Valerie and Theresa on Andreu Buenafuente’s show on La Sexta (Spanish TV Channel 6) on 4 February.

One of my least favourite summer-in-the-city rituals is the ITV – that is, the yearly Inspección Técnica de Vehículos.  Mine is always due in late July, when Barcelona is at its stickiest and most irritable. Last year, despite having hora (an appointment), I sat for hours (with air-con bust) in a queue that stretched a couple of blocks, to get into the basement testing station.  At least the car passed. This time, it failed (well, it is pretty ancient).

Every year the whole shebang has become more streamlined, less oily and dirty and stuffy and noisy, and they look at more things. The first time I took my previous ancient car, about 15 years ago or more, I found it totally nervewracking because I couldn’t hear the shouted instructions over the noise of all those engines (for those who have never done an ITV, you have to drive the car yourself through a sort of obstacle course including what I idiotically call the bouncy castle.)  At one stage the guy started yelling: ‘Pulmó! Pulmó!’ Lung? Lung? I sat there, sweating and dopey – and then he yanked the passenger door open, leaned in and grabbed the gear lever, glaring at me and muttering as if I was a total imbecile. I honestly didn’t get till years later, and a quieter, more courteous ITV, that he’d been shouting: ‘Punt mort! Punt mort!’ ie. Put it in neutral!

You can read about the ITV and hora, amongst other fun and useful stuff, in the book.

Mm, horchata. Thick, creamy, ice-cold. You either love it or loathe it. There are no half measures. Made by crushing the life out of tiger nuts (chufas) and mixing with sugar and water, you’ll find it at any good heladería swimming around in a glass tank next to the lemon granizado (sort of slush-puppy).  I absolutely adore the stuff – and will never forget how it got me through one of my worst summers in Spain.

Several years ago, some nutty naturopath put me on a can’t-eat-anything-that-tastes-remotely satisfying diet. You know: no wheat, no dairy, no alcohol, no tea, no coffee, no joy.  I couldn’t bear to eat out with anyone other than my partner or one very close friend – never in a group. After all, there is a limit to how often you want to pay to eat rosada a la plancha (grilled white fish) and salad. Or to how many glasses of maldito mosto (alcohol-less grape juice) you can take, while whoever you’re with knocks back the Rioja / Rueda / Ribeiro.

How to survive the heat and the fun of summer without small pleasures? Well, said the killjoy doctor, if you must, you can have the occasional lemon sorbet or horchata. They saved me, both. Tiny rewards, tiny treats that helped me stick to my regime, lose lots of weight and ditch the nutty naturopath (it’s a long story).

By the way, in Spain, tiger nuts are only grown in Valencia, and since 1995 the chufa de Valencia has been a Denominación de Origen product. According to the official Chufa of Valencia website, tiger nuts are rich in phosphorus, potassium and vitamins C and E.. More interestingly, perhaps, is the highly unlikely-sounding story as to how the drink got its name in the 13^th century. It goes like this:

While the king of Catalunya and Aragón was taking a rest from fighting against the Moorish army, a kindly village girl offered him a glass of tiger nut milk Mmm,” he said, “¿Qué és això? (What’s this?)”

“Es leche de chufa (It’s tiger nut milk),” she replied.

“Això no es llet,” declared the King,. “¡Això ès OR, XATA! (That’s not milk, it’s gold, darling!)”

In Catalan ‘or’ is gold, and ‘xata’, pronounced ‘chata’, a term of endearment, like darling. From then on, the drink became known as ‘horchata de chufa’. The word ‘chufa’, on the other hand probably comes from a place in Sudan called Chufi, where the tiger nut is thought to have originated several thousand years ago.

Not many people know that.

Summer in the city. You lie around in your underwear, eyes glazed, watching TV adverts for canned iced tea, air conditioners, mosquito machines and indefinably pornographic ice creams.  It’s time to head for the hills for the Catalan Picnic Experience, an elaborate ritual that bears no resemblance to the consumption, in the car in a layby in the pouring rain, of the soggy affairs we used to call British Rail sandwiches.

The Catalan Picnic takes place in a special, immaculately kept area in a clearing on a pine-clad mountainside or by a river. Tables and benches hewn out of logs are well spaced out under the trees, and at a safe distance from each table, in the open, is a special individual square stone hearth with a barbecue.

When we had a house in the Solsonès, when the kids were small, we used to go to a wonderful place called Creu del Codó near Coll de Jou (at 1460 metres one of the toughest mountain passes in Europe where we once had the excitement of watching the Tour de Catalunya flash past).

I had it down to a fine fast art: oil and vinegar in plastic bottles, sugar and salt,  plastic cups and plates, checklist on the fridge door: matches, kitchen roll, tin of olives, insect repellent, Swiss Army Knife, plastic bags, fruit. In the village on the way we would buy a massive pa de pagés (farmhouse loaf), una sindria (a watermelon), costelles de xai (lamb cutlets) and botifarres (sausages).

Never ever has food tasted so good, in the pine forests, surrounded by clouds of wasps, with stones in our paper cups to stop them blowing away.

The hillside is dotted with ice boxes in bright neon colours and old ladies squeezed into folding chairs, fanning themselves. From their cars parked outside the area, the large families heave baskets, iceboxes, radios, folding chairs, washing-up gear, footballs, toys,  pots and pans, plates and cutlery, cruets, bottles of wine and beer, Coca Cola and lemonade, coffee pots and bottles of brandy, gigantic two-kilo loaves,  and claim their tables. The women lug the enormous melons and watermelons and bottles of Coke and lemonade to cool down in the font, the spring that pours out of a little pipe in the hillside and in and out of a series of troughs. The men and children traipse off into the forest with baskets and boxes to collect kindling and pine cones. The women cover the knotted wood table with a red and white checked tablecloth. They then proceed to hack doorsteps off the loaf, rub them with tomato and dribble them with olive oil.

