Ponferrada to Villafranca del Bierzo

Hello, everyone.  There was no post yesterday because there was not enough wifi in the building to use it in the room.

We walked to Villafranca on a pleasant day, with dry weather for most of the day and sunshine for part of the day. On the way to Villafranca we found a little museum about the vines and wines of the Bierzo region. (Bierzo has an official origin system for wines, in which if the grape varieties, growing methods, and processing qualify the vintner can label his wines as Bierzo wines.) They had a number of pieces of equipment and other displays available for viewing. 

I guess this art piece is an old fashioned wine bottle?

Villafranca has the distinction of having a Pardon Door. There are only 2 on the Camino before Santiago. The idea was that people traveling to Santiago might fall ill en route and be unable to complete their trip to visit the shrine.(As in by becoming disabled or dying. Travel was a lot more difficult in the middle ages.) If they made it as far as a church with a Pardon Door, they could still obtain the graces they would have gotten in Santiago.

We spent the night in a former collegio, a school for older students rather like high school.

Our room had something I had never seen before: an electric toilet seat. We didn't try out its functions because the controller was labeled entirely in, I think, Japanese.

French style shallow poached pork steaks

Hello, everyone.  Recently I tried making shallow poached fish. It was great, even with swai. (Swai being tricky to make tasty.) This inspired me to try the method with something else.

The method, on Youtube. This is from Chef  Stepháne. 

I had some pork loin steaks. Following the method, I salted and peppered both sides. Also I chopped up a shallot.

Put shallot into nonstick pan and added the meat.

Added broth (chicken because it's pork) and wine and so on as in the recipe, which I found in his cookbook that was on hand. (It's hiding in a recipe for fish with tomato and onion reduction or something like that, I just skipped the part about tomatoes etc and the rest was as in the video.) Put the cover on and let it gently cook just like in the video.

Finished as per the video and put it on the plate. YUM! And completely low carb.

Remembering Spain in Texas (edited)

Hello, everyone.

We miss the Camino so much...we drink Spanish wine, we eat Spanish foods, and we also have Spanish tapas with our wine in the afternoon.

Today it is olives stuffed with anchovy paste. On our last pilgrimage, we sometimes made dinner of a tallish can of these and the local regional wine.

(Edited to re-upload the picture.)

Recap of Camino Primitivo: Lugo was a rest day

 Hello, everyone.

I think that Lugo was talked about with some detail in the en route posts. Today I will only put up some photos that I think were not in the first discussion.

Breakfast pastry and coffee the morning of our rest day. The pastry has vegetables in it, if I remember it correctly.

The game board from the Roman house museum. The ancient Roman house, or its successor buildings, had been used off and on almost continuously for well over 1000 years.

Wine with our dinner on the rest day. The little bit of pastry is the last of a "New Mother's Cake" which was custard and chocolate in a crust. Very tasty!

The Camino stays with us

 Hello, everyone.

Even though this year we have not been able to walk the Camino--not even a short route--there are things that stay with us.

We have been watching Camino videos on Youtube. (Sarah Dhooma's videos give a pretty good idea of path surfaces.) 

Occasionally we make tapas for dinner. We use a baguette recipe to make the barra bread. Sometimes we make garlic soup, too.

And we drink the Spanish and Portuguese wines.

These are three we have tried recently. The first is a lovely white, the other two are reds. We liked the bad rabbits a little better than the other red. (All found at Spec's.)

Israel pilgrimage, ninth in series

Hello, everyone.

Today will cover the remainder of the third day of visiting sites.

En route from the northern part of the Holy Land to the more central part, besides the sites of Qumran and the Baptism site, we stopped at Jericho and at the Dead Sea.

Jericho has been a major city for thousands of years. Joshua came there and conquered it--it was not small even then. Jesus came there and encountered Zaccaeus, the tax collector, perched in a sycamore tree along the path. Our bus drove past the site of the sycamore tree and we viewed its descendant. Our guide told us that this is the only sycamore tree in the area. There has "always," meaning as long as anyone knows, been a sycamore on this spot, a sapling will grow there and replaces the old one over time.

The sycamore tree has a protective fence. There is a small play area inside the fence, too.


We went to the Franciscan sisters' convent for Mass. Their back patio, which is covered, is set up to be an outdoor chapel. It is in a lovely green area, and there are peafowl strolling the grass and cleaning up the bugs in the shrubs.

One of the peafowl

About a half block away from the convent is the big mosque of the city.

View of the mosque from the sidewalk in front of the convent

The mosque began playing a sermon (?) in Arabic on the loudspeakers of the minaret while we were having Mass on the patio of the convent.

I can just imagine how pleasant it is to be quietly offering morning prayers, or midnight prayers, or vespers, and having the loudspeaker kick off and try to drown out every other sound in its vicinity.

