Cooking in Spain

It was great to get back to the warmth of Gabriela Llamas’ studio for a series of Spanish cooking classes in English. Gabriela is a member of the Spanish Academy of Gastronomy and when she is not giving cooking classes in her beautiful kitchen studio, she is either writing articles for magazines; Vogue, Food & Wine and Spain Gourmet Tour to name a few, or catering for private dinners and functions for clients such as Krug, designer Luis Galliussi and the French Embassy in Madrid.
 

Good food certainly runs in the family and Madrid foodies are well acquainted with her mother’s kitchen shop El Alambique now run by Gabriela’s sister Maria.  Both school and shop are situated just minutes from the Royal Palace.

 
Our first class was tapas and pinchos for parties; Spanish tortilla, stuffed baked mushrooms, red piquillo peppers filled with manchego,  romesco sauce with quails eggs, broccoli and dipping potatoes, cecina (Spanish cured beef) with thyme and olive oil and of course the laborious ham “croquetas” and pears in saffron syrup for dessert.

The Inside Island

As part of our TV and Film services, Insider’s Madrid oversaw the subtitling and marketing materials for the film La Isla Interior (The Inside Island) produced by Mecanismo Films which premiered in the Valladollid film festival SEMINCI last November, taking the Best Actor award for Alberto San Juan's performance playing the role of Martín.
A deliciously paranoid black comedy about a dysfunctional family from the Canary Islands starring Geraldine Chaplin, Alberto San Juan, Candela Peña and Cristina Marcos. The film is due for release in Spanish cinemas this coming April.

Wine tasting in Botín

When the Spanish wine club Vinoselección told us they were going to hold a tasting of wines produced in the Madrid region for their members, the Botín restaurant seemed like the perfect location to offer them, complete with our guided tour and lunch known as “The Botin Experience” put together to give visitors a closer look at the world’s oldest restaurant.


Members of Vinoselección met outside the restaurant in the Calle Cuchilleros, just metres from Madrid’s Plaza Mayor to begin The Botin Experience guided visit showing our guests each of the four distinctive dining rooms, the ovens dating back to 1725, not forgetting to step down under the Calle Cuchilleros into what was part of the elaborate network of medieval tunnels that used to run underneath the city. With almost 300 years there are so very many anecdotes to tell about Botin, and those who have been here….from Goya to Hemmingway, from Henry Connick Junior to Danny DeVito, from Ava Gardner to Frank Sinatra and that’s before we get into the history...

We finished the tour in the Felipe IV dining room and began the tasting with an introduction to the history of Madrid’s wines and vineyards by Luis Bellón from from Vinos de Madrid, the appellation body of Madrid’s wines. Vinoselección’s enologist, Yolanda Bravo introduced us to a Jesús Díaz crianza as we began the Botin Experience lunch with appetizers of manchego cheese, Iberian pork and the house croquetas before moving on to try the Andalucian salmorejo and aubergines, Segovian mushrooms, and the “revuelta de la casa”; eggs scrambled with morcilla and potatao. This was all accompanied by the prize-winning Tagonius crianza followed by the also prize-winning Tagonius reserve wine accompanying the suckling pig, cooked for two and half hours in the original ovens from 1725. Marc Isart from the Valdeiglesias bodega Bernabeleva presented his limited desert wine Cantocuerdas Moscatel with the delicious Botin soufflés for desert.

As all good things come to an end, our guests from Vinoselección said their goodbyes, each one armed with a ceramic jug from Talavera de la Reina, similar to the one mentioned by Nancy Reagan in her thank you letter to the restaurant following the Reagans’ vist in 1987.