ZenWan: You're right, it's a very beautiful country, although the heat does get to me in the summer, particularly because it's a Mediterranean climate, which means no summer rainfall. And month after month of baking heat with no rain becomes unbearable after a while. I long for the huge summer storms of Africa, where the heat builds up and builds up until - with a huge clap of thunder and flashes of lightning - the rain explodes out of the sky like a waterfall. And afterwards the earth sings, and all is clean and fresh.
adaliabooks: Do you write? If not you should give it a try, because I think you might be good at it ;)
ZenWan: They do indeed have wood-fired ovens all over Spain and Portugal, and the bread they make in them is out-of-this-world. I am often stunned to see locals filling their supermarket trolleys with plastic-wrapped, mass-produced, pre-sliced, soggy cotton-wool stuff called 'bread', when you can wander around to the nearest bakery and buy a little bit of heaven. :-)
But they don't much use the ovens for pizzas, and most of the pizzas I've had here have been the deep-dish type, which I loathe. There are a few reasonable pizza places around, but very few. I love Italian food, and there are a lot of 'Italian' restaurants here, but they seem to specialise in the kind of food that package tourists like. Few of them are authentic at all.
adaliabooks: I don't mind deep dish, but I do prefer thin crust. Yeah, Italian restaurants are like that here too, but we just tend to make our own :)
I had some of the nicest bread I've ever tasted when I was in Spain, but it was when we took the boat over to Tangier. Don't know if it was wood fired or not, but I think it had polenta / corn meal in it. I just remember eating about 3 baskets between my mother, brother and I.
I'm not a fan of sliced loaves at all, I don't have the time to bake bread as much as I'd like so we tend to buy from the local bakery or the bakers bread from the supermarket (which isn't great, but still better than most packaged sliced stuff)
ZenWan: Fortunately the simple local Portuguese food is always good - grilled fish or chicken with fries and salad and great bread, not to mention great wine. And my favourite is chicken piri-piri, chicken with hot sauce - if they know you, they'll make the sauce extra hot - yum!
Hmmmm I'm getting hungry!
adaliabooks: I've had piri piri chicken, but only from Nandos... Not sure if you get them there? Yours sounds much better :)
Tried 3 times to get this reply to post this morning, before I gave up and saved it. I'll try to get it to work now...
Thank you for the kind remarks about my writing - no, I don't write in any professional way, just posts here and there. I tried it once, but I am always crippled by perfectionism and the dilemma of never knowing what to add or what to take away, so it ended up taking forever to get even one page done.
I'll leave the writing to
Ghostwriter, who seems to be doing well. :-)
I don't know why I said anything good about Spanish bread, because I dislike it intensely. It's strangely dry and biscuity, with no taste at all. But if you found the cornmeal bread, which the Portuguese also make, then that would be better. Local bakers are always the best ones to look for, mass-produced anything is not something I enjoy.
Nando's is originally a South African company, started by someone who wanted to try to reproduced the chicken he ate here in Portugal. (There is a huge Portuguese population in SA). Now it's a very successful company in many countries, except in Portugal, where I believe it didn't do well at all. I suppose people already had the 'real thing'. I've never tasted their chicken, but it's supposed to be very good.
Still looking forward to trying one of your pizzas - maybe one day when you branch out and have franchises all over the world....
A quick hello to all of you before I must run. Busy day today, with no time for posting. I hope that all is well in your worlds. :-)
