The F-Word Part 3: Food

So shopping is of itself an experience - especially for food. Unless I take my Spanish dictionary - it's not always clear what a product is, so cooking can be a bit random.

I made a chilli the first week here and was about to add a tin of tomatoes to the fresh tomatoes when I discovered the three cans I'd bought believing them to be tomatoes were some kind of tomato soup. For the record Fritos does not mean tinned tomatoes even if the picture on the can looks like that!


The one on the right is the proper stuff!

Mojo Sauce

Canarian Potatoes are a local speciality served with most meals rather than chips. They are minature baked potatoes with a salty, slightly crispy jacket and usually come with Mojo sauce which is a spicey bell pepper sauce, sweet and sharp at the same time and goes with almost everything I am finding. I'm so glad I have something to stand in for Nandos piri-piri sauces and this goes really well on chicken kebabs for the bbq.

Here's a monster kebab Dominick made the other night about to hit the flames!
 

 Almost everyone has a bbq of some kind - it's generally too hot for my special roast dinners - both to eat and to cook indoors. Sadly the rain of the last week has meant switching to the hob indoors and I am missing the smell of charcoal.

Another oddity we discovered is that the tea and coffee we made at home tasted foul - all salty and bitter and really undrinkable. This is due to the high salt content in the water which you can taste if you drink straight from the tap. So for hot beverages we've switched to bottled water. A side effect of so much salt in the water is that everything rusts really quickly - pans, cutlery, cars. Within two washes a brand knife will be showing signs of rust so as far as possible its best to use plastic - pity they haven't invented plastic cars yet though!

  It's quite easy to get old favourites though and I was relieved to find marmite on the supermarket shelves...so I neededn't have smuggled this one in after all!

 

Some of the packaging is weird as I posted on www.facebook.com/crumpetcapers about "slutty bread". 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeQNPJtMWY

Does anyone remember the yellow Yorkie chocolate bar with the almond nuts in? Well I have been missing that for years since they discontinued it, but I think I might have found a replacement with dark chocolate!

I will have to wait until Saturday (cheat day - to be explained in a further blog) to trial it!