Madrid Cooking Class

My new thing for every vacation following this one is going to be to take a cooking class...regardless of cost. Wednesday was a wonderful experience in both Spanish culture/hospitality and Spanish cuisine. Our chef, Gabriela, took us in and shared with us some of the most delicious Spanish dishes made with the freshest ingredients you can buy. She even said she bought the seafood the day before and the fresh cherries from her own orchard.

As far as the dishes go, we made 4 of them: salmoréjo (a cold gazpacho-type soup made with pulverized bread & veggies); Ibérico pork with Pedro Ximenéz sauce; fideua-pronounced "fileguac"-(paella but with noodles in place of rice); and he last dish was an almond cake with mint sorbet. Spaniards take their lunches the most seriously. Usually, they take hours to enjoy their lunch but only eat something light and fast for breakfast and dinner.

Gabriela even taught us how to peel and prepare artichokes. I will include a good picture of Ming in her amazing kitchen doing just that. I made the cake, he did artichokes, Fred helped peel the shrimp and Ruben seared the pork. We each did our parts and the end result was a sweet, savory pork, a creamy, but light, tomato soup with bits of Iberian ham and egg, salty macaroni-filled seafood fideua, and a sticky lemon almond cake with sweet mint sorbet!

It's midnight in Sevilla and I'm hungry just thinking about it again....

Fun fact: Spaniards eat their dinner around 9pm! It's light out here until around 10 so I completely lose track of all sense of time. Siestas totally make sense since it's blazing hot in the afternoon and doing anything but napping in the A/C is crazy.

Til next eats!
-Amy