Category Archives: Travel

Crucina – New raw food restaurant in Madrid

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We’re on our way north again, heading back to the UK for a little while. As we were passing near to Madrid we decided to take the opportunity to visit Crucina, probably Spain’s only 100% raw restaurant. Crucina is a combination of two Spanish words – the start of crude meaning raw and cocina meaning kitchen.

Crucina is centrally located in the Malasaña district of Madrid, less than 5 minutes walk from San Bernardo metro startion.

We arrived to a very warm and friendly welcome from Yorgo, one of the co-owners. The ambiance is great, smart and modern, although they do have plans to make the décor more unique and creative. The menu was of course in Spanish, they are planning to have English menus, but for now both owners speak English so they can translate anything you don’t understand. The menu is comprehensive: juices, soups, salads, starters, mains, deserts and drinks.

We started with juices – I had “Purificaverde” – Green Purification with spinach, cucumber, celery and lemon, very refreshing although a little bland (I’m used to much stronger wild green juices!). Jolita had “Anticolesterol” with carrot, ginger, apple and parsley, which was delicious. (We shared all our food, so got to taste twice as much!)

For starters, I had the “Trio de Tartletas”, three little savory tarts, each with a different filling. The ‘pastry’ casing was unfortunately a bit too hard, almost rock solid and I couldn’t eat it, although the fillings were really delicious. Jolita had the “Tabla de Kesos”, the cheese plate. In Spanish, cheese is spelled Queso, so the alternative spelling Keso is to denote vegan cheese! Two different nut based cheeses, some raw jam, and at least 4 types of raw crackers, it was all delicious.

Trio de Tarteletas Cheese Plate

MoussakaI always used to love Moussaka when I ate cooked food, so when I saw it first on the menu, I just had to have it. After reading further it was a toss up between that and the Saag Hindu, but Jolita chose that so all was well. It turns out that Yorgo is originally from Greece, and he wants to include more Greek dishes in the future.

The moussaka was great – aubergine is not always the best thing raw, but they suceeded by cutting it very thinly and dehydrating – it was a bit chewy but good. The ‘meat’ was tasty and the ‘cheese’ and tomato sauces were delicious, overall a great dish, just slightly too salty for me (I don’t usually add salt to my food, so I’m quite sensitive  to too much salt).

Saag HinduSaag Hindu was a spicy Indian dish made with spinach and ‘mango chutney’ (more a mango sauce than chutney) which was served with some spicy coconut based breads. This again was delicious, the spicyness was just right, tasted like food from an Indian restaurant!

I was getting a bit full by now, but the deserts sounded too tempting to pass over. We ordered the tiramisu and the “Pudin de Chia”. The chia pudding was good, but a little bland, although the strawberries and banana it was served with did go well with it.

The tiramisu was amazing! Excellent textures and flavours, definitely among the best raw deserts I have ever eaten.

Chia Pudding Tiramisu

In conclusion, if you are anywhere near Madrid this is well worth a visit. And their plan is to open another restaurant in Barcelona later in the year, so keep listening out for news of that.

Crucina, Divino Pastor, 30, Madrid. Tel: 914453364. Opening hours: Tues – Wed: 13:30 – 16:00, Thurs – Sat: 13:30 – 16:00 and 21:00-24:00, Sun: 13:30 – 16:00

Photos from our travels: Part 5 – Basque Country and Pyrenees

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Some beautiful scenery in this part of the world. This is the final part of this section of our trip, from Bagneres de Bigorre we drove through the Pyrenees into Spain, across to the Spanish and then French Basque Country then along the Spanish coast to Santander where we took the 24 hour ferry to Portsmouth – we then spent a month in the UK, mostly in London.

Basque Country - map 5

Ainsa, our first stop in Spain. I have a friend who was staying there and she took us to visit a local lady who was growing all sorts of food plants, we ate some delicious figs and I got to try fresh stevia leaves for the first time (first photo), they are amazing, so sweet! The dragonfly was dead on the ground, but it gave me a good opportunity to take some photos.
The road out of Ainsa towards Jaca was amazingly beautiful. We just kept stopping to take photos! Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido
Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido, in the Pyrenees on the border between Spain and France – well worth a vist, amazing waterfalls.
Back in France, Saint-Jean-de-Luz The Atlantic coast of France here is beautiful. This is Lac Blanc, a little inland from Vieux-Boucau. Bayonne was a very pretty city.
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Bilbao: Outside the Guggenheim Museum were several sculptures, including this dog made out of flowers and giant spider. And of course, the obligatory photo of the Guggenheim Museum!

