23 Jan 2012
One of the things I love best about Spain is the ready availability of fresh fruit and vegetables. It's local, and it's cheap too!
In the United States, we have access to a wider variety of fruits and vegetables, but the quality usually isn't as great. Fruits and vegetables are picked before they are truly ripe so that they can be shipped from across the world to our supermarkets.
That's why they don't taste as good! As soon as they are picked, they start to lose their flavor!
In Spain, it's much more common to go to the mercado (market) for fruit and vegetable needs. There, local farmers sell their goods at a much lower price than you'd ever find in the US.
In Alicante, even when I walk into the supermarket, nearly all of the fruit is local. If it isn't from continental Spain, it's usually from the Canary Islands.
Last week, strawberry season started. For the start of the season, these strawberries are amazingly juicy!
All this fresh fruit has been giving me cravings for fruit smoothies! Unfortunately, my apartment doesn't have a blender. However, after a week of contemplation, I decided today that I should go ahead and buy a blender so that I can make smoothies in my apartment!
The first smoothies (banana and strawberry) turned out delicious! I can tell that the blender will be well worth it when it starts to heat up!
Hey there, I'm creeping on your blog and felt compelled to give you some blender advice. (I brought back peanut butter from the UK and indulged in some awesome peanut butter and banana smoothies.) My house came equipped with an immersion blender: http://www.vegkitchen.com/product-guide/cool-kitchen-gadgets/attachment/immersion-blender/ (actually, with this exact immersion blender), and it's been super useful. I had never come across it in the US, but it seems to be pretty common here in France, and probably cheaper than a real one.
ReplyDelete-Lia