Food glorious food

I am an unmitigated foodie. No question about it. I love cooking and I love eating, and best of all I love eating out with friends. Here in Galicia, eating out is a social occasion: a time for wine, chatting with friends and catching up on news so it was with some joy that I found out Galicia had increased the number of people who could meet together to six indoors and ten outside. This meant that for the first time in a very long time we could meet up with friends for a menú del día.

Galician menús are incredibly good value, normally being three courses plus coffee, wine and water, and bread for around twelve euros or less. And the portions are not stingy either. None of your nouvelle cuisine in Galicia. If a plate isn’t full, it’s not considered a proper meal.

Our first outing was to a café restaurant we had only ever visited for drinks, in a tiny village called Pitón on the way to Ourense. Our friend Leo booked us a terrace table and seven of us enjoyed the early June sunshine and a truly memorable meal. (pics just to whet your appetites!)

I began with mushroom risotto. It arrived in a soup bowl and was creamy and delicious. Mum had a mixed salad which here always comes with tuna, often with ham, and is always a meal in itself. Our main course was pork ribs cooked on the grill with some sweet sticky glaze and perfectly tender. The portions were huge! For dessert I had a chocolaty mousse, S a banana pudding but there are no dessert photos as they never last long enough! With coffee, liqueurs, wine and bread the meal cost us eleven euros a head.

One thing you rarely find on a menú in Galicia are vegetables. Salad, yes. Occasionally a slice of grilled pepper or a plateful of pimientos de padrón… the Russian roulette of peppers; but your average meat and two veg type vegetables, no way José. The only time I recall having vegetables on my plate in a restaurant, we were the only people to clear our plates. All the other diners returned the vegetables uneaten.

Allotment growing in early June

Luckily, I grow plenty of vegetables at home so we can offset the occasional meat overload when eating out with plenty of veggie heavy meals at home. This spring has been fabulous for my peapods… or mangetout or, in Spanish, cometodo. I plant them early in the polytunnel and by April they are already reaching the roof. Once the indoor ones are flowering I plant my second crop outside for the late spring. I love peapods either raw or very lightly cooked. Our broad beans have also done well this year. I was rather tardy in planting them (I usually do so in autumn but left it until February) so they were slightly later but are now cropping heavily and deliciously. I love a broad bean risotto, especially if I take the time to double pod them, leaving the sweet, bright green inner bean. They make a particularly good, pale green hummus too.

My tomato plants are growing tall and desperately need tying up but it has been raining for the last week and every time I go onto the allotment I get wet! I’m not sure the tomatoes or the cat enjoy the rain but I have managed to get my cabbage plants in and they look very happy.

The garden looks good before the rains

The weather at the beginning of the month was hot and dry. It reached 32 degrees centigrade on June 12th and then the storms came. That first day we were at our friend CJ’s house enjoying cake and tea, and a chat for the first time in far too long. We sat outside watching the sky darken alarmingly before hurriedly scuttling indoors as the first heavy drops fell. An hour later we returned home to a flooded terrace, a sodden bench, three pairs of wellington boots full of water, drowned pelargoniums and a very bedraggled looking cat. Having dried the cat, boots, plants and terrace in that order we retired for the night. The next day dawned hot and humid only to give us an action replay of the previous day in the evening. This repeated for the next night too though by now we knew to move our wellington boots and bring the cat indoors!

A soggy terrace after the rains

On the Wednesday the rain turned to heavy hail with some areas nearby looking as if they had had a fall of snow in June. I had to stop the car coming back from my weekly swim as the windscreen wipers wouldn’t move the deluge (below).

We are also at the peak of our soft fruit harvest at the moment. Redcurrants come first, then gooseberries, raspberries and loganberries, strawberries (wild and cultivated…totally different tastes), blackcurrants and amelanchier berries. These latter are from a small tree which grew for years in my parents’ garden in England. The blackbirds always enjoyed the berries but I never knew they were edible. We took a few cuttings when Mum moved here and they have flourished. They have a mild sweet taste and are a lovely addition to our breakfast bowl… if we can keep the birds away! We have blackberries and blueberries still to come, though the cherries have already been stolen by the blackbirds, and we are, incredibly, still eating our Kiwi fruit from last year, stored in our cool barn over winter. At this time of year my breakfast fruit bowl is rather full - just the way I like it!

Happy summer eating!