Fruit and Veg

What a wonderful time of year for shopping on the local street markets. This morning I bought aubergines that are nothing short of beautiful, fresh runner beans and glorious on the vine tomatoes amongst other things. The stalls were full of locally grown fruit and veg, Ricote peaches at one euro a kilo, cherries at under two euros, plums, of which we have many on our own trees, were also a euro.

Its so inspiring for a cook to get such fresh ingredients, I like to slice the aubergines not to thickly length was brush with olive oil, I always use extra virgin, sprinkle with crushed garlic and grated cheese then bake in the oven. Great hot or cold.
The runner beans with be served with bacon stir fried together after the beans have been lightly steamed.
I bought fresh beetroot to and that will be served raw, grated with a dash a of lemon juice and black pepper.

In fact all this talk of food is making me hungry, I am off to the kitchen right now!

Tapas lunchtime

We seem to have really gotten into the local way of eating at lunch, and the local time as lunch is often sometime between 2 and 4 in the afternoon for us. Tapas is very often the order of the day. In Spain they say "eat when you drink, drink when you eat" tapas is an ideal way to do this. Lovely tasty bits of finger food, eat as much or as little as you like. Olives of course dressed with virgin olive oil and our own fresh herbs or chillies. Manchego cheese, you can put olive oil with this to, almonds and sunflower seeds. The wonderful spicy sausages chorizo and of course the air dried Serrano ham. No butter or sunflower spread on our bread these days but you've guessed it more olive oil which we often have mixed with fresh crushed garlic.