Dragon Fruit Flowers!

Hello, everyone.  I've been walking 4 or 5 times per week, and after I knock out those steps I'm so relaxed that making a post gets forgotten. But doing a couple of miles early just makes me feel so good.

Today sunrise brought a surprise: thirteen open blossoms on the dragonfruit cactus.

The bees and bumblebees act like they're in shock at the huge amount of nectar and pollen on the buffet.

A bee doing her best to cope.

We have discovered that the birds like to peck out the middle of the fruit before it's fully ripe. Now we need to find a lot of nylon fruit covers quickly. 

More flowers!

Hello, everyone.  Summer has arrived, with our typical temps in the 90's F. 

Salad of cucumber, tomato, and garden pepper

Very low carb, dressed with viaigrette and some onion-y green sprinkle and parsley. 

Another of the desert rose plants is now in bloom.

My low carb breakfast today

Hello, everyone.  As part of being accountable for my food choices--part of staying on the wagon--to work on the weight, I'm taking photos of food. 

Three egg omelet with the last of the jalapeño cheese spread and some guac on top. Black coffee on the side.

This will keep me feeling full until well after noon.

Lower-carb foods

Hello, everyone.  I had been slipping on my food choices over the holidays, and paid for it on the scale readings. I'm climbing back onto the wagon now, newly determined in spite of all the bad foods and drinks people push at me. 

Some new things: 

Wild caught salmon (Orca Bay frozen fillets package) cooked gently in butter with 2 eggs over medium and the garnish is some verdolaga (purslane) from the garden. That was a really tasty breakfast. 

Pork steaks, baked on a rack in a sheet pan, seasoned with S&P, tenderizer, mild curry powder that was turmeric colored, and some Tony's cajun seasoning. Garnish on top is a jalapeño cheese spread. (I took all of the seeds and pith out of the little pepper before chopping it into little bits. The cheese gentles the heat also.) Garnish is more of the verdolaga. This was a yummy and filling dinner dish.

3 eggs omelet, filled with more of the jalapeño spread--I want to use it up--with a few drops of Cholula and another sprig of verdolaga. 

The verdolaga is free for the pulling, and I don't indulge on spraying in the food garden, so it's the garnish of choice. Besides being chock-full of nutrients! Other good choices for garnish greens: volunteer dill. Parsley. Fennel leaves. Tiny little thinnings of lettuce or mustard greens. Arugula. 

Making the food look pretty encourages me to eat better.

Tried the flourless Greek Yogurt Bread

Hello, everyone.  We're having a bit of a cool spell today: this morning it was about 50°F. We're wearing long sleeves,  of course! 

I had run into a high protein, no wheat bread recipe on Youtube, and today I tried it out.

These little sandwiches are on yogurt bread slices.

The recipe makes a slightly wet bread. The loaf fell a bit while cooling, bit it didn't collapse. There is no real strength to the structure. I had noticed this about another eggs and cheese type bread recipe also.

 If I do it again, I will adjust the time and temp for a slower, cooler cooking. I'm thinking my oven is a little bit hot. Though the bread's pretty good in turkey sandwiches. 

Lemons are ripe now

Hello, everyone.  It's lemon picking time, and so we're doing something with as many as possible. 

We have squeezed many lemons and filled an assortment of containers for frozen lemon juice. That way we have home grown lemon juice for much or all of the year.

The lemons that gave their peels to the recipe.

The lemon peel marinating in vodka.

This year we're doing crema de limoncello. Like regular limoncello, it's really sweet and involves alcohol. The crema also has boiled-down milk. This is about our third batch of the sweet dessert sipping drink. It's very tasty.

Fruitcake season!

Hello, everyone.  It is, indeed, fruitcake season. Or it would be, except the stores have no candied peel for sale. Sigh. I have a lemon tree and an orange tree. 

Peels cleaned and sliced for candying

After candying. These are lemon peels. Tomorrow I will candy orange peels. 

The $64 question is: can I make an edible fruitcake patch without any candied citron?

We found the candied cherries and pineapple in the grocery store. Unfortunately there were absolutely no candied peel packages. Thus the preparation of candied lemon peel, and soon, candied orange peel. I don't have a tree that produces citron. I have decided to do my best with what is on hand.

It's a sad thing when you think you maybe need to set an arrival alert with HEB grocery so you can make the traditional Christmas goodies. Really.

Homesick for the Camino

Hello,  everyone.  This is the time of year that makes me think fondly of life on the Camino. We miss so much about it, even though the thing that makes it so special is that we have to leave our daily life behind. And when we return, we're happy to take up our activities,  like crafting, quilting,  beading, and sewing. We're also happy to cook, which is not a  thing that we can do while walking the pilgrimage. 

