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 already announced that another ‘Food on the go’ would appear on the blog soon, since I was on vacation again. It is the pretty cool thing about having finished school: you have time to go wherever you want. So I was in a couple of cities and towns again. Let me show you, what precious food I found there.
First, I was in Berlin again and visited a vegan food market there. For refreshind, we tried the flavoured coconut milk with a cute design. The ‘Veganz’ shop was pretty expensive, you’d better buy normal stuff like fruit, vegetables and bread in a normal supermarket. But there is everything and more in a vegan version available. I had a chocolate coconut milk, which I liked, because it reminded me of Bounty.
If you want some interesting and cheap food, you should walk around the area of the Adalbertstraße. There are many restaurants and bars offering food of foreign origin. I had an awesome falafel wrap at a Lebanese restaurant which offers a lot of Oriental vegetarian and vegan meals.
The next day I was in Leipzig, where I found a neat place called “Bagel Brothers”. I am not that into bagels, but the hop offers homemade apple lemonade with fresh apple juice. Perfect on a hot day!
Walk along Karli street for some good vegetarian and vegan food. You should try one of the kebab shops, they often have fancy menus with falafel, tofu and seitan fillings as a substitute for the traditional meat stuff. I had a wrap with cheese and spinach which made me very happy (you do realize I like wraps).
I was also in France for several days where we visited Nice, Cannes, Monaco and Marseille. On our first day in Nice, we found a bakery providing traditional sweets of southern France, offering these buttery cookies and the traditional navettes, butter cookies with orange flavour. I personally liked the violet flavoured cookie above, but I am sure it tastes best as a part of a triffle or cheesecake, since it was a bit dry.
The best food I had was at a small restaurant a few metres away from our hotel in Nice. ‘Chez Moi’ offers a delicious menu with three courses for 15 Euros. You have the choice between about 3 different meals per course. When we had dinner there, we only saw French people there, which means this place is not a tourist trap. I had a very interesting salad with roasted bread, fresh tomatos, peaches and fennel. The main course was a risotto with vegetables and pickled citrus – try this and you will know what heaven is like. As a dessert, I chose a slice of apricot tart and concluded that I have to learn more about french patisserie. Danm, they know how to cook!
In Marseille, we proceeded with exploring French pastries. First thing, we ate our was through fruity macarons and then I fell in love with a citrus meringue tart.
The markets in southern France offer a lot of good fruit and vegetables which are ripe and full of flavour. We went across a food market and had some figs, apricots, watermelon and honeydew.
In Cannes, we tried some sugared churros. These are really fun to me, because I love finger food and food that can be dipped into different sauces. Maybe I should give these another try (The last time I fried churros, one of them exploded and my whole kitchen was messed up).
In Le Souk, a restaurant at the Old Harbor in Marseille, you can try very good Moroccan food. We ordered couscous and got a big pot with a kind of spiced vegetable soup, chickpeas, raisins with chinnamon, chicken with curcuma and chili paste. It is a lot of fun to sit together with friends and combine the different components.
And last but not least: our food at Lafayette Gourmet. We tried Belgian chocolate and caramel soft ice cream in the mall. I had a salad with parmesan and a vinaigrette dressind in a cute little glass bottle.
One highlight was the creamy mousse au chocolat. I really need to make this at home or look for a Lafayette Gourmet in Berlin, so I can buy some fresh mousse as a dessert.
Hope this post gave you some inspiration!
Ahoy y’all, another eternity since my last post has passed, I know, I know.
But I am not dead or something. Just had a tough time getting through my finals and guess what? I survived.
Yeah, I was quite busy but now I kind of have my life back – or should I rather say: ‘my life has just started’?
So, to get down a little between the exams, I travelled around quite a bit. Just a little. Okay, I pretty much ate my way through the heart of Europe.
First stop: Heidelberg. Heidelberg is a really beautiful town near the German-French border. You can see a lot of the French and Italian influence – gelato, chocolaterie, épicerie… yes, it is a really romantic and very yummy place to be!
This spice shop is a really fancy little place you find quite hidden in the main shopping street if you go through one of the passages. If there is a place in Germany where you can get every kind of pepper in the world – this is it. There was a really great variety of oils, spices and salt there.
They even had grilled grasshoppers there! Argh!
I did some turbo sightseeing that day since I was on my own and undisturbed, so there was also plenty of time to chill out in cafés. I sat down in the neat chocolaterie YilliY in a tiny street near the main tourist track (it was not that crowded, mind you), where you can enjoy the best hot chocolate and listen to live piano music. The paintings are worth a look, too.
To cool down, you should not miss trying a homemade ice tea from The Fresh Tea Shop or some freshly squeezed juice at a Chiquita stall.
Second stop: Berlin. Well, I was not in Berlin to report what I am eating, so not on the hunt for fancy food, either. But if you come near Wonder Waffle or the sweet crêperie which says ‘Eat Crêpes, No Crap’, make sure you don’t miss these mouthwatering sweets.
I was on a tour through Italy. Yeah, I was, no kidding. (Milan – Sirmione – Verona – Venice) So besides the typical ‘pizza and pasta’, which is of course fantastic, we had some fancier stuff, as well.
Pizza ROLL, anyone?
Or some rick dark choc muffin, or a zabaione mountain tart?
Or crispy cannoli with the creamiest cream?
Hang on, I have one more for you:
Perfect ice cream! It is atually so popular that you have to take a number to order it.
And the last one (for now) is Prague. My most recent trip gave me the opportunity to experience the delight of eating trdelnik, a thin sugared roll of dough – you can’t miss it, its delicious aroma is carried down all the streets!
And finally, some more ice cream – Absinth is a Czech specialty and there are plenty Absinth-flavoured things to buy. Go for the ice cream, it is sweet and creamy. I do not even know if there was actually alcohol inside – but if there was, it must have been quite little.
So that’s it for now. But I shall post more often from now on. I have a neat truffle recipe waiting for you and I will travel some more in less than a fortnight – Berlin, Leipzig and several cities at the Côte d’Azur are waiting to be visited!