Ballando Nudi

Friday, April 20, 2012

We have an appointment later this afternoon with Juanra who is a real estate agent. He is going to help us look for a new apartment that we will occupy when we return to Valencia next November. We are looking for a top floor apartment with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. It needs to have a large kitchen and it needs to be light and airy. Hopefully we can find a place close to where we are now, but we are willing to look into other neighborhoods. It would make life a lot easier if the apartment were furnished and came with a washer and dryer. After meeting with Juanra we will head to the Palau for a 6:30 concert celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Palau. It is intended for families and Nacho Diago will be the Master of ceremonies for this event.

I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post that we watched the latest Mission Impossible offering. It is called “The Ghost Protocol”. It was a pleasant way to spend two hours and it had its requisite share of explosions and car chases, as well as superhuman feats. Clearly there will be a follow up to this film.

Yesterday we decided to have lunch at Ballando Nudi – Francisco’s new place. We sat down and chatted for a while and when he asked us what we wanted to eat, we just looked at him and said, “Feed us!” He started us off with a breadbasket filled with Galician style bread. It is a very dense bread and it is flavorful. He then placed a plate filled with a variety of Italian cold cuts. There was salame, guanciale, porchetta and pancetta. He also served us a plate with a variety of cheeses all of which were topped with homemade marmalades. The two standouts were a smoke scarmozza and a gorgonzola topped with a red onion marmalade. Next came two pasta dishes. One was a plate of tagliatelle topped with a pesto sauce and the second was a plate of penne topped with a sauce that included wine, endive and Speck. We were unable to finish the pasta dishes and we took them home with us for later consumption.

We had a bottle of a nice Italian red, La Poderina, from Montalcino. Dessert was tiramisú and it was one of the best that I have ever had because the cream portion was incredibly dense as opposed to most where the cream tends to be quite thin and almost runny. Since the cappuccino machine is still on its way from Italy instead of coffee Francisco offered us a little something to finish our meal. I had a ten-year-old Port and Susan opted for some Tanqueray Rangpur gin. What a great meal!

We stumbled out of the restaurant a little before 4:00 and made our way home. I decided that I would take a little nap and given the fact that I had gotten little sleep the night before and I was a bit buzzed I woke up at 8:30. Susan had already headed off to her Photoshop class and, as it turned out, I had missed last night’s meeting of the veteranos. The good news is that there will be another meeting next week. When Susan got home she played around on the computer a bit and we were both in bed by 11:30.