Fiesta de Fotos (y Tapas)!

When we returned from Europe, there was about a dozen people who were very interested in seeing our pictures. (Really, they honestly said so.) Since many of them had already been to these places, we figured they were serious :-) And, since Darla and I had been looking for an excuse to make our favorite food in Europe, tapas, we added that into the festivities for the evening.

We knew they didn't want to see all 1500 pictures that the four of us took, so we narrowed it down to a manageable 100 (20 per country). While this was difficult, it worked really well to give an overview of our most interesting/beautiful/funny experiences in each place, which led to great conversations :-) All of our blog readers have seen many of these pictures here already. (For the record, I used Skype's "Share Screen" feature to share the same slideshow with my family, and it worked like a charm.)

While I love showing my pictures to people, my favorite part of the evening was making tapas. Tapas are basically little appetizers, which we had at tapas bars in Spain. Everything has a giant toothpick in it and are all priced the same. You take everything you want, and when you're finished, they count your toothpicks and charge you accordingly. My main souvenir from Spain was a tapas cookbook, which Darla and I used as we picked which things we wanted to make. We also used our pictures to remember our favorite tapas that we had in Spain, and then attempted to recreate them. (The first photo is from Spain. The other 2 are our attempts :-))

Darla made an egg and potato omelette cut into small pieces and served on a baguette, crab salad and an olive on a baguette, and marinated tomatoes and fried quail eggs on a baguette(yes, we used lots of bread :-)). I made baguettes, a garlic, potato and red pepper dip, toasted bread with 3 cheeses (square of semi-hard cheese on bottom, triangle of brie in the middle, and shaved hard cheese on top), mini-cream puffs with sweetened cream and drizzled caramel, andbreadcrumb fritters in honey syrup. While it basically took me the entire day to get everything ready, it was a lot of fun :-) I don't usually fuss over little things, especially little fussy things meant to look pretty, but this was a bunch of fun! :-) Give it a try sometime!