Cooking class at the Espai del Peix in Palamós, Spain
In the fishing village Palamós north of Barcelona along the Costa Brava, is the Museu de la Pesca (Fishing Museum) along with the Espai del Peix (Fish Space) where you can take cooking workshops. I had read an article in the Guardian about this town and museum two and a half years ago, and finally made it up on a long weekend.
The recipes you'll be preparing aren't published in advance, so it's kind of the luck of the draw. On this day, we were preparing two types of surf and turf, or "mar i muntanya" in Catalan. Both made from a type of squid, and sausage. We learned how to clean the squid (which I had also learned several years ago at a cooking class in Sydney!).
And I also learned something very interesting - the chef explained that in Catalonia, they thickened their sauces and stews with cooked bread, unlike the French further north who used dairy products like cream. Here, we fried slices of bread in olive oil, then mashed it with some nuts, garlic, and parsley in a mortar and pestle. This was then added to our sauce.
Here is our stew with squid and sausages.
And here are our sausage-stuffed squid, put back together to look like whole squid.
This was a very fun course. Though only an hour and a half, and amazingly only €10, we produced an amazing quantity of food! As the class was so short and ended at noon, a couple hours before typical Spanish lunchtime, I had no idea we'd make enough for lunch. I had booked a bus back to Barcelona right after the course, and felt very, very bad for all of my neighbors on the bus who had to put up with very pungent squid for two hours, as I hand-carried my food!
