SC - Churros was Re: digby's fruitcake

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Selene wrote:
>I stand corrected, or at least I sit corrected.  Churros and Chocolate, a
>cross-oceanic treat that was meant to be!But they still didn't belong at the
>Renaissance Pleasure Faire, whose costume police and other 
>disagreeable authority
>figures enforce the scenario of an English country gathering at a 
>time where the
>English and the Spanish were at war.  Nonono, completely wrong. 
>They would have
>strung up those Spanish by their heels, not eaten their pastries.

Well, don't get me started on the food at the Renaissance Pleasure 
Faire - hardly a period dish in the place. Barbecued turkey legs? 
Strawberry crepes with whipped cream? The various Italian and Greek 
booths? Churros are nothing compared to all the other gustatory sins 
:-) And when i first began going to the RPF in 1970 they had Flamenco 
dancers...

>Oh, and welcome back!!  What other dainties did you enjoy in al-Andalus?

Well, that's a whole nother message. To be concise i'm an 
ex-vegetarian who isn't real interested in four-legged animal meat 
and i travelled with three vegetarians, which made dining difficult.

It will be a long while before i can face another slice of cold 
tortilla de patatas (kind of a white potato quiche, but not a fluffy) 
and in some restaurants it was downright awful.

We had a good meal at Habanita, a Spanish-Cuban restaurant in Sevilla 
with a decent selection of vegetarian dishes. I had a rather 
interesting dish of cod with raisins and dates in the sauce in 
Cordoba, but it may be a few days before i can mentally reconstruct 
it. We also had a good meal at La Botana, a stylish vegetarian 
restaurant in Granada. And we found a few tasty vegetarian tapas in a 
number of places, although we tended to have the same ones over and 
over during the week we were in Aldalucia.

The best thing i ate in Andalucia was ajo blanco, a cold creamy white 
soup of garlic, almond milk, and, i think, a dash of vinegar (and 
probably a couple other ingredients). Gotta find a recipe for this!

Food in Morocco was rather dismal, where i travelled with my 
vegetarian daughter. I had, IIRC, three good meals in three weeks. My 
daughter ate almost nothing but "salade Marocaine" (tomato, onion, 
green pepper, and sometimes cucumber) and bread for weeks. More on 
all this later.

I did bring back 200 grams of long pepper, a kilo of henna, and three 
bags of dried Fassi ghassoul (the "gh" is like a French "r", since 
the Moroccan "r" is rolled or flapped) which mixed with water to make 
a paste that is rubbed all over the body VERY vigorously in the 
hammam, the traditional bath. And some textile things. No cookbooks 
as i can't read Arabic and the few i found in English or French 
weren't any better than those i already own.

More to Come.

Anahita al-shazhiyya