Spanish holidays

And when we got home…

Our ‘garden’ welcomed us with our own vegetables…

Monday 17th August to Friday 21 August

Somehow in the second week of our holidays, I was so much in a holiday mood, that I could no longer write regurarly. And the slow internet didn’t help much either…

So the highlights of the second week were:

Tapas!

We went to a wonderful restaurant by the see where we asked the waiter for recomendations on tapas and we got these beautiful, wonderful snacks, that we immediately fall in love with the whole idea of tapas. We liked it so much that we ordered some for dessert too!

And given that I liked bite-size food even before, since then before every dinner I was doing my own version of tapas (but I must admit – very much inspired by what we ate there). Some pictures below, a full post on my favorite inspirations by tapas to follow

Egg burgers (by Karl)

A very creative brunch menu…

Figs

The figs in Spain were really amazing. I made fig tapas, added them to salads, made spicy fig chutney and made a fig tarte… I even managed to buy green figs, which were supposed to be sweeter than the black ones, not really, but were still very good anyway…

Pappadron peppers

Looking through a very nice vegetable store I found a bag of small green peppers, and as they looked interesting and I didn’t know what they are, I obviously bought them :-). Then I searched for what they are and found out that they are called Pappadron and while most of them are not spicy, one in a dozen should be really spicy. So eating them is like a Russian roulette!

Fried in olive oil and salted they tasted really well. They also worked very nice as decoration for tapas. Unfortunately none of them turned out to be spicy! Too bad we didn’t have time to get another bag!

Sunday 16th August

The birthday party! Ice cream cake for breakfast!

And this wonderfully set (by the kids) dinner table!

And, as I keep exploring the sea food counter at every store, tuna burgers with fig chutney:

Saturday 15th August

was a really cool day, barely 27°C! So that was time for a very picturesque walk along the cliffs.

Friday 14th August

Couteaux de mer – razor clams. I saw them in the store and I just could not resist trying them out!

In the white wine and garlic sauce, they turned out really well!

Thursday 13th August

The hottest day so far. 37°C! Most of the day spent in the water again.

For breakfast we tried the brown sugar lemon tart that I made the previous day. As there is a lemon tree in the garden, we really had to do something with these lemons!

Recipe as good as I remembered it (not so good), and the limited utensils in the kitchen. That’s what the top chef competition should have as one of the challenges. Try whisking the egg with a fork and/or a wooden spoon!

But the kids loved it and my son asked to have one like this for his birthday. Or preferably two!

The day was spent around the shade of the house and in the pool.

Karl made and served this wonderful mexican salsa. With all the cutting he needed to do, he claims that gaspacho is salsa for lazy people, electric blender instead of all the cutting. I very much see his point.