Norman Darlo
From my diary, on the Camino de Santiago:
After three hours on the trail in ever-increasing heat, I came across the Restaurante Nossa Senhora da Cabeça (Our Lady of the Head (?!)) and dinner never tasted so good! Roasted loin of pork in a delicious sauce (I’m usually quite good at reverse-engineering recipes, but Portuguese sauces somehow defy me), served with a twist of orange, with homemade fries, salad and ubiquitous collard greens, and a mound of rice cooked to perfection – none of your al dente nonsense! I decided to reward myself with a small bottle of local white, but the waiter brought out a full sized bottle, and when I protested he explained that if I drank just half, that’s all I’d pay for. Well I’d wanted to sample the homemade pudim (pudding) but servings here are uniformly gargantuan, so it’s a mystery how desserts sell at all. I poured a third deliciously cold glass of vinho as I mopped up the last of that sauce, then looked at the bottle with a suspicion I’d slightly overshot the halfway point. Well, I couldn’t pour it back, and who can say exactly where the 37.5 cl point is on a wine bottle anyway?!
brambles
and morning glories
share the hedgerows —
food for body
and for soul
languorous lunch ~
wine and coffee
each doing
their own thing
in my head
hidden city gate…
I continue
my postprandial
extramural
circumambulation
— in Valença, Portugal.
You just made me so hungry. I am also not a fan of al dente but I am a fan of good wine.
Just like me, then 🙂
Would love to taste this entire plate and the white! That is cool to order a large bottle and only pay for half if you don’t drink it all. And your poetry was well done too Norman. Enjoyed the dinner and dessert! (poem) 🙂
Thank you very much, Carol! The dessert was meant to be three smaller desserts, but Virily served them all up in one bowl 😀
Oh well, like a box of chocolates, you never know what you will get. 🙂
Nice to share Portuguese cuisine with you watching the brambles and convolulus share the hedge as wine and coffee share your head at the Lady of the head,
Food of the land-a-person-is-visiting is really ( partly ) why a person is visiting, and part of the memory in a visceral sort of way… ?
Very much so, in my case at least, Kathy 🙂 That series of double-spaced lines was intended as three 5-line poems (ostensibly tanka/kyoka) But Virily murders the formatting!
Now I want tomatoes, but it is the best season to purchase them here.
Really? I find they taste much better later in the year!
It is said to sense the taste of food.
That is definitely true, Elenka! 🙂