Quiche Me Once And Quiche Me Twice And Quiche Me Once Again!

Monday, January 30, 2012

I am about to head off to the gym for a bit of cardio and some exercise. Susan will do Pilates early this afternoon. This evening I will be attending a lecture by French magician, David Stone at the CIVAC and Susan and Zahava have a movie date.

Yesterday we started off the day with a breakfast of bagels and lox. The bagels came for Kosherbest and I had purchased them a while back. The lox was from Mercadona and I found some Philadelphia Cream Cheese at Opencor. We added some red onion and some sliced tomato and we were good to go. When we finished breakfast, we read the Sunday paper and lounged around until a little after 1:00 when we headed out to do a couple of errands.

We stopped at El Parisien to pick up some bread and dessert for last night’s dinner and since Vilma’s birthday was yesterday we stopped by El Molinón to drop off a scarf that we had bought her for her birthday. We then returned home and Susan got busy making a salad for our lunch. She used the leftover salmon along with some chorizo to make yet another amazing salad. We had some of the raisin and nut rolls that we had bought at the bakery and enjoyed a glass of white wine.

While Susan busied herself getting things chopped and diced for what would be our dinner quiche, I headed out to FNAC in search of reading material. I was looking for two things in particular. One was a graphic novel entitled Arrugas (Wrinkles) written by Paco Roca, which has recently been turned into an animated film and had its debut here in Spain on January 27. Here is a link to the trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fAi0P7hHr8. I was also in search of several novels written by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán that feature his most famous literary creation, Pepe Carvalho.

Carvalho is a detective who is also a lover of good food. He has a manservant, Biscuter, and his love interest is a prostitute named Charo. I think there are fourteen or fifteen books in the Carvalho series and the last was published in 2003 when Vázquez Montalbán died in Thailand. The novels are set in a variety of countries around the world and, as expected, Pepe always gets his man. There was a television series based on this character and there have been a book or two of recipes that were based on dishes that were described in the novels.

Vázquez Montalbán served jail time under Franco because of his views and his first essay, Informe sobre la información, was written while he was still imprisoned. He was a prolific writer and in addition to being a novelist was a poet and essayist. His novels are always an enjoyable read and always contain interesting tidbits of information about the cities in which Pepe finds himself and the food and the places where he eats. I found four Carvalho novels that I had not read and I bought three of them. I also found a copy of Arrugas and I purchased it, also.

At 8:00 PM we set out a few snacks for us to munch on while we waited for the quiche to cook. There were chips, boquerones and olives to accompany the red wine that Susan and Zahava opted for, while Klaus and I enjoyed a beer. Klaus filled us in on his recent visit to Malta and what he discovered while he was there. He had such a good time that Zahava has booked a return visit for the both of them in March. A little before 9:00 Susan took the quiche out of the oven so that it could cool for ten minutes and at 9:15 we were gathered around the table.

We started with a salad and then dug into the lovely vegetable quiche that Susan had made. This was a new adventure since she prepared the quiche with two cheeses that she has not used in the past. Since ricotta and cheddar were not available when we shopped on Saturday, she ended up using a requesón made from goat’s milk that is lighter and less salty than ricotta. The recipe calls for either cheddar or feta and Cristina sold us a feta that had to be the best feta I have ever tasted. There were a variety of vegetables used in the quiche including spinach, zucchini, onion and red pepper. Everyone had seconds. We had a pan de castro along with the meal. It is a much denser bread than a baguette and was the ideal accompaniment for the quiche. I opened a bottle of a Valencia wine called Mala Vida and it was absolutely exquisite. For dessert we had some fresh fruit and some macarons that we had purchased at El Parisien. The macarons were quite good, but not as good as the ones that Sumi Chang makes at Europane in Pasadena. We finished the meal with a liqueur and when a FaceTime call from Rachel sounded at 11:30 we were all amazed that three and a half hours had flown by.

After Klaus and Zahava left we did a bit of tidying up and called Rachel back so that we could have a more leisurely chat. Rachel was about to head off to Ikea to return some tables that she had bought a while back and to look for several other things. When we hung up from her, we read for a little while and then called it a day.