Category: Cooking

Burriana / Castellón / Cooking / Food / Holidays

A fancy calçotada and some Holy Week pomp

A few days before taking off for a spring break trip to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Tenerife, we spent the second weekend of April around home because we were invited to a calçotada in Vila-Real! This traditional spring festival of Catalan origin celebrates the calçot, a very specific kind of spring onion that is traditionally fire-roasted, wrapped in newspaper, then peeled and eaten by hand while wearing gloves. It is also dipped in romesco sauce (delicious, and probably the reason why we needed the bibs) before it makes its way to mouths and bellies. Dreamer just couldn’t get it right, though.

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Castellón / Cooking / Food / Tourism

Onda: Castle, ceramics, and paella

We managed to fit another castle into our schedule last month during an overcast weekend spent recovering near home after our epic trip to Copenhagen. We also visited a ceramics museum and Doer learned some new techniques for making paella – but first, the castle! Onda’s castle once was known as the Castle of 300 Towers, and according to Guía Total de la Comunidad Valenciana (our resident guidebook of the Valencian Community), these towers allowed Muslims in Onda to resist King James I the Conqueror for years, even after the nearby city of Burriana, where we live, was taken in 1233. The Moors built

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Cooking / Food / Galicia / Tourism

Galicia! Day 4

This post begins with a rewind to Day 3 and something I left out: a phone call after we returned home that evening from Mr. M’s sister, Conchita, asking if we’d like her to cook us a meal the next day. Conchita, you will remember, had previously helped cook some of the food at the furancho, to great success of course. Conchita is one of those Spanish mother types I had only dreamed of meeting and learning to cook from. She and her husband, Cito, live on a 40-acre farm about an hour from Sanxenxo. In her words, people come from miles

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