Cooking

A Fabulous Morning at Barcelona Cooking

/ Pam Goode / 4 Comments

A FABULOUS time at Barcelona Cooking: Walking to class on La Rambla; Prepping veggies and making stock; teaching a handful of kids who were VERY eager and VERY good how to make creme brulee, including the torch; super duper burners!; setting up the first course — soup with flowers and tomato bread; working on the Spanish Omelet; Paella; and a group of very happy girls.

All in all we learned to make paella, Spanish omelette, tomato bread, crema catalana, and sangria. Perfect for those interested in cooking with organic and local produce.

Barcelona Food!

/ Pam Goode / 2 Comments

Do you travel for adventure? Scenery? Meeting new people? Architecture? Exploring? Food? All of the above?

I’m most definitely all of the above, but I did fall madly in love with the local food and Barcelona’s fascinating Mercat de la Boqueria, which is open Monday – Saturday, 8:00 AM – 8:30 PM.

From top to bottom and left to right:

Dragon Fruit; Mixed Fruit; Rambutan; Mushrooms; Olives; Chives and Greens; Oysters; Ummmm, no clue; Percebe and Langosteno ( ; Fruit; Market Entry; Veggies on Strings; Colorful Popsicles; Clams; Ice Cream Sandwiches; Veggie Chips; Calamari?; Eat your Veggies!; Clams and Friend; Stacked in Blue; Dinner!

P.S. Percebes, known as goose barnacles in English, are a Galician delicacy from Spain and are among the most exclusive seafood in Europe. Customers in Spain and Portugal pay up to 200 Euros per kilo for superb quality Percebes. This extraordinary price results from the extreme circumstances in which the rare barnacles are harvested from the rocky cliffs off the Galician coast.

The edible part of the goose barnacles are the stems. These are usually boiled for only a few seconds in salt water with a bay leaf. The leathery skin is then removed with a rotating movement to reveal the flesh. Percebes are most commonly eaten without any other ingredients or side dishes – maybe some olive oil at most.

Until next time!

Free Rice Feeds Body and Mind

/ Pam Goode / Leave a comment

Free RiceAccording to the UN, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes. www.freerice.com donates ten grains for each correct answer on this get-smart website. Learn a little; give a lot. I admit to loving school as a child, so maybe I’m not a good judge of “fun,” but I played this for an hour, donated 1630 grains of rice, and learned Continue reading →

A Very Fine Faucet

/ Pam Goode / 1 Comment

Steam Valve Trio

Since she doesn’t have the option of hiding in the pantry on bad hair days, the Perfect Kitchen Faucet is decorative as well as functional. I’ve been looking for the impossible, naturally — a European antique-style one-holer with a pull-down spray. While this one doesn’t fit my image of “antique,” it’s retro enough to look old and certainly un-American. Made in England by Steam Valve Original, it features a Very Cool Spray, in my opinion. If you go to the site, you can see a little video of some lettuce spraying. Continue reading →

Kitchen Obsessed

/ Pam Goode / 2 Comments

Green GoddessBusy, busy, busy day, but I know everyone wants to see my eagerly-awaited Green Goddess, now scheduled to arrive right off the boat from France the week of November 26. Will she be here in time for the Thanksgiving Feast? And what will she cook???? 🙂

Today I met with Karen, my Kitchen Guru, and finalized all the fun details for the cabinet order (which gets smaller with each successive meeting as the cost of each cabinet continues to rise). But hey, they’ll be beautiful, won’t they? We’ve been meeting for about six weeks now during “slow season,” but today the place was positively redundant with kitchen sluts slewn across every stool and horizontal surface, Continue reading →

Does the World Need Another Blogger?

/ Pam Goode / 1 Comment

It’s a sad, sad day here in Whoville for those of us (me) who’ve just finished reading Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia, a remarkable book based solely on the unlikely topics of 1) a so-so cook blogging her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as she attempts each of the 524 recipes within the span of 365 days, and 2) a so-so college-educated secretary temp who blogs her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as she attempts each of 524 recipes within the span of 365 days and gets a book deal out of it. Continue reading →