Of tiles, fish and wine.

It has taken some of us quite a bit of time to get back onto the ‘travel bus’ post pandemic. I’ve certainly found it difficult to normalise the process of booking, passport-finding, packing and embarking since 2020, and, at the risk of stating the obvious, Brexit hasn’t added to my ease at this whole endeavour. So it was with pleasure and, dare I admit, a small amount of trepidation, that the writer her indoors and I travelled recently to Portugal… but what can I say… just a stunning place to be. Admittedly we walked into Lisbon in full festa mode, so saw it at its best. We then spent a few days just north of the city with locals who showed us the ‘real’ west Portugal, before returning to Lisbon on Santo Antonio, a bank holiday, as he is the patron saint of Lisbon, so it was still in full party mode.

I had heard friends talking about the quality of both the food and the wine. Our friends there are definite ‘foodies’, so we had our eyes opened to some real Portuguese treats. So, a brief ‘tour’ of food and drink. A typical day started with coffee, a range of breads and fruits and jams. It is a cliché, I know, but to have strawberries, apples or pears that just taste as they should is such a delight. Mid-morning, time for more coffee, this time with pastries. Whilst we had to try the increasingly ubiquitous pastéis de nata (custard tarts) in their country of origin (and they were very good indeed), there were so many other options. The Portuguese way is to perm some combination of eggs, sugar and almonds, with stunning, often very sweet results.

After a brief interlude of village market/quaint town/beautiful church, time for lunch…Having over-indulged already, a ‘light’ snack was what we only ever wanted, furnished by any number of establishments, one of the best of which was in a small town called Batalha (just under 2 hours north of Lisbon), where there was a café, restaurant and wine shop, all run by the same team. Small plates were ordered – the famous pastéis de bacalhau (codfish fritters, made with potato, onion and parsley, morcela (a rich, flavourful blood sausage), a variety of local cheeses and cured meats, all washed down with a lovely Alvarinho – light crisp and refreshing, so an ideal lunchtime drink.

Time to walk off lunch, so a short drive to the beach and a long, leisurely stroll along the coast – beautiful expanses of white sands, almost deserted, charming coves, rocky outcrops… and a more than gentle breeze to help manage the temperature of the sun! Unsurprisingly, we managed to find a small bar in which to down a small Sagres while watching surf school students splashing playfully on and off their boards in a sea that was becoming increasingly challenging for the less experienced students.

One evening, at a festa in a small village, communally eating beautifully succulent and spiced grilled/barbecued chicken, washed down with a passable red before the band came on and played a mixture of europop and trad Portuguese tunes was a delight, though less so for the pescatarian writer her indoors. Another evening, the freshest sardines you will ever have in a restaurant overlooking a small, working port. The sardines were still relatively small, as the season has just started. Perhaps our favourite meal was in a restaurant just off the main Lisbon to Porto road. Thick steaks of succulent fish, cherne in portuguese, grilled and finished with garlic, parsley and lemon, served with new potatoes and sides of migas, a variety of different recipes that are based on using up the previous day’s bread, which is soaked then cooked with onion, garlic and beans, or any vegetable that is to hand. I had a grilled black pork belly dish, (barriga de porco preto grelhada) that was succulent and so, so tasty!

Here we drank a beautiful local white and a full-bodied, dark fruited red. I was struck by just how good the wines were in Portugal, so many of which have yet to reach the UK market. The above meal was finished off with some tawny white ports, a 10, 20 and 30 year old (left to right in the photo)- apologies for the rather poor quality below, but it had been a long day (and a long meal)!

I can’t recommend Portugal highly enough and will certainly be back there soon, this time with a car, so I can bring back ingredients…. and wine!

Clearly eating and drinking all the above, so a slightly different finish to this blog post and I’ll end with some music. We had a great night in a Fado bar in Lisbon, listening to the beautiful, melancholic, heart-wrenching songs, but the soundtrack to the trip was a cd our friends had in their car – Simple Minds greatest hits. So, so many from which to choose, but probably Don’t you and Someone somewhere brought back the most vivid memories..