The secret gallery’s blog

The sight of a fridge that has little else but ends and rinds and vegetable on their last legs (well almost!) strangely, satisfies me greatly, when it comes to making something to  eat. I am much bolder and more inventive when I have to search through the remnants of the last weeks or fortnights shop. I end up by cooking something that I have never cooked before, this often means eating dispirit combinations of fodder but it is a little more interesting then having the same old reliable small selection again and again! Luckily I had some shallots hanging in the kitchen since I pulled them from the garden in the summer and some garlic that was starting to grow from cloves that I put into ground hoping they would grow into big bulbs of garlic. If only I could remember what I cooked!

On a memorable note, but not a gastronomic one! One day, while my Husband and I were walking  the Camino de Santiago, it was February so many of the villages were closed down; that is to say that to a passing hungry walker there was NADA! We were so hungry for a couple of days that when we arrived at yet another shut down village we walked around the village searching for anything we could eat. February is a bad time for this! When we walked in the Summer we found lots of fruit and nuts. My eyes were out on sticks, to my delight I found a couple of onions someone had thrown into a ditch! Outer skins removed they were the main ingredient of our soup for dinner! We were staying in a little Refugio or hostel where some previous pilgrims had left about 10 straws of dried spaghetti and one or two other tiny morsels of food, these with the onion and some rosemary we found, I made an edible but quite disgusting watery soup! I did taste very strongly of rosemary and was very watery but it was hot and got us through the night. I remember we even decorated that Albergue with some art, I wonder is it still there!

James walking the Camino de Santiago, somewhere in Rioja, in February 2005