(Today's recipe: How to cook a really big steak)

We met two amazing couples in Portugal and spent a wonderful week together eating, drinking, chatting and forming a bond for life. We met up near Olhao in the Algarves where we were parked right on the banks of the Rio Formosa. They harvest salt there and we harvested wild asparagus and almonds too.

(Todays recipe: Green beans and coconut milk)
We met a delightful Dutch couple and she has a really interesting name. It's spelt Trees but pronounced Trace. Ron and Trees spend many months of the year traveling around Europe and Morocco in their camping car. We spent a couple of weeks traveling together and had an absolute blast, laughing and joking together. A lot of the jokes are a bit naughty so I shall spare you the details – sorry!

That many people bring their dogs along in their camper van is a given, but a dog and a 90kg Vietnamese pot-bellied pig?! I must admit that when I first saw her, I thought I might have to give the Tapas Trails a miss for a while. A pig. In a camper van. Yeah, and pigs can fly.

The six month matured Huguenot cheese from Dalewood Fromage, a cheesery in
the heart of the Cape Winelands, was last night (24 April) crowned as the
2013 Dairy Product of the Year, having trounced some 800 products entered by
69 artisan and commercial producers. Twelve exceptional dairy products that
earned the most coveted Qualité mark of excellence joined this winning
cheese on the podium during the DuPont Qualité Awards Dinner of the SA Dairy
Championships. An additional 95 products were lauded as SA Champions.

Forgive me, for I have not posted in 3 weeks. And I have so many things to tell you about. I shall not say (yet again) where has the time gone to, but I really really want to. So I am just going to get straight into continuing on about Tapas. We made quite a religion of it on our travels, sitting ourselves down and making pre-dinner food. Today I am going to show you some of our cheese, chorizo (paprika salami) and olive tapas.

We continue our adventures in southern Spain, enjoying much better weather than the rest of Europe – well, as long as you exclude the hurricane force winds and driving rain we've just endured for the last 3 days. Ripped off one of our solar panels it did. But now it's back to tapas, blue skies and beach glass collection activities again.

It's been quite a while since Epiphany, hasn't it?! We have met the two most wonderful, talented, deelightful clowns in the whole world. Allow me to introduce Elli and Angele. We keep meeting up here in southern Spain and have yet to decide who's following who. I just hope they'll follow us home and then I can keep them with us forever 'cos they're soooo nice.

I would love to have a dog / many dogs, so my husband has started barking and howling as he thinks that this is a good enough substitute for a dog. I'm not sure I quite agree with him. Fortunately, he hasn't taken to jumping up on our guests or wetting on the floor and insisting on being toilet trained, but you never know.

Fried calamari pieces with anchovy stuffed olives

Seeing as this is something of a food blog, I thought it about time to write something about the food in Spain. Tapas is a great invention of the Spanish and I think it's right up there with discovering fire or the wheel and stuff. I mean, you go into a bar for a drink and get full-on food. Five drinks and you don't need supper anymore. You are also paralytic, but hey, what I don't do for this blog.

It's 25°C on January 6th, 2013, and I'm sitting here in Maro southern Spain unable to believe my luck. The sky is the most amazing blue and we've just gotten back from a walk to the beach where I sat in my bra in the sunshine. There were some rudey nudeys on the beach, both male and female, but I opted to keep my big sports bra on, thank you very much.