I know. I know. You’ve been to the mall 4,000 times in the past six weeks, And the grocery and the liquor store, the hardware store and the other grocery store; the one with that thing you like but the other store doesn’t have. So why read a blog about yet another market? Churros, my friends. Churros.
The Churro Man. We’ll come back to him in one second.
The village of Lubrin has a market on Wednesday and it’s a chance to see and be seen. Everyone, even school children selling raffle tickets, goes to the market on Wednesday morning. Who are we to skip out on the Must-Do event of the week? Nope, not going to miss out! We met our new expat friends Betsy and Warren for our first trip. Now we’ve seen a LOT of markets over the past year, but this one is is far and away the cutest!
We walked from home to town which took about 45 minutes, but you get this wonderful little view. You can really see it IS a hill town.
You can get almost anything you want: clothes, music, shoes, outerwear, more shoes (there’s no shoe store in town, so if you want shoes you have to wait for them to come to you on Wednesdays!), plants, flowers, fruit, veg, meat, fish, olives, olives, more olives, roasted chickens and, yes, churros.
Walk with us:
I expected this: fruits and veg. Much of this is home grown in little plots on terraces that run up the side of the hills around here. Every bite is delicious. After market day, I made the best soup I’ve ever made.
Friendly Bartolo, the olive farmer we helped last week. Check out the cabbages! He puts up a little stand with tomatos that are fantastic – juicy and tomato-y. No supermarket styrofoam here- these are the real heirloom deal. He also weaves those baskets you see on the lower left. Quite the guy, our Bartolo!
A quick stop at one of the two town bakeries to load up on bread and pan au chocolate…and maybe some muffins…and some honey cookies.
Mr. Chicken Roaster. Yes, he sets up a chicken roaster right on the street. Get half or full chickens for 4.50 or 9 euros (about 5 and 10 US dollars right now) and spuds for .50. We got a bunch of the roast taters and they were DE-LISH.
Now on to the main event. Churros! I’ve never seen churros made in the wild before. I’ve occassionally been handed a cold bag of churros, which didn’t seem that exciting, and we had some disappointing ones in Barcelona, but when I saw the vat of boiling oil I knew we were in for a real treat.
Churros in their native form.
Betsy and Warren brought us to the Churro Man and we got to watch the whole process start-to-finish… and now you can too:
The culmination of market day: Churros and cafe with friends.
If you watched the video you might notice that at the end the Churro Man asks in Spanish “Would you like sugar with your churros?” and you’ll hear a deep chorus of “Si!” When it was done, Aaron grabbed the sugar shaker and added a little more. Ooh-la-sugary-la! Can’t wait for next Wednesday. I know what we’re doing!
My kind of market!!
Keep it up and you two (four?) aren’t gonna look like churros. More like the cabbages! Remind me what town you are in and where, in general, it is. Old minds, without the help of churros, can’t remember.
Going to? We’re well on our way!!!
We’re in Lubrin, Spain – a little hill town of 1600 people in the southwest of the country, about 1 hour up from Almeria if you’re looking on a map.
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