Three takes on breakfast

1. I'm a light breakfaster and seldom have more than a combination of the following:
Tea or coffee
Something sweet and pastry-like
Fruit
Cereal with ricemilk.
So because of the glut in cherries at the moment for 1.95€ kg I made this lovely cherry coca for myself.


2. A few days later I was in my local coffee shop and had a craving for the wonderfully simple yet unique coca de vidre (glass cake).
Coca is the local Catalan version of pizza (they say it was the oirginal and pizza was a copy...we'll never know). It comes in sweet and savoury (see my other blog). For coca de vidre the dough is rolled out and then left to dry before covering with sugar and pinenuts. Once baked it is drizzled with anise liquor which glazes the sugar in the residual; heat. The result is brittle, crunchy, sweet and fragrant.



















3. And now for the big one. My boss picked me up for a meeting at 10am and asked if I liked Callos (tripe). I lied and said I quite liked it.....not imagining what was about to happen. We went to a local no-frills barrio bar - all harsh strip lighting, melamine tables, bleeping fruit machines and blue and white tiles. A clattery, echoey place of function over style which was full of people (mostly men) scoffing tripe for elevenses and quaffing wine cut with gaseosa (weak lemonade). It was 10:30am ! I tried the tripe and battled valiantly to swallow three slithery, wobbly squares, but (excuse the pun) I couldn't stomach it. So my boss ate my portion too. People here breakfast very lightly at home, usually coffee and a biscuit, but then everybody hits the local bars for elevenses (almuerzo). It's ingrained in their DNA and performs as much a social function as it does a nutritional one. It's very common to see people drinking modest quantities of alcohol too, and yet drunkenness at night is something I've never seen here.Talk about cultural differences!