One way we try to get a little reminder of Camino life is by having tapas for dinner.

The figs and dragonfruit are from our garden. The pretzel nuggets looked interesting to try in the store.  The anchovy stuffed olives are available at Phoenicia, an import grocery store in Houston, Texas, which a relative visited recently. (Thanks, gang!)

Fall gardening season is here

Hello,  everyone. It's fall, and the heat of summer is starting to moderate. The warm weather garden plants, after struggling earlier, are in their prime.

These five beauties are not the first, but there are enough to make a nice picture.

I like to cut them in 1/4" slices, salt them and drain them for a while, then saute them gently until there are little golden-brown speckles on both sides. Wonderful flavor! 

Tapas ideas, American style

Hello, everyone.  We love eating pinchos and tapas so much when we're on the Camino. At home, we get to missing them. Sometimes we try to make some of our own.

Cucumber rounds with tuna and pomegranate on the blue plate, also bread rounds with soft cream cheese and wild salmon on the yellow plate

Cucumber with dates, walnuts, and goat cheese. After making these we concluded that peeling and making thick slices of the Cucumber and scooping out the middle with a melon baller would work better.

Bread rounds variety: cream cheese with wild salmon, slices of meatball with Mexican cheese blend, cream cheese with piquillo pepper relish, combinations of the above. This last plate was turned sideways by the Blogger app, I did crop it but the first version was still in memory or something like that.

Pistou con huevo (edited to add link)

Hello, everyone.  It's going to be hot today, and no rain in the forecast to cool it down. Pretty much the same weather we enjoyed during our time in Córdoba, after we finished our Camino Francés this year. 

As y'all will have noticed, whenever we go on a trip we notice new recipes (new to us, not new in the world) and when we come home we want to make that yummy food for ourselves. This time I discovered pistou, a dish that is both Spanish and French, which I had read about but never tried. I had pistou with eggs for dinner in Córdoba and enjoyed it very much. When we got home, I went onto the internet and found a pistou recipe at Spain on a Fork. 

Pistou involves onion, zucchini or equivalent summer squash, bell pepper, and tomato. Eggplant is optional. It's basically gently cooked veggies in the skillet. It goes great with a lot of protein foods, and if you feel like the plate is a little too low on fat, you can add some sour cream on top.

Yum.

A couple of memories from Madrid on our way home

Hello, everyone.  After our rest in Córdoba,  we took the train back to Madrid for our flight home.

We saw a living wall near the train station. That is a lot of plants! I guess they are each potted separately, so nothing sags. 

The favorite bakery, on Puerta del Sol

I had to cut the morning snack photo into halves.

The cake was approved by DH. I had the toasted croissant with butter.

After Santiago, a few extra days were available...

Hello,  everyone.  We had a busy arrival day in Santiago,  getting our Compostelas, checking into our accommodation, and going down to the train station to get departure tickets. There we discovered that the people were not able to help us get the tickets. We were there too early,  and we needed to buy the tickets online or at the vending machine.

We went to the ticket vending machine, opened Monday, and discovered that the trains on Monday were sold out. Oops. Time to rework the plan. Switched to Tuesday and got early seats out. Went back to the accommodation and reserved an extra night. Sat down with cell phones on the wifi and fussed around with options until we decided on what to do with our days: Córdoba is very historic. So we got train tickets online from Madrid to Cordoba, reserved a few nights in Cordoba, and also reserved the pre-departure time in Madrid. (So we wouldn't be trying to run across the city from train station to catch the outgoing flight all at once.) Then we spent some decompression time in Santiago. 

On Tuesday we left to Madrid, took the metro across town to the other train station, and caught the train to Córdoba. This went smoothly--as long as you allow for buffer time it will work--and when we got to Córdoba we used our Spain phone Google maps to find our place.

This is dried tuna tapa. The garnish is almonds with a drizzle of olive oil. 

The other tapa we tried was gulas (baby eels, but actually imitation gulas made from fish) with garlic mayo on toast. These are the last 2 on the plate. 😉

Mancillas de las Mulas to Leon

Hello, everyone. I'm trying to get a little more timely on the posts.

Before beginning today's post, I would like to wish DM and all moms a happy and blessed Mother's Day.

Yesterday we left Mancillas de las Mulas a little bit later than usual: about 7:15. The day had some sprinkles of rain during our walk into the city but was mostly cloudy and chilly. 

Breakfast stop on the way--I had my usual tortilla de patata. 

