Fire! Noise! Music! how much excitement can you take?

Today, March 19, is the feast day of St. Joseph. He's the patron saint of Canada and of many worthy causes but nowhere is he more revered and celebrated than in parts of Spain. In Valencia today, a days-long festival will come to an end with fireworks, parades, lots of music and finally, bonfires throughout the city as massive statues built for the occasion will be set ablaze.

This is the statue in Valencia's main square and it will be the last one to burn tonight. It will be sometime around or after midnight their time — sometime after eight here in Atlantic Canada. (They haven't set their clocks ahead.)

The festival is called las fallas, literally "the fires."

I was once in Valencia for las fallas. When I got out of bed on March 19, I thought I had awakened in hell. The cacophony was deafening. I looked out the window and the air was filled with smoke. People were crowded into the streets, laughing and singing with bands that were playing in most neighbourhoods. We went out and joined the ruckus and got swept along in an almost helpless state; it was impossible to fight against it. I noticed at a certain point that many people were wearing earplugs, an excellent idea although too late for us.

There were firecrackers going off everywhere but also day-time fireworks. You couldn't really see them but seeing them was not the point. You could definitely hear them. Bars and cafés and restaurants were open and doing a grand business selling mountains of paella and gallons of wine and beer.

We followed the crowd and saw lots of the crazy statues before they went up in flames. As so many of the festivals in Spain do, the symbols incorporate a lot of religion and politics and they're often viciously satirical. Trump shows up a lot this year.

Here he is in the company of Franco, Stalin and Hitler. We will probably hear the cheering from here as this one burns.

I'm going to watch the main statue burn on the webcam from the Plaza del Ayuntamiento (Town Hall Square). As I write this, they're already making the pre-burning preparations.

We survived it, being there in person, and I have to say it was very exciting even though in many ways, it was pretty scary.

Join me at the webcam though. I recommend it!

And tomorrow, the first day of Spring, the neighbourhoods will be back planning and drawing and collecting materials to get started on their statues for next year!

Ibiza: stopping 'progress' is no longer an option

One day recently — September 18, to be exact — I saw a small news item that said 47 years ago, to the day, Jimi Hendrix had died.

Under normal circumstances, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have known where I was when I heard that Jimi Hendrix had died. In this case though, I know exactly.

Fred's Bar was in a small town on the Balearic island of Ibiza. In 1970, Ibiza was at the dawn of what was to become a massive tourism industry. We used to go to Fred's for breakfast every morning walking down a remarkably undeveloped street from the building where were staying which wasn't quite finished.

I used to read the International Herald Tribune while I had my tomato and cheese sandwich and a lovely frothy cup of café con leche. Most things were still cheap in Spain but not the Herald Tribune. We couldn't afford to buy it every day but I bought it two or three times a week and I savoured every word even though it was a very business-oriented paper and often quite boring. I was probably never so well-informed on the subject of international business as I was then.

It was there that I read of the death of Jimi Hendrix and I remember it so well. It was on the front page and it must have made quite an impression on me, a small story tucked in among the war, the appointments of big business executives, the ubiquitous news that followed the ups and downs of petro-dollars. The story of the death of a genius musician must have seemed almost out of place.

In the past 47 years, Ibiza has become known as "party island" for young Europeans. I don't think I would recognize it today. We used to walk to the beach every afternoon along a dusty little road, past small family farms where the families were often gathered around a big outdoor table enjoying lunch.

On a busy day, there might be a handful of other people on the beach but just as often, there was no one. An empty beach.

Today, I'm pretty sure most beaches look more like this.

When I started writing this, I thought it was just an interesting little memory anecdote, the reason I remembered where I was was when I heard of the death of Jimi Hendrix. I didn't know it was going to be another look at unsustainable tourism. I've written about that here and here — about Shakespeare's hometown and about Iceland. I make the point again, sadly, because there are so many wonderful places in the world to visit but so many of the places can't take any more.

Spain was early to tourism over-development. Throughout the '60s, the Mediterranean coast of the mainland was mindlessly built up with miles and miles of characterless highrise buildings (I'm looking at you, Benidorm), magnets for sun-seeking vacationers from northern Europe.

There was little regard for heritage or history but it seemed not to matter. The tourists kept coming. The development on the Balearic Islands began with Majorca, then Menorca, then Ibiza. The smallest island, Formentera, is in the earlier stages of development but it's getting there.

Many people still don't take this kind of issue seriously. "You can't stop progress!" they bellow. This is not progress but there's no point arguing with people who hold that view.

But just look at two views of the Old Town of Ibiza:

1970

2017

Not progress.

There were two other headlines/stories that I remember reading in Fred's Bar. Janis Joplin died on October 4. And on October 5, James Cross was kidnapped from his home in Montreal by the FLQ, marking the beginning of the October Crisis.

That was definitely the headline that had the greatest effect on my own life, both there in Spain and far beyond.

The food of the Mediterranean: classic and delicious

The last cookbook story I wrote was about my introduction to Chinese cooking — my TV relationship with Chef Martin Yan and my plunge into the complicated world of Chinese cuisine as taught at the California Culinary Academy.

