole lunch) one of the chefs brought me out a book showing me the different pork cuts. After that we got some boozy sorbets on the house and I got to take photos of everyone for Sevilla Tapas. If you want to see all the great stuff we had to eat then have a look here:
La Resolana
It was only after I got home that I realised this had actually been another of my 20th anniversary day trip! And I’m now keen to explore El Aljarafe a bit more. If I can find someone to take me…
[also posted on the azahar sevilla blog]
so what do you do when it’s 51º…?
11 Saturday Aug 2012
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Well, if you are completely mad like me, and an Englishman like Peter, you go out in the midday sun!
Of course we didn’t know it was going to be 51º. The official weather forecast was much more conservative and said the high would be 42º, but you know, who lives at the airport? In the centre of Sevilla with the sun blazing down on narrow cobbled streets with very little air-flow it soon turned into a blast furnace. But I was determined to go and visit a little abacería I’ve been meaning to go to for years. Finally did go on a Saturday at the end of June only to see a sign posted outside saying they were closed for holidays – starting that day! I later found out that this was the first time in 15 years they’ve closed for holiday.
Anyhoo… when I saw an article in the local paper about the post-holiday re-opening party yesterday at La Antigua Abacería de San Lorenzo (on San Lorenzo day!) I knew I had to get over there. And I’m really glad I did. What a little curiosity shop of tasty delights! An abacería is a combination of provisions store, take-away delicatessen and tapas bar, and the best ones have been around forever and have a loyal and local clientelle. In fact, we were not only the only foreigners in there but also the only non-neighbours. Everyone was clearly on a first-name basis and the old guys hanging around the bar area made me feel like I was in a small village rather than in Spain’s fourth largest city.
After trying a couple of tapas I got to talking with the owner Ramón who was charming as heck and really keen to tell me all about the place and even about future plans, including cooking classes that will be starting up in September. I loved how he’d take an occasional trip through the bar with a tray of complementary snacks, and I also loved how they served the bottled beer in tiny ice buckets. And the tapas were very good! So all in all, a very worthwhile reason to go out in the very intense HEAT.
dinosaur toes
26 Thursday Jul 2012
Posted in computers, food & drink, sevilla, spain, tapas
They really do look like dinosaur toes, don’t they? They are actually goose barnacles, called percebes in Spanish, and I have been dying to try them ever since I first heard about them. Why? Well, why the hell not? Recently I heard that one of my favourite seafood tapas bars – La Moneda – has been serving percebes and I asked them if they could let me know the next time they got some in. Turned out that was today! Not the best timing as Peter and I had just stopped off for a couple of tapitas with my familia at Bodeguita Romero – celebrating my shiny new laptop purchase (more on that later!) – and after our second tapa I got a Twitter message from Isidro that the percebes had landed.
So we high-tailed it out of the Bodeguita and headed over to La Moneda, with new laptop slung over shoulder – luckily it was only about a five-minute walk away – and upon arrival a plate of steaming percebes were placed in front of us. My first reaction was “eep! now what?” but Isidro quickly instructed us on how to eat them. You grab them at each end and then give them a sharp twist and a yank, after which the “claw” of the toe pulls away with a delectible morsel of deliciousness dangling off the end of it. What Isidro failed to mention was how squirty they are! At the first twist water shot out everywhere (usually all over me!) and I never did manage to get as clean a severing between claw and toe as Isidro did. But man! These guys are very tasty – not to mention prohibitively expensive! – but Isidro gave me a deal since it was my first time.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?
casa azahar 