View of the city as we first saw it from the trail. The Cathedral is at about the middle of the photo.

In front of San Marcos, a famous parador hotel that was used in the movie The Way, we found these lovely trees.

As heavy rain came rolling in just about dinner time (our dinner time--Spanish people eat quite a bit later in the evening) we stayed close to the place we were staying and tried a new variation on the classic ham and cheese sandwich. This, the sandwich mixto con huevo, was really good. As y'all can see, they present it with a cut-out from the upper slice to show off the perfectly fried egg.

Carrion de los Condes to Terradillos de los Templarios

Hello, everyone.  Today we had great walking weather again. It started pretty cold, about 4 degrees C, but the sun was out and it gradually warmed.

This stage has very few services until near the end: a seasonal coffee stand and a few scattered picnic tables and benches for resting. About 17 km in, though, we arrived at Calzadilla de las Cuevas.

There we discovered paella.

This went very well with cafe con leche.

About 5 km farther, at Ledigos, we had a snack. (If you are thinking of walking this, both Calzafilla and Ledigos have places to stay. We just elected to go a little farther.)

This is manzanilla (camomile tea) with a tapa of marinated olives. There was a hard chocolate candy on the saucer, which was left undisturbed. 

It was another 4 km or so to our stopping point. Terradillos is quite small, but has two albergues. 

Our dorm room sleeps 6, but the beds are not bunks. 😀 Which is nice!

Atapuerca to Burgos, in cold rain

Hello, everyone. We got into Burgos yesterday about noon. The walk was wet but otherwise okay. We turned off the Strava at the McDonald's at the edge of town. (We go to McDonald's if we need to use internet, and the ones in Spain have good cafe con leche, too.) Then we looked at our info on the place we had reserved the day before and thawed out a bit before going on into the main part of the city. 

Breakfast was at 0800 at an open cafeteria/bar on the way, just before the rain started. 

The first church we came to, after McDonald's.  The crucifix inside is really nice, but when I tried to add it in here Blogger turns the photo sideways. 

Today, we are having a rest day. We went to the Museo de la Evolution Humana, where the artefacts from the Atapuerca Mountains archeological discoveries are still being made. The museum is really neat, the anthropology museum we have been in. 

This nifty fellow is an atmospheric decoration near the entrance. He and his buddies (horse, rooster, wolf, maybe some others) are just fun. The exhibits about the geology and archeology are really neat. And by consolidating all of the work from the area together, over quite a collection of cave discoveries, they are able to build an exhibition about the continuum of the people and animals over the epoch.

The gift shop had a cute fabric tote with a print of the cave but I thought about carrying it for 300 miles to Santiago and left it in the shop. 

Nájera to Santo Domingo de Calzados

Hello, everyone.  I didn't post yesterday,  so this post covers yesterday's walk.

We walked from Nájera to Santo Domingo. This Santo Domingo, by the way, is not the guy started the Dominican order. He was, however,  that Domingo's tocayo: his mom had asked the well known holy man to pray for her to have a son. When the son arrived the following year, she named him after the famous patron of the pilgrim travelers and founder of towns. And holy monk. He is one of the "engineer saints" of the Camino.

We did about 23 km on a glorious day. 

This was a really delicious tortilla, with bacon and cheese on top.

View of Santo Domingo from the trail. (DH the nearest pilgrim in photo)

Tortilla de verduras con gambas

Hello,  everyone.  We miss so many things about the Camino. And some of them are not really practical to recreate at home.

Tortilla, fortunately, can be made at home. 

Yum.

Trying a new recipe

Hello,  everyone. It's cold outside, so it's a good day to do sewing and baking.

Well, it's determined to put it in sideways. I think y'all can see reasonably well. The recipe is from Cherry Republic's web site, Sharon's Cherry Scones. I didn't like the way her recipe says to shape them, and it looks a lot like a buttermilk biscuit recipe, so I patted and gently rolled the dough to 1/2" thick and used my 2" biscuit cutter. With this system, I got 28 round Cherry flavored biscuits. 

I sampled one with some cream cheese and it was good. Also very tender!

This one looks like a winner, and it helps to use up some of the dried sour cherries that are in the pantry. 

Cold weather has arrived

Hello, everyone. It's really chilly out today, it was yesterday,  and it's supposed to be tomorrow, too. We call it "winter", no fancy names needed. It's warmer than a lot of places farther north, but it is in the 40'sF. 

I had some tallow in the house, left over from making chili, and I melted it and poured it over some birdseed. 

When it firms up it can be broken into chunks for the poor little birds outside.