To Market, to Market!
We have managed to start up a weekly tradition here on Sundays. The girls look forward to Sundays the most, and say it’s the “best day ever!”. We get up and head up the big, steep hill up towards the cathedral. When we get to the top of the hill, there’s a little café. We stop there so Jon and I can get a café con leche and the girls can get a lemon granizado (it’s essentially a frozen lemonade slushy drink that they sell literally everywhere here). We sit and talk about something the girls are curious to learn. We will spend about half an hour learning something – whether that be economics, medieval history, or financial lessons so far. Depends on what they feel inquisitive about that day that we have some knowledge about or have brought a non-fiction book about with us to learn from.
After 30-45 minutes at the café, we continue on to the market. We browse the clothes vendors and imagine how pretty the dresses would look on us. We look at the two produce vendors to see what is available at each before deciding what to buy from each of them to stock up for the week. We go to the table of random food items, as I refer to it. Here you will find buckets of various types of olives, pickles, and little peppers in brine. You will find cured meats, honey, dates, cheese, and a variety of other items. There’s the van that sells a variety of cured meats and cheeses. And the amazing Chicken Man, as we call him. He has a huge rotisserie and has dozens of chickens he’s cooking whole. They are stuffed with an amazing herb blend. He packs the entire chicken into a container and douses it in an amazing sauce (aka salsa – here, every sauce is just called salsa no matter what kind of sauce it is). It is so unbelievably delicious and means we do not need to cook meat for today’s meal! Some weeks there are also freshly made churros, which we are sure to buy when we see them!
After we finish stocking up at the market, we head home. We try to stock up on as much produce as we can that will last. While our fridges are smaller here, you will typically find ours full to bursting with fruits and veggies on Sunday afternoons, which will slowly dwindle throughout the week. We buy some produce at the grocers but try to limit that since the quality isn’t always the best there.
Once we get home, our next step depends on whether the churro people were there today or not. If they were, then I get making the Valor drinking chocolate and we sit down to have our churros con chocolate as a family. If not, we just move on to the next part of our day and have the drinking chocolate as a dessert after lunch, possibly with some cookies or other treats we have found to dip in them in lieu of churros.
Lunch is always the biggest meal of the day here, and is typically served at 2 or 3 p.m. Jon gets to making a risotto, typically using white wine, chicken broth, lemon zest and lemon juice, shredded cheese, garlic, leeks, and sometimes other veggies from the market like finely diced red pepper. While he’s working on that, I’m working on food prep. I’m busy washing up and peeling/chopping up all the fruit and veggies that need it. Things like apples, pears, grapes, etc. we just wash and leave. But cutting up peppers, carrots, melons, oranges, peaches/nectarines, etc. makes it so it’s easy to grab a plate of cut-up fruit and veggies when we are hungry and need a quick and somewhat healthy snack. I don’t think any of us have truly adjusted to eating our meals at such odd times (9 a.m. ish for breakfast, 2-3 p.m. for lunch, and 7:30-9 p.m. for dinner). We find ourselves needing snacks around noon and 5 to keep us going between meals!
Once Jon’s risotto is done, I pause where I’m at with food prep so we can eat our market chicken, risotto, and some cut-up veggies. This is our favourite meal every week! So yummy, so flavourful, and always enough leftovers to have this as a meal another day!
We go back to finishing up our food prep unless we are having drinking chocolate after lunch. The girls will usually stick around for part of our food prep time, as they LOVE to help out in the kitchen and want to wash and cut up as much as they can. Unfortunately, we are limited to only one cutting board here. They help with washing, sorting, and peeling while I chop. Eventually, they run out of things they can do and then usually disappear down to the playroom.
We will take some downtime during siesta to relax before we move on to getting a dish prepped up for the weekly rooftop patio potluck with everyone. That usually starts around 7:30 p.m. We all eat well and socialize for quite a while. There are usually at least 15 kids around that all disappear off together or in small groups to play when they aren’t eating. By 11 p.m. we start attempting to drag our kids back indoors to get them ready for bed. Except this past week, when most families (us included!) left around 10 p.m. to head over to the fiesta instead.
These Sunday market, yummy food, socialization, and family time days have been the favourite day for all four of us while we are staying here!