Segovia and Cochinillo

With lots of visitors lately, we have been making the tourist rounds in the Madrid area. It is a definite blessing to have friends visit with us!

Monday, we took a trip to Segovia, Spain. A small town about an hour north of Madrid. It is home to a castle and a Roman aqueduct.

It is also famous for its local dish: cochinillo (roasted piglet). It is a very popular dish at Christmas time here in Madrid. As the holidays get closer the supermarkets will have meat cases with baby pigs all very nice placed together and plastic wrapped, ready to be taken home for Christmas dinner.

Neither our guests, nor Jeff and I had ever tried the Spanish dish, so we decided to have a nice meal at a Segovian restaurant called "Asi Nos Ponen Huevos como Gallinas"....I'm not really sure what exactly the name is supposed to mean.....translated it means: "We'll be like chickens laying eggs".......

Anyways, so we all tried the local dish: cochinillo. This is what arrived as my main course:

(I can't get blogger to turn my picture the right way....)

Yes, that is a foot and a tail. Jeff ended up with an ear on his piece... I will say that the meat was really tender, and didn't exactly taste how I expected, though one is defintely thrown off by the sight of the tiny foot and tail....

Quick Breakfast

The boys started school this past week. I have given myself two goals for this school year:

1. I will be at the bus stop when they get off the bus in the afternoon.

2. I will make them at least one hot breakfast a week.

The boys get on the bus at 8:00AM, and get off the bus around 6:00PM.

It’s a long day for someone so little, so I wanted to send them off with a full feeling in their stomachs. It has been a challenge to find ways to make a quick, hot breakfast that toddlers will eat when they would be happy with a daily dose of the marshmallow cereal that Grandma sent from the States.

I had discovered earlier that you can make pancakes in the sandwich maker (my new favorite kitchen appliance), and that you could refrigerate the batter for up to a week, so making just a few pancakes at a time.

I also discovered, via some comments on facebook, that you could microwave an egg mixed with a little milk in a small bowl and have perfect scrambled eggs. It was only about 2 minutes in the microwave, and they come out in the perfect shape to use for an egg sandwich (although we ate them ‘plain’). The boys love ‘em, so they’ve now become a regular on the breakfast rotation.

I think my next goal should be preparing quick, good-for-you dinners for just the two of them. Jeff and I usually eat a large meal at the lunch hour (around 2:00pm here in Spain) and then sometimes I’ll reheat the leftovers for the boys for dinner and we eat something light later on (around 10:00ish). Lately the boys have been having a lot of white rice mixed with tomato sauce, a Spanish staple. They do like this meal….but it has very little actual nutrition.

Goal for the next week (or whenever I actually get up the initiative): discover actual nutritious dinner meals that don’t take very long, and that they will eat…