Barcelona. Sweet city of my dreams, city of culinary delight. May I present to you the culinary experience of a Strawberryelmo at the Mediterranean?
Barca really tickled my senses and I feel like I have eaten tons of new stuff there.
First of all, this city has a huge food market – La Boqueria. There are a lot of tourists there, but, hell, it’s really worth the stress. You get some really fresh and interesting food there.
… e.g. smoothies…
…mini burgers…
…eggs from various kinds of birds…
…pretty much everything to fulfill your dreams of sweet sin…
…and some organic (orgasmic) Mexican food. Be careful what you choose there, because the spicy stuff is really really spicy.
The district “el Gotic” has a lot of touristic restaurants with way too high prices. We were lucky and found a tiny restaurant offering fresh made pasta. Therefore I recommend to you the “Pasta Bar” in C. Escudellers street.
If you find a Spanish baker’s or pastry shop, go in there and buy something. We were lucky to have a bakery right around the corner next to our hotel. They had some great goods. I liked some puff pastry filled with crema Catalana, a kind of vanilla pastry cream. “Our” bakery (I call it this way because we bought a lot of things there) also made the best donuts ever. Seriously, forget about Dunkin’ Donuts. These soft babies are just perfect. I have never seen such a good donut dough.
Don’t miss churros with dulche de leche or chocolate sauce.
I also had a special ice cream with chocolate coating at Vioko’s. It was yummy, but not really worth the price of 4,5o Euros.
We were very happy to get to know El Cangrejo Loco, a noble but not terribly expensive reastaurant offering seafood. A friend of mine recommended it to us and told us the local specialty was not paella but fideuà, a skillet meal with seafood and small noodles. It was savoury heaven.
So if you ever get to Barcelona, I can tell you for sure you foodies will not be bored. And it this is one more reason to actually go there and try some things yourself.
I do not really want to call it ‘Thai food’, because I am not sure whether it was really Thai or just Thai style. But nevertheless, the following pictures and lines will give you information about my food adventure in Asia.
First of all: there is a lot to eat. Food stalls are an important part in markets and you have a big choice of sweet and savoury stuff. We tried a lot of things and I will tell you about them all in a second. Please excuse I did not take pictures of the food buffet we got in the camp, I can give you a short description about that. We always had boiled rice as a main component, some dishes contained noodles. There were always several dishes with stir-fried vegetables, such as cabbage, carrots and corn. There were different kinds of tofu or fried protein stuff used (the people did not know enough English to explain to us, what exactly it was) and also fried eggs. As a dessert, we always had fresh fruit, which was great, because thai pineapple and melon was reaaaaallllyyyyyyyy gooood. I miss that here. For real. Breakfast mostly contained fried stuff like bread or bananas, sometimes we had pancakes. Not bad for a sweet lover like me :).
And now some pictures, okay? Here we go.
I had exotic fruit in Thailand, such as mangosteen, papaya, pitahaya or lychee. Their taste is quite different, if you buy them in Europe. They are much sweeter and softer. My favourite was definitely mangosteen, this very soft and juicy fruit is just awesome.
This is a coconut pancake. It was yummy, the texture was quite similar to the one of American pacakes, only a little more sticky and with a coconut taste. Yum.
And here we have a fried banana. It was crispy like chips and interesting, too. But I liked the fried bananas wrapped in dough better. 
It was very hot on our trip to Ayutthaya. So I had some coconut juice to hydrate and cool down. Very refreshing.
Thai sweets. Cool, eh? These are a kind of yeast muffins, very light and fluffy. They are served with a cream, which tastes like vanilla pudding, whatever it is made of.
Now this is one dish we got during our work in the orphanage. We had a menu of 9 dishes, which were prepared by women living near the orphanage. They cooked everything right before your eyes and I guess you can’t get a dish more Thai than the one made by a Thai granny? Thise one was a little spicy, with small tangly noodles and lots of you sauce.
Another dish you could choose was this one: stir fried rice with vegetables. I really liked the way the rice and the vegetables were balanced. It was pretty much my favourite one.
This one you could order extra. One day, when I was sick of rice, I just ordered vegetables and got a plate full of fresh, lightly fried ones in a really yummy sauce (tasted like soy cauce with tomatos, maybe).
And finally, I have a step-by-step instruction for you. We made stir fried noodles in our ecohouse, and although I do not have exact measurements, I can still show you how it works.
This is what you need: Oil for the pan, garlic, salt, sugar, tofu, cabbage, baby corn, carrots, eggs and boiled rice noodles.
First sauté 1 tsp garlic.
Add 1 egg and stir-fry it. Add tofu.
Throw in some carrots and corn.
Add cabbage leaves and rice noodles. Pour over some soy sauce, 1 tbsp sugar and a little salt.
Et voilà!
I really hope you enjoyed some of my Thailand reports here and on my other blog. This is the very last one, I promise. But if you are interested, I can give you more information, just ask.