The Blog

Today was the first time I really got to experience the streets of the city. A few of us woke up in the middle of the day (nice to do that on vacation) and walked to Placa de la Bouqueria. This is one of those open air markets that Anthony Bourdain and his kind are always walking through to get ingredients for a cooking segment. I was in heaven!

I’ll have more pictures of the market later…

From there, I met up with the entire group to tour the Pablo Picasso museum. Honestly, Salvador Dali is my favorite Spanish painter, but I really enjoyed the museum. I will be seeing Dali on Monday or Tuesday.

This was the only drawing I could find of an African.

One room (pictured above) had no paintings in it, but was so breathtaking that I had to take photos. By the way, we were not allowed to take photographs in the museum at all. I had to sneak them in.

After the museum, we came back to our apartment and I cooked clam pasta for those who like seafood, which turned out to be just four of the seven of us. Fine. More for us. (*sticks out tongue) I’ve posted the recipe below.

Ingredients: olive oil, garlic, flat-leaf parsley, clams (in shell), white cooking wine, and long pasta.

1. Place clams in a large dry pot or pan. Make sure clams are in one layer. Cover and heat on low heat until clams have opened and are swimming in their juice.
2. In another skillet, cover a medium to large sized pan with a generous amount of olive oil. On medium low heat, saute two to three cracked cloves of garlic in the oil until cloves are lightly golden brown. Then remove the cloves from the pan and let oil stand.
3. Remove clams from pot with slotted laddle, place in bowl and set aside.
4. Pour off the juice of the clams into a separate bowl and set aside.
5. Bring water to boil for pasta. Boil pasta until pasta is al dente.
6. Remove pasta and transfer to pan of garlic olive oil. Turn heat to medium. Pour in clam juice. Pour in about a cup and a half of white wine.
7. Add in shell (or shelled) clams to pasta. Stir and let wine, clam juice and olive oil coat pasta and clams. Add salt to taste.
8. Add chopped flat-leaf parsely and stir until parsley is spread evenly into pasta.
9. Serve immediately, with bread and wine.