a culinary tour

We had a lot of amazing meals out in Portugal. Every meal seemed to be out doing itself...all ending with each of us saying, "you know, you would never be able to get that in Canada" or "that amount of seafood would cost us an arm and a leg back home". I can't think of one bad meal we had, well, okay 1 - but let's just say that Portugal is not known for it's meat dishes, and although it was not the greatest meal, it became the butt of all jokes so it was worth the memory.

The above dish (sizzling garlic prawns) was had on a terrace overlooking the ocean. Does it get anymore perfect than that? It was so good that we tried to recreate it back at the villa - more on that later.

I was always the more adventurous one of our group, eating things like squid and octopus.

Our first meal definitely set us up for some good food. The squid rings I had were so tender that we started wondering if it was indeed squid, or just some pasta that was shaped into it.

Other memorable dishes included pots of seafood stew, grilled sardines, monkfish rice, and a fish soup.

Each dish that we had probably had no more than a total of 5 ingredients in them. It is food simply prepared, but done with the freshest ingredients. Sadly, the taste is not comparable to anything we've ever had before or probably anything we will have for a long time to come.