There was an Orthodox church nearby as well, but we didn't get a good photo of it.

Jericho has a number of shops that are like shops we commonly see in Mexico. This is a produce market. (Other photos were too blurry.)

Jericho has an ancient palace that is being excavated.

We ate lunch at the Dead Sea, at a resort restaurant. After we ate there was some time to experience the famous salt water. Which is kind of in the "have a little water with your salt" range of concentration.

The supervised area of this resort. They marked the lifeguard's area of responsibility with the float line out in the water.
The bottom varied between squishy, slippery mud, to a latex like surface, to gritty sandy precipitates. Yes, you will float in the water. I went out into it and tried to squat down on my heels in the warm water, but I couldn't. The water floated my rear end before it touched my heels.

The resort had both water spigots near the shore (to rinse your face if needed and your feet) and also showers with rental lockers and rental towels. In addition to the restaurant, which seemed to be set up for groups mostly, they had shops and a bar. There was a nice path down from the shops area to the waterside.

The Dead Sea is a lot smaller than it used to be. As there is no outlet, and the losses there are from evaporation, I think that a decrease in water arriving is the reason. The only source, as far as I know, for water into the Dead Sea is the Jordan River. Which also supplies drinking water and irrigation water to many, many people before reaching its end here.

After visiting the Dead Sea we drove to Bethlehem to our new hotel. It was about two doors down from a dental lab.

We don't think we would want any dental work there!

A statue of the Archangel Gabriel in front of the St. Gabriel Hotel in Bethlehem. (Link goes to Tripadvisor, has capsule information and pictures of the hotel.) The lobby has an upper level that includes the bar and seating areas. In the evenings, we sampled the red Israeli wine they had and it was good.

Israel pilgrimage, third in series

Hello, everyone.

My last post was the end of our first day visiting holy sites. Today's post covers the beginning.

We headed out from breakfast and over to Cana. As many of my readers already know, Jesus' first miracle was at Cana, when he turned water into wine at a wedding. (This miracle is recounted in the gospel of St. John.) The church at that site has become a place where couples renew their wedding vows.

There were about 7 couples, including us, who wished to renew vows. As the Mass schedules at the various shrine churches are somewhat busy, and we needed to be out of the church before the next pilgrim group came in to have Mass, after Mass we all did our vow renewal "Moonie style"--all of us gathered in the front in our pairs and Father led us in unison recitation of the lines. Then he blessed all of us. (For those who don't remember, Sun Myung Moon famously used a football stadium to conduct a mass wedding of his followers once, something like a hundred couples. Pictures are floating around and likely on the web someplace. Thus my reference to "moonie style.")

The Franciscan sisters convent has a window onto the church courtyard and couples can purchase a lovely certificate to fill out in remembrance of their vow renewal. 

The pictures in books and online do not convey how intimate the space is. This is not a large church. The brown at the right in the photo is the metal gate into the courtyard.

Above the door, apparently during recent renovations, the Jerusalem cross was placed. Like almost all of the churches in the Holy Land, this building is not ancient. The centuries, and conquerors, were not kind to the older buildings and most of the sites have relatively recent structures for the pilgrims and visitors.

After Mass and wedding renewals, our guide showed us the way to a shop, owned by Christians, and the shop owner gave us all a shot of wedding wine. Wedding wine, at least in this area, is really, really sweet.

The shop also sold other items, including pomegranate wine which, when we drank it a couple of days later was quite nice. Their standard packaging included foam padding to prevent bottles breaking in luggage. Very nice!

The street that led to the church had this interesting item. I think it's a sundial. The wires hanging down, if they aren't to steady it in winds, are a mystery. If they are actually guy wires, they seem a little loose. IMHO. The ones on power lines are always taut.

Bottling day

Hello, everyone.
Today the long-watched carboy of grapefruit wine was decanted and bottled. (Beginning another long wait.)
We had to rearrange all the bottles to make room for the newest batch. Here they are lined up on the table and ready for storage:

Banana in front, new grapefruit at the back.

Fruitcake

Hello, everyone.

A couple of weeks back, we made the annual batch of fruitcakes.

Yum.

As y'all can see, we ran short of racks for cooling.

This recipe appeared in the McAllen Monitor some 30 years ago, as part of a piece on champagne. I make it with a still white wine instead, not much liking champagne, since it calls for 1 cup (250 ml) of the stuff and there's still the rest of the bottle that needs to be drunk or otherwise used up.

We did give some away and ship some out. GS1 is said to love his first fruitcake. The remainder keeps reaching its sugary hands out to me and whispering "eat me...eat me...you know you want to!"

Tomorrow we begin the new year. May you all have un prospero aňo y felicidad. (Sorry about the strange looking enye, the symbol insert button has many things but seems to omit this common element in Spanish spelling.)

