We were in Valencia in the International Conference of Women in Black, an activist group working for peace and expressing it's concern for peace and dialogue.
400 women from Afghanistan, Iraq, the US, India, Canada, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Colombia, Turkey, Iran, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, Holland, Belgium, Finland, the UK, Australia, Denmark, Israel, Palestine, the Balkans, discussing weapon trade and trying to find new and imaginative ways to stop the wars and disrupt the weapon race. Yes, an utopia, but worth to work for...We gathered in Valencia and had an ambitious program of discussions and workshops.
We lived together in a building where students are trained to be engineers, a new neighborhood and very few remains of the old city around.
To travel to the city we took the tram and the last night of the event we went to the beach and started to look for an ”authentic Valencia restaurant”.
The kitchen in Valencia is and old cuisine, an hybrid of many important traditions. The Muslims ruled Valencia for several hundreds of years and left traces in the architecture and in the food. Rice rules in Valencia and the paellas are gorgeus. The local variation is called ”fideua” and it's made with noodles instead than with rice. And often the fideua or paella have rabbit meat besides the traditional shellfish.
The search for the ”authentical” restaurant took us to small streets near the beach where imaginative signs tried to attract the hungry crowds. The food joints offering ”Mar e Montanya”, sea and mountain, offered a mixed cooking based on the near mountains and the Mediterranean, these old sea where civilizations started and grew.
”La Nouvelle Cuisine” from Valencia was interesting to explore, salmon prepared in new ways, with saffron and orange, eel in garlic and mustard, red peppers filled with tuna, bread baked with olives and fennel.
In the Mercado Central we bought wonderful fresh spices cultivated nearby and old gipsy women went around selling fresh rosemary, my favorite herb.
The rice in Valencia is of great quality and a lot of the restaurants we visited cooked dishes based on rice, rice with almonds and milk (the Medieval blancmangé), sweet rice pudding with sugar and cinnamon, rice and water, a variation of the local ”horchata”, a drink made with water and tigernut (a plant introduced by the Arabs to Spain and today mainly cultivated in Valencia).
