One of the things that I most love from Spain’s culinary arsenal is jamón serrano.  One of the things I like least in life is not having all the answers.  Last week, it was time for these two things to come head to head at our house in an event that we dubbed jamón, jamón.  (It may not be the most inventive name, but the event itself didn’t suffer for it.)
Spain’s cured ham may just be the best in the world.  Wait - it is.  No doubt about it.  I’m …

Just the other day I heartily agreed with a friend of mine that the term ‘expat‘ isn’t a good description for people who choose to make their home in a foreign country.  For him the term is most closely associated with corporate employees who spend a year or two recreating their own country within the borders of another while waiting for their tour of duty to end; never learning more than a few words of their host culture’s language and little else about their surroundings.
And then I happened to notice …

This fascinating, somewhat beautiful image of a virus doesn’t express the enormous frustration that I feel at being laid victim to another illness here in Spain.  I thought that I was healthy and strong; I thought that my immune system was working at peak performance.
Shortly after arriving in Barcelona last year, Katie and I - and to a lesser degree, Oscar - suffered an incredibly virulent stomach illness.  Another one followed, but not as intensely.  Life went on and a few colds andflus didn’t scare us in comparison with those …

It’s about time that I start writing about the wines of Valencia - no more waiting for the right moment to start. It’s a huge topic and I’ve been putting it off just because it’s a daunting task. But the putting-off is over. Little by little I’ll learn to expertly navigate the viticultural landscape of this beautiful region and, of course, share all that I learn on-line.

Oscar, the nearly-three-year-old gourmand, has taken to the idea of going to the market - in this case one of Europe’s largest, the Mercado Central - on the way home from school.  Today he was particularly insistent that we go buy some strawberries and some fish.  What could we do but oblige?
Of course, Oscar isn’t very specific about his definition of fish, so he was perfectly happy when we bought some langostinos - prawns.  Well, I say that like it’s a simple matter of translating the word but, like most …

My first breath of Spanish air, I breathed in Barajas airport in Madrid.  I was surprised to find that air carrying the smoke of countless cigarettes.  For a young, sheltered Canadian it was unheard of that people should be smoking inside a public building.  The guards with machine guns were also smoking, which was a real oddity to say the least.
Since that day in 1997 things have changed somewhat, but not as much as I would have thought.
On January 1st, 2006, new laws came into effect that restricted the smoking …