Steve Kroll
Wine Guy
As promised, I am posting some food photos from my vacation in Spain.
First, I have to say this is one of the best value trips I have ever taken. The flight over was very reasonably priced at under $500/ticket, and the food so far has been inexpensive, yet excellent. My travelling companion for this trip is Ex-Mrs. K. We're still divorced and living under separate roofs, but still enjoy each other's company enough to travel and do things together.
Unfortunately, due to bad weather blowing through Minnesota on departure day, our first flight was delayed and I never did make it to Paris for the 24-hour layover I had originally planned. The worst part was sitting on a plane for 7.5 hours without food due to mechanical problems. But all of that is water (or snow) under the bridge and we finally arrived in Barcelona, where I rented a car to drive up into Aragon, Rioja, and the Basque Autonomous Region.
The first stop was in the ancient Roman city of Zaragoza (the name comes from a short form of the name Caesar Augustus, "Zar Agosto"), a city of about 650,000 people, and the capitol of the province of Aragon.
We booked a tour with a local guide named Jorge, a young man who went to school at Oxford, and an amateur chef. He turned out to have a wealth of knowledge of local wines. There are four wine regions in Aragon and we had a sampling from each region. At this point it was somewhat late and we weren't terribly hungry so we mainly had tapas just to tide us over.
The tapas in Zaragoza were hit or miss. We had ham and cheese filled croquettes, which were awesome. We also had some of the local Jamón Ibérico (ham from pigs that subsist on a diet of primarily acorns). This is truly melt-in-your-mouth kind of stuff.
As for the "miss" part of hit-or-miss, I ate one tapa that consisted of a salty anchovy with chocolate and cream cheese. In fairness, it wasn't completely terrible - there was something about it that was just kind of weird. These are three ingredients that should never share the same plate, let alone the same little piece of bread.
Tomorrow, I will write about the Rioja wine region and our first stop in Basque Country.
First, I have to say this is one of the best value trips I have ever taken. The flight over was very reasonably priced at under $500/ticket, and the food so far has been inexpensive, yet excellent. My travelling companion for this trip is Ex-Mrs. K. We're still divorced and living under separate roofs, but still enjoy each other's company enough to travel and do things together.
Unfortunately, due to bad weather blowing through Minnesota on departure day, our first flight was delayed and I never did make it to Paris for the 24-hour layover I had originally planned. The worst part was sitting on a plane for 7.5 hours without food due to mechanical problems. But all of that is water (or snow) under the bridge and we finally arrived in Barcelona, where I rented a car to drive up into Aragon, Rioja, and the Basque Autonomous Region.
The first stop was in the ancient Roman city of Zaragoza (the name comes from a short form of the name Caesar Augustus, "Zar Agosto"), a city of about 650,000 people, and the capitol of the province of Aragon.
We booked a tour with a local guide named Jorge, a young man who went to school at Oxford, and an amateur chef. He turned out to have a wealth of knowledge of local wines. There are four wine regions in Aragon and we had a sampling from each region. At this point it was somewhat late and we weren't terribly hungry so we mainly had tapas just to tide us over.
The tapas in Zaragoza were hit or miss. We had ham and cheese filled croquettes, which were awesome. We also had some of the local Jamón Ibérico (ham from pigs that subsist on a diet of primarily acorns). This is truly melt-in-your-mouth kind of stuff.
As for the "miss" part of hit-or-miss, I ate one tapa that consisted of a salty anchovy with chocolate and cream cheese. In fairness, it wasn't completely terrible - there was something about it that was just kind of weird. These are three ingredients that should never share the same plate, let alone the same little piece of bread.
Tomorrow, I will write about the Rioja wine region and our first stop in Basque Country.
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