June 08,2008 will go down in history as one of the best meals we have had in Spain. Trust me we have eaten lots of paella here, but there is no comparison between restaurant paella and the backyard (think barbecues in the US) paella.  

Vicente Carbona, the paella cook, had started long before we arrived to build the wood fire under the paella pan.  Fruit wood is the best, but these little wooden pieces of wood kept the fire evenly burning.  The little house in the picture, in their backyard is where the magic happens.  It has a vent for the smoke and looks like a real kitchen.  Ingredients for this paella were olive oil, garlic, chicken (or rabbit)  when the chicken has cooked, then he poured in a can of chopped tomatos, then  he poured enough paella rice across the middle of the pan to make a dam from one side to the other.  The spices are saffron based, corn starch and salt.  Then you put in the vegetables, flat green beans and artichokes.  Except they go in before the rice so it will be tasty.  What a pleasure to be invited into a home, a rare occurrence for us in Spain.  That's not uncommon, it's not that Spaniards don't like foreigners, but when they meet us they prefer to be on neutral ground.

Vini was born inValencia but moved to Boston when his family was ten years old.  The Franco regime did not treat them at all well and his father's shoe factory was blackballed by the politics of the system and they were able to get out of the country.  Vini met Mona at Boston University.  She had traveled and lived all over the world.  They married and have three children, high school to post high school. Their beautiful home they finished as a shell in an urbanizacion.  Their tales of what it was like to finish the house was a Herculean task.  But it is gorgeous.  Roomy downstairs, terrace with the table, the paella place out back along with the pool.  To boot they have a finished basement with the biggest laundry room in the world.  Their oldest son, lives next to it, in absolute privacy.  The garage is fully tiled.  Amazing.

David met with Mona at our house for Spanish tutoring for almost three months.  He has really made progress. Now he's correcting me!

But a big part of David's comfort with Spanish is Mona's doing.  She marched him through verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc.  So he feels like he has a more comfortable base.  He understands quite a bit, but there are still those trace moments when it's a little dicey making out technical words like 

"Cuidado con los animales Sulfeticacion"  We figure it has to do with spraying for mosquitos.