The air becomes fragrant with woodsmoke as the men get the fires going. They all have hairy paunches hanging over baggy bermudas, and they stand around in groups shouting and waving kitchen tongs and long forks. The paella (l’arrós) is a particularly complex form of the Picnic Experience: the women start early in the morning at home, preparing the squid and prawns, scraping and steaming open the mussels and clams, making the fish stock from the prawn heads and then getting it all into plastic containers and not forgetting onions, garlic, parsley, tomato, saffron, the rice itself of course and the big flat paella pan and…

“They’ve got everything but the kitchen sink,” gasps our friend just up from Bcn.

And after the coffee and brandy, when all over the hillside men snore on tartan rugs in the shade, children play and women chatter and wash dishes in the font, the couple just across from us oblige. The woman sets up a camp bed in the shade of an umbrella pine, and the man clambers onto it, flakes out and falls fast asleep.

I’ve been in Spain as long as The Simpsons have been on air (1989). And for me, despite their utter American-ness, they remain utterly Spanish. The first time I heard the ‘real’ Homer’s voice I was horrified. Lisa and Marge sound amazingly similar in both languages, but somehow Homer is cuter in castellano, Moe even gravellier, Burns even sleazier, Ralph even, well, Ralphier. And so on. I can’t make my mind up about Bart. His voice is different in the dubbed version but both are great.

Sure, some of the humour must get lost in translation but if your Spanish is street-language good, you’ll find both versions equally funny – or not-quite-so-funny as the case may be. But how do you say ‘Eat my shorts’ in Spanish? How do you translate a phrase that didn’t exist in English? Well, you dream up an equally tame ‘screw you’ expression like ‘Multiplícate por cero’ (er, multiply yourself by zero) and it works just fine. ‘Cool’ is either ‘Mola’ (or rather ‘¡Mooola!), ‘¡Cómo mola!’ or ‘Dabutin’ (a euphemism for the more hard-core ‘de puta madre’). I still haven’t worked out ‘Don’t have a cow, man’; though in one episode I did hear Bart say the fabulous ‘No te sulfures’ (don’t have a chemical reaction / lose your temper / have a cow?).

Homer is easier. In Spanish he does ‘Woo-hoo’ just the same and he says things like ‘Mm… comida / cerveza / chocolate’, but he doesn’t do ‘D’oh!’ This most characteristic of all his catchphrases is captured in Spanish by either something that sounds like ‘¡Ouch!’ (usually when he actually hurts himself), or by the mild expletive ‘¡Mosquis!’ when he’s annoyed.’ (Incidentally, doh – no apostrophe – was added to the online Oxford English Dictionary in 2001).

Perhaps one of the most interesting characters to translate and dub is that of Ned Flanders. If you follow the show you’ll know that Homer’s bible-bashing neighbour jollies up his speech with diddlys and doodilys all over the place. This is rendered consummately in Spanish with a super-abundance of diminutives like –ito, –illo and -icillo.  His standard greeting ‘Hi-doodly-ho’, for example, becomes ‘Hola-holita’, and instead of the classic ‘okily-dokily’, he says ‘por supuestecillo’. Interestingly, his character uses Spanish diminutives in any case and he regularly comes out with words like ‘neighboritos’ or ‘neighborinos’.

Whatever and however you look at it, Los Simpson is an example of dubbing at its finest – a subject to which I’ll be returning in further posts. Until then, hasta luegito.

Oven-hot is the only way to describe the weather when it gets to the 30 somethings. Housework gets relegated to 7am or midnight. Or in a Quentin Crisp sort of way, not at all.  (“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”). As for cooking, suddenly those frozen ready meals don’t seem such a bad idea. All you can face at midday are salads, sandwiches, water-melon …. and gazpacho.

What a wonderful and necessary invention! So simple, nutritious and refreshing – just what you body needs. And if you whiz up all the ingredients at 7am or midnight no hassle at all to make.

Photo: www.notesfromspain.com

So, how do you make this quintessential Spanish summer dish? How long is the proverbial piece of string? No-one, absolutely no-one, makes gazpacho in the same way and no two gazpachos ever taste the same. Everyone uses a slightly different method and uses a slightly different selection of ingredients. You may start off with the recipe your abuela gave you or that you sneakily ripped out of  Hola! at the hairdresser’s, but you soon end up with your own unique variation.

The basic ingredients are tomatoes, stale bread, olive oil, garlic, vinegar, water and salt. Optional vegetables are cucumber, green pepper, red pepper and onion. Some people leave out the bread; others – me included – substitute the bread with carrot. For what it’s worth in the grand scheme of gazpachos, mine goes like this:

1. Place 5 or 6 ripe tomatoes in boiling water so the skins come off easily.
2. Roughly chop the tomatoes, one small cucumber, one long skinny green pepper, and one clove of garlic.
3. Throw in a carrot or a tiny slice of stale bread soaked in water.
4. Whiz all veggies up in the minipimer (hand blender).
5. Add a good chorro (slug) of olive oil and white wine vinegar.
6. Add salt and a teaspoon of cumin (my ’secret’ ingredient) to taste.
7. Dilute with cold water from the fridge (even the cold tap runs hot in summer …) till it’s as runny or thick as you like.
8. Garnish with chopped tomato, cucumber, onion, pepper.
9. Or if it’s really, really hot and chopping vegetables seems like a task of Herculean proportions, cut out the middle man (bowl and spoon) and slug directly from the Tupperware thingy.

Enjoy!