Hi everybody,
In the other article I told you about Rambla Honda, but I forgot about a dish that we discovered in 2017 and that I loved.
Diego’s mother was born in Almería. After she got married, she went to Almusafes (Valencia) and in gastronomic matters, she is quite “Valencianized”. When she invited us to lunch, she would almost always make paella and never typical dishes from his land.
In the summer of 2017, we went to the Sorbas Caves. What I thought was going to be a one-hour walk turned out to be a mega 5-hour excursion inside the cave. When we left, it was 15h and we had only had breakfast. Imagine how hungry we were. To make matters worse, the exit from the cave was quite far, so we still had more than half an hour to climb the mountain, in the middle of the August sun in this desert.
We went back to ticket office, where there is a restaurant next door and, miraculously, the kitchen was still open. There was a menu for 12 euros that included entrance, main course, dessert, drink, bread and a salad. Super cheap.
I ordered “gachas” which, from what the waiter explained, seemed like it was going to be tasty. It’s like a soup with dried peppers, roasted sardines, and cooked cornmeal stuck to the plate where it is served. There are people who put more types of fish in it too.
I love corn, corn flour and everything that resembles it, so I loved this dish. Also, the beastly hunger that I had, surely contributed to making this dish taste so good.
We were struck by the fact that Diego’s mother, being from Almería, had never prepared this dish. From that day, we would always ask her to prepare gachas when she invited us to eat at her house.
A curious fact is that gachas is a dish eaten in summer, which is rare because it is a hot soup and in Spain, during the summer, hot soups disappear. The reason is that, in the past, dry peppers were only available in summer.
Here is a link in case you want to see the preparation: