Going nowhere fast…
Well, I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but starting out on an adventure can be hazardous to your health (mental, that is).
Mama and papa have planned, for weeks now, to try to take the fast train to Barcelona from Perpignan, which was installed and operating as of last year and which promised to be great fun for a day’s outing since Barcelona is only two hours from my kitty corner.
So off they went, ABANDONING ME AGAIN (probably thinking, “Oh, Loulou will sleep the whole time and won’t know a thing” but little do they know…heh, heh) and took that thing with four wheels in which I take a back seat all the time and they parked and went up to board the train and whiz off to an appointment papa had with a dentist and lo and behold, NO TRAIN.
“I’m sorry,” said the information lady, “the train is broken and won’t run today.”
Well, back to the parking lot, jump in the four-wheel thingy, and DRIVE to the dentist, which isn’t all that bad, as I see it and I’ve seen that road MANY times (there are some cool but weird sculptures along the highway, not to mention what smells like a pig reunion about an hour into the trip but it doesn’t last long, thank heaven) and so they arrived an hour before schedule and had a nice little lunch of tapas—gazpacho in the Andalucian style, smooth and silky, a brillian tortilla of potatoes and onions, and a couple of croquetas each to have stamina for the teeth doc.
Mama went off to deliver her 167-year-old vinegar to the nice man at Bonanova restaurant and stopped in to get very cheap avocados and little sweet pimientos de padron (see mama’s recipe below), which are hard to find where we are and which you can get all over Spain right now, and because they had the car, they could schlep all of this stuff back easily without having to carry it on a TRAIN, plus they arrived home two hours earlier than they would have and I was FED ON TIME instead of having to wait until dark for my codfish (or tuna or plaice or salmon, whatever those fishies are in that delicious gelée mama feeds me) and so now I am hoping that the train is NEVER fixed and they’ll give up on little adventures to far away places.
But of course hell will freeze over before that happens, so I had better resign myself to suffering…
And I’m not coming out until they show some RESPECT!
Pimientos de padron
Heat 1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil in a thin pan. Put the pimientos, stems and all, into the hot oil and cover. Watch carefully to make sure they do not burn, but they will wilt and get crispy on one side. Turn them over and let them brown well on the other side, keeping the lid on until the very end as they tend to splatter. When the peppers are nicely browned on both sides, transfer them to a plate and sprinkle with coarse salt. Serve with drinks or as a tapa along with others.