Photos from our travels: Part 4 – French Pyrenees

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This was a beautiful part of France. Châteaux, mountains, hot springs, French markets and lots more, from 17th August to 5th September 2010. Click to enlarge the map or photos.

Carcasonne has an amazing fairy tale Château, and is generally a very pretty place, but once you go inside, you are greeted with tacky souvenir shops.
This is the Château at Peyrepertuse, it’s an amazing old Cathar Castle built in the 11th Century. We’re big fans of hot springs, although at Rennes-les-Bains we only found the warm springs (still beautiful), this photo is nearby.
This is not far from the campsite we stayed on near Foix. In the evening we followed a footpath and went for a great walk, founds lots of wild food and saw wildlife like this butterfly.
In Saint-Lizzier near Saint-Girons, lots of interesting plants, including this kiwi vine. Bagnères-de-Luchon, beautiful place in the Pyrenees. Sunset from campsite at Bagnères-de-Bigorre.
Bagnères-de-Bigorre. We spent a week here, it was a beautiful place and I had some work to catch up on. Lots of walks in the surrounding countryside, some amazing views and wildlife and a great market on Saturday. As well as the amazing mushrooms and spider, we saw a hummingbird moth, which looks a bit like a hummingbird, but it was flapping its wings too fast to be able to take a good photo of it.

Monkey stole my apple!

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Today we went to Gibraltar – I’d heard that the Upper Rock Nature Reserve is the only place to have monkeys in the wild, specifically Barbary Macaques. I wasn’t really expecting to see them, but there were loads of them! At one point, I was walking along, happily eating an apple when one of the monkeys came up to me, climbed up my leg and grabbed my apple. Unfortunately this all happened too quickly to get on camera, but I did manage to take the following pics of the monkey eating the stolen apple:



Making Cheese

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We’ve been staying in Orgiva (Granada Province, Spain) for a couple of months, we rented a little house as it was getting a bit cold in the van (there is no heating in the van). While we were travelling in France we were buying the most amazing selection of raw milk cheeses, but here in Spain there is not the same selection, and they mostly have hard cheeses rather than the soft cheeses they have in France. You can buy soft cheeses in Spain but they are much harder to find, and it seems that in Orgiva it is only possible to buy hard cheese.

But here it is easy to buy raw goats milk direct from the farm, so I decided I would try making my own cheese. A friend told me a way of making cottage cheese just using lemon juice to curdle the milk, it worked ok but took quite a long time for the milk to separate. A little while ago I got a book called Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, which has some cheese recipes in it using rennet. So I got some rennet and used kefir as a starter to “ripen” the milk, and made cheese which resembled mozzarella in texture. Wild Fermentation is an excellent book, I reviewed it in Funky Raw magazine issue 17, and I will republish the review here soon.

Wanting to take things further, I bought a book called Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll, which has recipes for all kinds of cheeses, but I’ve not yet made anything from it as I need to buy various starter cultures and moulds. It looks like a really good book, with hard and soft cheese recipes, mould ripened cheeses like Camembert and more. If you like cheese, I really recommend you try making your own, it’s lots of fun and there is so much to experiment with to make your perfect cheese.

Fresh Fizzy Spring Water

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Went for an amazing walk today in the La Taha area of the Alpujarras (Granada province, southern Spain). There are many places to collect fresh spring water around here, but the spring we found today was a little different: the water was sparkling. Yes, fizzy spring water, straight from the source:

There was even a sign telling us that the water is fizzy and explaining the health benefits of the water. If you can read Spanish, click on the photo to see a larger version you can read.

The spring is near Ferreirola, on the Ruta Medieval towards Busquistar. It’s a very beautiful area and there are lots of walks and of course you can taste fizzy spring water yourself (it’s delicious by the way!)

Photos from our travels: Part 3 – Mediterranean France

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Getting into the swing of this now! Here are some photos from the first couple of weeks of August. As before click the map and photos to see large versions.

