Spanish Food 3

After a hard morning of wandering around the El Corte Ingles department store, trying on shoes (oh the shoes!) and having lunch in the sun, we needed a snack on the roof terrace of our apartment to fortify ourselves before an evening of bar-hopping. The view from the terrace was rather good, and for a girl coming out of a British winter, the sun was just amazing. I basked like a cat (or possibly like a walrus, given the amount of food we ate).

We picked up the components of our snack in the supermarket department of El Corte Ingles. Lovely sweet strawberries, a big wedge of torta del casar cheese, slices of jamon, slices of a sort of truffled pork brawn, some nashi, some crackers, a tin of spicy mussels in olive oil and sherry vinegar and a bottle of white rioja.

Then it was off to a local bar for our first stop of the evening. We had boquerones - the pickled white anchovies I mentioned before - on fingers of toast spread with salmorejo, and toasted sandwiches. The best of these was filled with pringa. Pringa is a sort of meat paste, with a shredded texture similar to rillettes. Apparently it is made from the leftovers from the Cocido but that hardly does it justice. The ones we had (we'd had it for breakfast the day before too) were quite highly seasoned with garlic and smoked paprika.