These days I have been virtually travelling to your kitchens and seen all these beautiful candies and cookies you bake for Xmas days; all these moving stories, cooking with your moms when you were just kids and learning the recipes while it was snowing outside, I could just see the picture...I wish I had cooked with my mom when I was a kid too, but I never did, oooohhhh, and I wish I would, really!. We have been cooking together only once or twice when I've been a grown up. The only thing I did at my mom's kitchen when I was a baby was to sit on the floor and play with her tupperware recipients and the wooden forks and spoons and see how it sounded when beating the aluminium pots! (In the picture holding a cook book, though ;-)) And the only thing that she does when she comes to my kitchen is sit down, relax and talk with me and my dad. I just love to have a beer with them while I cook. I like being the one who "works" and have them resting as spoiled kids.
It never snows in Barcelona during Christmas, it has only happened a few times and one of them was on 1962, when my mom was pregnant a huge snowstorm covered Barcelona during Xmas eve, people still remember it, it was sooooo huge that getting the car outside the parking place was impossible, they were fully covered of snow. My mother was in her 7 month of pregnancy and that day they had to go for Xmas lunch to her aunt's house... my parents, by that time, didn't have a fridge and therefore they didn't have food to eat at home! So my mom and dad had to walk all the way to her aunt's with all that snow on the streets, with her big belly and with a freezing cold!!! They walked for 3 to 4 kilometers and finally got there. That's an experience they won't forget.
Here the foodie tradition is to buy special Xmas candies and cakes. There's specialized shops where you can find all these mouthwatering delicious "desserts". Of course you can also bake them at home but I know nobody handmaking turrones for example. During Xmas day all family gets together and eats and drinks a lot, we seat on the table from 2pm to 6 or 7pm and these you will see here under are all the sweet things that come after the huge lunch.There's many kind of turrones: jijona, chocolate, fruities, hazelnuts, walnuts, rice, licours... anything you can imagine! There's also polvorones and mantecados: flour and spices with nuts. And also Bombones: that's black or white chocolate sweets, small sized, sometimes filled with licour and sometimes not (you probably have those too). And finally here in Catalunya - Catalonia we have neules which are these tubs some of them covered with chocolate. Lovers eat them each one starting one side and finally kiss.
The weather man just said that cold winds are coming over (this morning at 8am we had 5ºC below 0... that's very low temperatures for us! And next week snow will fall over 600 meters!!! I'm not 600 meters high, I'm lower, but hopefully we'll have some snow this winter!!!
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