Banana wine

Hello, everyone.

A few months back, the neighbor's banana plants fruited. Giant stalks of yellow bananas drooped down. DH watched them ripen and droop and asked the neighbor what he was planning to do with them. The neighbor said that DH could have them all!

Banana wine

The wine is now ready for drinking and it has proved to be a dry white. We mostly just sip it chilled.

And this recipe didn't even use up all of the bananas from the plants!

Prepping for Thanksgiving

Hello, everyone.

We have wine corks. Oh, my, do we have wine corks. So when I saw the many, many wine cork craft ideas at Pinterest, I was very interested.

This week was the time to use up most of our wine corks on hand.

The 8 cork pumpkins are in one of the larger Amazon book boxes, the one that the Camino wall calendar came in. There isn't a lot of extra room besides the pumpkins!

The leaves are felt pieces, which I took the suggestions at Wee Folk Art to stabilize before cutting. It was a hand workout, but it went well.

The question now is whether the pumpkins should sit in their glory, unlabeled, at each place, or whether there should be name labels. (Our bunch is pretty laid-back, so I may skip the labels.)

And for a bonus, there are only 35 or so wine corks left on hand at the moment. Re-use for the win!

One of the (many) grapefruit cake recipes out there

Hello, everyone.

My sweetie has been trying to use up grapefruit a lot this year.

He's made a batch of grapefruit wine. (Seen here in secondary fermentation, under the carboy jacket with beer bottles on it. After this he clarified it and let it set in the big jug some more, and then he bottled some and racked the rest...ran out of containers.)

Grapefruit wine in the back, a beer kit in the front. White bucket in background on floor contains sanitizing solution for cleaning hoses, testing equipment, and whatnot.

 Then he made a grapefruit cake recipe he found on the internet. It was a fairly basic white-ish cake. Used whole eggs, and had some zest and juice in it.

The grapefruit cake--which wanted to slide apart. Thus the toothpicks temporarily in the cake top!

Then he was supposed to pour a boiled-down juice glaze over all and make a frosting with confectioners sugar and juice and butter. (?) The icing wasn't that great at first, but the grapefuit flavor came out more over time. I told him he should try making the French pound cake (quatre quarts) with zest either instead of vanilla or in addition to it, and then pour the fruit glaze over that and call it a day. It might be really good.

Winter in South Texas

Hello, eveyone.

The Chamber of Commerce down here will probably love me for this post. But I saw a bird--while holding a camera--the other day, and also took some other pictures.

Sunshine coming through the branches of the Olmos tree.

 The Olmos tree hasn't dropped its leaves yet, because it waits until the new leaves come out in the spring to do that. It's fairly fast-growing (with water) and the birds love to perch in its branches.

"Are you looking at me?"

 The mockingbird is the Texas state bird. This one looks like he's a little suspicious of that strange human with the camera.

A rare bit of leaf color in the Valley

 This little Red Oak isn't growing very fast, but it did color up this winter. Behind it, the grapefruit trees and the tangerine tree. DH is going to try and make a batch of grapefruit wine this year.

Curly-leafed kale

Beets

And a couple of things from my cool-season garden. There is also a row of arugula that is going crazy. I'm trying all kinds of things to use it up!

Camino memories: Valdeiglesias

Hello, everyone.

In 2014, we stayed in the newer albergue in Valdeiglesias.

Y'all might remember this patio picture.

 We met a wonderfully friendly pair of hikers from Belgium there. They told us about their village in Belgium, called LaChouffe. The village has a brewery.

This past weekend, in Spec's wine shop in San Antonio (mmm, Rioja!) we found a bottle of the beer from LaChouffe. The hat worn by the little elf in the label picture is the regional hat of the village. He's wearing wooden shoes, too, so one supposes that the land around LaChouffe is rather damp. I'd love to visit the village some day.

We haven't opened it yet. It's a huge bottle and one wants to be able to do it justice.

One foot in front of the other

Hello, everyone.

On June 16 we passed on to Agueda, if memory serves, and met Mr. Simoes while walking through the town. Y'all may remember me mentioning his kindness on a post while we were on the road. He makes aged brandy.

Studying the guidebook before crossing a highway

Lovely tile art on a house

Local tourism council promotion of water wheels or windmills

Wine or Port production facility (out in the country)

Pretty old house on the street

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Path into the next town.

Plums on a tree on the patio--juicy but not tart.

Pilgrim laundry facility. After this, you hang the things on a line and hope it doesn't rain!

This was a private albergue/pensao at the outgoing city limits of Agueda. It has private rooms and also dorm facilities. The patio was lovely.

We walked a quarter mile back along the road to the grocery store and picked up some eggs and bread and such and had boiled eggs and bread and wine (and maybe some olives?) for dinner.