Preparado

What with one thing and another (Covid, absences), today was the first time since we've been here that we invited friends to lunch. We love having people round to eat, as you may have gathered in the past, and we missed it.  Plus ... all our guests were French, so we got to speak French all afternoon! We had missed that too.

Spanish class in the morning, then we went to the best fishmonger in town to buy sea bass for lunch. As we don't have an oven, we had an incentive to keep it simple ... plus only two hours to prepare. Our guests were blown away by S's  excellent ensalada tropical -- which surprised us since they all live in Almuñecar, so you'd expect them to be familiar with it. Sea bass done on the barbecue, with plainly boiled new potatoes, allioli, and home-made mojo picón -- a spicy sauce from the Canaries which I thought they wouldn't like, being French, but Michel at least loved it.

I hesitated over a cheese course, not traditional in Spain, but hey, they are French! So, a selection of English, French, Spanish and Italian cheeses went down very well. And finally, what else but tarta de aguacate?

It was a bit windy, so we had aperos on the terrace but ate indoors with the doors to the terrace wide open. As our guests got up to leave, there was a gust of wind, and with an impressive sound of shattering glass, the door to the internal patio blew open, crashed into the sideboard, and deposited shards of glass all over the living room. So that was exciting, and we all got involved in picking them up. Amazing how far flying glass can go.

Anyway. A lovely afternoon, and now it's raining ... we have draped a blanket over the big hole.