I love Chinese cooking and I still do it a lot but there came a day when I admitted to myself that my heart is really in Mediterranean cooking. It's the style that comes naturally to me and I'm never happier when I have good olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, oregano, basil, anchovies, and a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano sitting on my counter, awaiting their instructions.

I first went to Spain back in the 1970s. Life was very different then. Food and cooking and eating had not evolved in Canada to where it is now so encountering the sights and smells and tastes and the food in Spain was much more exotic then than it would be to travellers today. In restaurants, all the tables had cruets of oil and vinegar and as soon as you sat down, even before a menu, you were served a beautiful crisp salad which you dressed yourself — just a toss with that beautiful olive oil and vinegar and what a salad!

All the food was memorable but the tapas custom soon becomes everyone's favourite. Because the Spaniards don't sit down to eat dinner until 10:00 p.m., they need a little something to tide them over and that's where the tapas come in — delectable small servings of delicious foods, hot or cold, mostly but not exclusively eaten with the fingers or speared with a toothpick.

They're usually eaten standing at the bar with a glass of wine. There's a vast display behind the bar and the bartender will hand you a small saucer and you choose your own — in some cases, the bartender will serve you. I remember small plates of potato salad dressed in a very egg-y, lemon-y mayonnaise and of course, plates and plates of seafood: shrimp, scallops, calamares, mussels, sardines. And bites of chicken, chorizo, serrano ham, meatballs. Chunks of roasted peppers, cauliflower, mushrooms. And more varieties of olives than you knew existed.

Part of the enjoyment of that kind of eating is the atmosphere — the noise and excitement and the crowds. But the food is so good, you do want to duplicate it.

Years after I was first in Spain, Valerie gave me a cookbook for my birthday:

It's a cookbook of glossy pages and beautiful colour photos. It demands that you head to the kitchen and start cooking. I've made many snacks from this book but as I'm looking at it now, I realize happily, I still have a lot of recipes to enjoy from this one. On my list.

I had already been converted to Italian cuisine, long before my first trip to Italy. Italian does seem to be at the top of the pecking order of cuisines — although I suppose the French and the Chinese would dispute that. Italian chefs — Lidia Bastianich, Mary Ann Esposito, Nick Stellino, and many others — dominate PBS cooking shows and the Food Network. And non-Italians occasionally become famous for leaning toward Italian cooking: Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray of London's River Café, and Jamie Oliver — just to name a few.

I have lots of cookbooks devoted to Italian cooking but what could beat this one:

Dan gave me this one and any book that has the number 1000 right on the cover has to be taken seriously. One thousand is a lot of recipes. The titles of all the recipes are in Italian — there are translated sub-titles — and some of them take me right to hillside village streets where I've never been: salami and caper tart; sausage and prosciutto with potato, pork with tomatoes and onions, liver soufflé, saffron pancakes with mussels.

As with the tapas book, I still have plenty of recipes to try out of this one.

I'm afraid I complain quite a lot about being in a cooking rut but it looks as if it's my own fault. A quick trip through either of these books should solve that.

Happy New Year

I've posted the story about the New Year's Eve we spent in Madrid several years ago. It's right here and I'd be delighted if you'd have a look.

Let's all hope for a productive and peaceful 2016.

The library: a labour of love in Denia

Years ago, we used to go to Spain quite regularly and often stayed for a few months near the town of Denia. It's a lovely Mediterranean town, just down the coast from Valencia and up the coast from Alicante. We used to stay in a villa a couple of miles from the centre of town, near the beach.

Two or three times a week, I would catch a rickety bus and go into town with my straw basket to get provisions and to browse the market and shops. Before I caught the bus back, I would often sit down for a drink or a coffee and watch the action on the busy main street.

Denia's main street

My favourite stop on most of my trips was at The English Library. It was up a side street just off the main street and up one flight of stairs. It was a medium-size room with floor-to-ceiling shelves all around. The shelves were filled with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of paper-backs.

The library was a labour of love for a couple of English expatriate women. They had lived there for some time and somehow, had begun collecting the books that travellers left behind. When they found themselves overwhelmed with books, they decided to open the library. Most of their clients were expatriates too but there were some people, like us, who were shorter-term and there were some who were just passing through – travellers dropping off books and picking up others as they travelled on.

We paid a certain amount to join – about 100 pesetas – and then paid a small amount to borrow a book. It was worth every peseta and we completely understood that they needed, at least, to cover their expenses. In retrospect, I hope they did better than that.

I used to borrow several books every visit and when I look back, I realize that I owe so much of my status as a well-read person to that unconventional little library on a side street in Denia.

I was not above some great recreational reading – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler. I loved – and still love – Eric Ambler. I read John le Carré (I discovered at the library that he had a house outside Denia also, perhaps a little more elaborate than ours).

I did love George Smiley.

But I also read literature: W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh (my first experience with Brideshead Revisited), E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicholson, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell.

The library had mostly British writers but I read some Americans: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller.

This is only a partial list. I hasten to add that I didn't like some of these books. I don't regret having read them; obviously, they're part of who I am as much as the books that came later that changed the way I look at the world.

We went back to Denia several times and always went back to the library. They were still there and they remembered us. I often think of them and feel so grateful that they were there.

I had intended to share some of the books I'm reading right now but my time is up. That list will be for another day.