Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, pancake day. 57 years ago Shrove Tuesday was 17th, my birthday. According to my mother, I narrowly avoided being christened “Pancake”. Good Darwin, being saddled with Curd at school was bad enough; can you imagine the torture a child would be forced to endure having been given a handle like Pancake Curd? I suppose it would go nicely with the lemon juice on the pancakes thus blending seamlessly with “Lemon Curd”. As a kind of defence mechanism, I used to challenge people to come up with something original.

The other thing that goes very well with the lemon juice and sugar on pancakes is fresh strawberries, sliced 3-4 mm thick and wrapped in the lemon juice and sugar soaked pancake. This is what we had for lunch and I commend it to the house.

I had grabbed an opportunity on a dry but overcast morning to break out and take el perrito, Scamp, for a stroll down into Jalon and back through the vines. I timed it well ‘cos, no sooner had I returned but the rain did, also, and remained for the rest of the day.

For our rainy evening meal, Chris, a bit of a curry chef, spent all the wet afternoon preparing his version of Goan stuffed crab as a starter to be followed by chicken biryani and yellow split peas – and very excellent it was, too.

My mother says the weather was fine when I was born. According to the weather forecast it is supposed to be fine again for my birthday tomorrow. That’ll make a nice change from the rain.

Having arrived in Spain yesterday to substantial sunshine, albeit with clouds shrouding some of the higher hills, today dawned with clouds on the deck and a constant dripping of rain. It was expected to remain all day. With temperatures hovering around 6°C/42°F, there was little alternative but plan a casual gastronomic day in.

Chris and Yvonne had a filleted turbot in their freezer. Rummaging around in their fridge revealed that they also happened to have some chicory and leaks. We were already half-way to Mr Stein’s Ragout of Turbot and Scallops so Carol and I decided to pop out in search of the remaining ingredients; ‘t would be my turn in the kitchen for the evening meal.

The rain continued. Having spent five minutes learning how to turn on our rental Renault’s windscreen wipers, Carol and I drove to a supermarket in Benissa and found what was needed to complete Mr. Stein’s creation. Turbot just had to be accompanied by a couple of bottles of albariño. The supermarket was offering two-for-one on some pre-packaged pulpo (octopus) which we simply couldn’t resist grabbing for lunch.

 The rain continued. We returned with our booty.

The rain continued. Lunchtime arrived. I opened the first package of pulpo. An unpleasant smell not resembling any octopus I had previously met hit my nostrils. Curious – the package was still well-within date. I opened the second package. That smelt much more like octopus. Darn! We’d got some rotten pulpo with four days still to run on its best-before date. I returned the suspect octopus to its packaging and plan B swung into action; lunch became some cold meats and cheese.

The rain continued. Carol and I returned to Benissa accompanied by our rotten pulpo. This was to be my most advanced conversation in Spanish to date. “Losiento, pulpo non bien.” which I hoped translated roughly to, “Sorry, octopus not good”. Whatever, it worked and we given a refund.

The rain continued. Those not on kitchen-duty resorted to the diversion of a jigsaw puzzle. The kitchen staff (yours truly) having substituted dry oloroso sherry for dry vermouth in Rick’s recipe, dinner was much more successful than lunch.

Now to the title. In rummaging around for ingredients in the fridge, Yvonne had produced some celery. Apparently all the celery available locally from Spanish suppliers was quite dark green. This celery, almost white, was from Iceland, a British shop in Benissa. What was the country of origin of this light celery that the Spanish don’t appear to sell? Yes, Spain. We can only assume that this celery had been grown in Spain, shipped to Iceland in England, then shipped back to Spain to be sold to all the expats there.

How’s that for food miles?

A 4:00 AM alarm woke us for a 5:00 AM departure to “London, Luton” airport. Paul, our neighbour and Spain specialist, very kindly drove us to the airport.

Since we last flew with easyJet, they have introduced the facility for all passengers to check-in online; previously this facility was reserved for those travelling only with carry-on baggage. Now, even those with hold bags can check-in online. There is a desk for such passengers to drop-off their hold baggage, which clearly still needs to be tagged. Neighbour Paul seemed to think this facility was good so I thought I’d try out this new streamlining, checked-in online and printed off our boarding passes a week ago. After all, the most painful part of air travel these days, the part that seems not to get technological solutions thrown at it, is check-in. What a nightmare!

We arrived at “London, Luton” at 5:30 AM in plenty of time for its timetabled 7:00 AM departure. We dragged our few bags into the check-in area. Well, that isn’t entirely accurate – we couldn’t get directly get into the check-in area for the mass of humanity, most of whom appeared to be queuing for the already-checked-in baggage drop-off desk. Shortly, an announcement encouraged anyone on our Alicante flight to go to check-in desks 46 & 47. Feeling frustrated by the length of lines, which had really turning into an uncontrolled melee, we went. The lines to check-in were less than half the length of that for those already checked-in. The check-in desk was happy to process us with our pre-printed boarding passes.

This seems like a classic case of a system backfiring. Allow all passengers on all flights to check-in online and provide a desk for bags, bags which still need tagging as to destination and, I imagine, weighing. Provide four or so desks, in total, for the few remaining passengers still needing to check-in. Brilliant! DUH!!

Since most prospective passengers were still stuck in impossibly long lines in the check-in area, we made it to the departure lounge through a reasonably civilized scanning procedure, albeit half-naked. Passengers now half to remove shoes and belts due to various items-of-clothing bombers. Once an airline suffers from a passenger wearing explosive underpants, we really will have to be scanned naked. That’ll be interesting, especially for the transvestites!

Once in the departure “lounge” (have you ever tried lounging there?), we were soon called to the departure gate where I couldn’t help but notice that easyJet’s original four boarding groups had been reduce to two: SB (Speedy Boarding, for which you pay) and 2 (all the remaining cheapskates). We were near the end of the cheapskates’ line but eventually made it to the front for the next new technological innovation. There were two ladies on the gate processing boarding passes. One was free so we approached her whereupon she informed us that her only her colleague was equipped (with a bar-code scanner) to process all those with home-printed boarding cards. More imposed bottle-necking: one gate operative for the majority of people that had checked-in online, one for the few remaining passengers. More brilliance! Once again the system favoured those who had not checked-in online.

Nonetheless we boarded and found reasonable seats (aisle, front), albeit not together. The plane was ready for departure on time but the weather wasn’t. It began snowing lightly so the pilot called for some de-icing treatment which took 30 minutes to arrive. New Winter Olympic sport: plane de-icing. Naturally, Britain would not be in the running for a gold.

The flight was good, we seemed to make up some time and landed close enough to schedule in Alicante. Our rental car was ready and we were expected so the Victoria car rental systems appear to work well. We drove north in our neat little Renault Clio, playing with various buttons and controls to see what they did, and arrived in Jalon to a very boisterous welcome from el perrito, Scamp, who leapt into the car and licked us to death as soon as a door was open, even though the car was still moving. Chris and Yvonne were very welcoming, to. 🙂

Four litres of rosado seemed to disappear over the remaining day.