Ah, traditional Spanish cuisine...tapas and paella. If you didn't know (which I didn't), tapas are just small servings of food served for late dinners in Spain. Apparently, Spanish folk love to start the day late, eat a big late lunch (around 2pm), take an hour siesta break or nap, go back to work until 7, drink and eat at around 9-10, then party it up until 1 or 2am. On Mondays. And Tuesdays. And so on. In fact, the bar downstairs has been playing house music until 3am every night so far. Where's my broom handle when I need it?
Anyways, today we learned the fine art of preparing some Spanish dishes: seafood paella, catalan cream (like creme brulee), tomato bread, and spanish omelette. But first, we take a tour of the famed Boqueria Market, the largest food market in Europe, where you can buy 10+ different kinds of eggs, 100+ kinds of fish, fruit, vegetable, peppers, and even freshly caught rabbit. It's been around for some 100 odd years, and reminds me a lot of Tsujki Market in Japan.
I didn't know Emu eggs were black.
Today's class was pretty large (about 13 of us), so we all took turns working on some part of the menu. Les worked on preparing the fish broth, which consisted of dicing vegetables and monkfish head. I don't think she was very comfortable with the head part, but she seemed a bit too happy when she got it to cut apart.
I worked on the paella part, and it was simple enough to make. Chop squid, cook in oil, put in rice, add fish broth, let cook until water is gone. Done. Don't stir at all, that's the key. It costs a lot at tapas restaurants because it just has to take a lot of time to cook off the broth, but other than that, it's pretty simple.
Since the cooking class took the majority of the day, we decide to take it easy for the night and take a stroll on La Ramblas, the huge shopping area. Lots of street performers and tourists, so it's usually a place for a lot of con artists and pick pockets. Apparently, we didn't run into any because I had a 50 Euro bill hanging out of my pocket for a while and no one took the bait.
A nice late tapas dinner later, and we head home. Tomorrow, we have a trip on the tour bus to take us around the city, so we need to get some sleep. And it looks like the party is getting started downstairs again. *shakes fist*
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