Monday April 4

Breakfast 

I'd run out of the bananas that I usually have for breakfast, so it was a chirimoya along with a couple gourds of yerba mate to get me going. I've got to finish the chirimoyas tomorrow or they'll go off. I like them when they're just on the verge of going rotten, so they're really soft and smelly inside, but it's a fine line to walk!

Lunch

I'm not usually a fan of canned tuna with pasta, but Vero does this really nice one with peppers and a tomato sauce. Really yummy and just a little bit spicy. This was leftovers from the day before.

Dinner

We'd been talking about Jalapeno poppers the other day and how good they were. I couldn't get any jalapenos at La Boqueria today, but this time of year in Barcelona, there's a lot of peppers that look a lot like them, only they're not spicy at all. So I got some of those. But I still wanted a bit of a spicy kick, so I mixed the cream cheese with a dried chili that Karim brought me back from Istanbul. I chopped it really finely, but in retrospect, it could have used two.  Then flour/egg/breadcrumbs and again with the egg/breadcrumbs and deep fry for a minute or two.  The colour came out really nice.

Decided to roast a chicken, and I've been thinking about root vegetables. From left, that's some little tiny turnips, celeriac root, yam, parsnips, onions and potatoes. The parsnips turned out to be pretty crappy, dry and mealy, so I only managed to salvage one.

That's about half the veggies after roasting with the chicken. I stuffed half a lemon, a couple of cloves of garlic and a handful of fresh sage and fresh thyme inside, pushed a fat pat of butter under the skin and drizzled some olive oil all over everything. Oh, there's some red bell pepper roasting in there too.

A little mashed root vegetables. A little of everything, with some butter, salt and black pepper. We've got a really crappy plastic masher, so it was a bit lumpy. Got to get a metal one.

I toasted some bread in the oven while the chicken was cooking. Mixed it with some roughly chopped sage and thyme, add some boiling water and let it sit, covered, for a bit. I added a bit too much water so it was a bit too soggy.

The finished product. Pretty good! Nothing light about it, but it's not too warm here yet, so not too bad. I liked all the different roots, it's nice to eat things that don't get much attention. The parsnip has a really distinctive flavour, but sometimes I think it gives me a bit of a weird buzz. The celeriac was sort of nutty with a hint of celery. The yam was nice and sweet. And there's tons of leftovers.