The relationship is a little complicated. Stay with me. We're staying in a house that belongs to a former coworker, whose family were from El Vendrell, a Catalonian town with a population of 36,000. Family members still live here and one cousin recently spent some time in Vancouver.
We were invited to that cousin's parent's home for lunch where we were treated like royalty with a lovely paella dinner followed by a drive out to their country home complete with vineyard and olive grove. They generously thanked us for their daughter's Vancouver experience although we were not directly involved. It was a case of gratitude by association.
The parents speak Catalan and Spanish, we English, but the conversation was lively with the translation help of their daughter and her their efforts to speak slowly enough for us to follow along.
It put me in the mood for cooking, considering in the past almost two months I've only cooked twice. Imagine that!
On the way back from today's hike we discovered a new grocery store akin to the Real Canadian Superstore without the headache provoking bright colours. Walking by the fish counter they had them! The percebes (per-thay-vase), AKA the goose barnacles, we missed in Gallicia. At 30e/kilo I bought 350gms just to have a taste. Don't they look like dinosaur toes?
In case you have the opportunity to cook them, you bring salt water to a rolling boil, throw in the creatures and as soon as the water boils again, they're done.
To eat them, you forget the biological fact I shared in last week's post from Finisterre, perforate the black leathery skin near the claw, pull it off and eat the remaining meat. It was all that it was cracked up to be. A moist delicately flavoured tender meat, not slimey, with more substance than clam meat but a similar flavour. This is the peeled percebe:
On a roll I started the veggies and chorizo for some lentil soup.
A cloudy Sunday afternoon in Spain, everything is shut up tight. What better way to spend it?
Life's a Stitch 
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