Barcelona is where we celebrated Jonah and Morgan’s bar and bat mitzvahs. We stayed
at Casagrand Luxury Suites — a perfect, centrally located hotel to accommodate a family — and on our last day there, my nephew Danny Adler, who owns the travel company Adler & Marlow, arranged the day for us to walk through the historic city and visit a food market before heading to a unique lunch at Canela Fina.
At the market, we were all delighted by the smells and visuals of the fresh food stands filled with fruits, vegetables, meats and fish laid out in an artful manner.
From the food market, we walked through Barcelona’s narrow, old-world streets into an ancient building for a unique experience.
Canela Fina is a reservation-only space reserved for guests to cook their own meal and then enjoy eating it. I’m not a big “working for my dinner” fan, but this turned out to be great fun.
Our “tutor food guides” had prepared the ingredients for our lunch and we all put on aprons and got to work at two large prep tables.
I loved seeing little 7-year-old Sloane for the first time using a scraper to peel the cucumbers for the salad and my big girls Addy and Morgan preparing the ingredients for chicken potato croquettes by peeling potatoes and chopping onions. My job was taking off the burnt covers of the eggplants and tomatoes. A lot of work and nobody ended up eating it! Oh well!
My daughter Elizabeth’s responsibility was skinning, cutting up and cooking the sausages and placing each on a slice of crusty bread with a toothpick to hold each in place.
I also had the fun of squishing ripe, luscious tomatoes over crusty, toasted bread sprinkled with olive oil and garlic. It was so good, I think I had four pieces!
Finally, we made delicious, ice-cold sangria, cutting the fruits and mixing in orange liqueur with the wine. It was the best sangria I ever drank!
Tomatoes are in season, so we also made gazpacho, a cold soup, that was my late husband Stu’s favorite dish to prepare in the summer.
Jonah made crème brûlée and we each applauded his delectable dessert.
Maybe the best part of the meal is that no one looked at their phones or tablets!
What a way to share a meal!
After lunch, we wandered through the narrow cobblestone streets to shop in open plazas and eat gelato, which became a daily tradition.
The experiences in Barcelona are now embedded in our memories!We continued our journey to Costa Brava before ending with a visit to Madrid. Tune in to next week’s column to read all about it and visit QNS.com or danspapers.com to see more photos!