St-Quentin-de-la-Poterie was a fascinating little place. In the past it had been a commercial pottery town, making tiles and such like. Several years after the heavy industry closed down independent artisan pottery studies started opening up, now there is something like 23 studios. If you like ceramics, it’s worth checking out! Anyway, to the photos, this was a mosaic on the street. Cevennes National Pak. This is in Bédouès where our campsite was. We liked this area and the nearby town of Florac which had an interesting market.
We went for a walk from the campsite in Bédouès, Cevennes. We never like to take the same route back but we hadn’t got a map so we took a bit of a risk. Turned into the longest walk ever, didn’t get back to the van until sometime after 10pm! At the bottom of the campsite was this river and lots of wild greens for fresh juice.
Gorges du Tarn, on the edge of the Cevennes National Park. The gorge is over 30 miles long and very beautiful, went for a good walk, although the trees generally obscured the view of the gorge, we got the best views from walking along the road. Flamingos in the Carmargue area, not far from Montpelier.
The amphitheatre in Nímes, over 2000 years old and still standing In a little place called Ginac, campsite by the river.

Photos from our travels: Part 2 – Italy

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Oops, I’m a bit slow with this, here are some photos from July. We were in Briançon, only 10km from the border with Italy so we decided to pop over for a quick visit. The first night we camped wild and saw the most amazing sight, lots of fireflys. First time I’ve seen them, they fly around flashing a little light on and off, the affect is best when there are a lot of them. I did take a photo, but it came out black! We covered a lot more ground in a short time in Italy, we whizzed down the motorways to get to a few interesting places, unlike France where we mostly stayed off the motorways on the smaller roads.

Click on the map and photos to see larger versions:

Santa Isola, Italy – This was quite a random stop (like many of the places we have seen), we were driving along and stopped for a little walk and found this beautiful lake and river. Wanted to go in the water but it was very cold (in the mountains), just got my feet in for a few minutes. Out of the mountainous area, we did find a beautiful river to swim in, really warm, but I can’t remember the place name or river name! The sea on the coast at Marina de Pisa was also lovely and warm for swimming.
In Tuscany we went to a few interesting towns and villages with old buildings, Volterra, San Gimignano and Siena. These three photos are from Siena. I’m not religious (far from it) but churches and cathedrals are often beautiful buildings and this one was one of the most ornate I have ever seen.
Back on the coast, this is Vernazza, one of the five villages known as the Cinque Terra. I thought we were in Russia for a moment, but it turns out we were in San Remo This is somewhere in the Alps on the border between Italy and France.
More in the alps. Back in France, Gorges de Daluis (Alps). This was a beautiful area, the photos don’t do it justice.
A place called Annot. Not the most amazing place, but the campsite was great.

France Photos part 1

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If you’ve been following this blog, you will know that we set off on June 1st in a camper van. Below is an approximate map of wheer we went for the first five weeks of our trip, and below that some photos. From Briançon we went through the mountains over into Italy for a couple of weeks, I’ll put photos and a map of the next sections of the trip up soon.

Travels in France Part 1 map

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Wimereux, between Calais and Bologne has some interesting buildings. Wild rocket near Paris! Gecko in Bourg-en-Bress
We stayed at Chavannes, near Bourg-en-Bress. beautiful campsite by a river and lots of walks in the area. Driving through the mountains towards Geneva we saw this beautiful lake. Bright and colourful architecture in Geneva (yes, we popped over the border into Switzerland for a couple of days)
St. Johns Wort flower at a herb garden in Geneva Stayed in Taninges in the Alps for a few days, it rained a lot but on the nice days we had some beautiful walks
Sculpture in forest at Taninges
A beautiful lake not far from the campsite. No rain on our last day in Taninges so we went for a long walk into the forest. Saw all kinds of wildlife and mushrooms (not sure what they were though) plus some fun sculptures.
Interesting mushroom at Taninges Another mushroom at Taninges Chamonix-Mont-Blanc in the Alps
Wild mushrooms, Taninges. Chamonix-Mont-Blanc is in the Alps, about 15km from the border with Italy. It was amazingly beautiful…
More photos of Chamonix. We also found the best wild strawberries here.
Interesting flowers near Briançon
A final waterfall photo at Chamonix. Le Petit-Bornand-les-Glières was a random stop on the way to Annecy. Tiny campsite in a sleepy village, very pretty. In the mountains near Briançon, beautiful area and interesting town with great market and several good organic fruit and veg shops.