Happy New Year to all my readers.
Our Christmas was spent working here in the hotel for the first time. This year, apart from all others, we had 5 enquires for Christmas, a first and in the year of a recession, perhaps heading toward depression!
Well, we were pleased to work with the hotel full with this family from Algeciras, Cadiz. They were all very nice people, as usual. They brought a guitar and a karaoke machine which we heard them singing with into the late hours on the night of 23 December. Ivan prepared a lovely Christmas eve dinner for them of grilled shrimp with rock salt, boiled langoustines, plates of Spanish cured meats, Manchego cheese, baked stuff mushroom caps, pisto on toast with baked pork tenderloin, consume of langoustine, all followed by roasted leg of baby lamb with rosemary sauce and a roasted turkey with mashed potatoes. Dessert was a baba au rum, OH so yum yum!!, with whipped cream.
This family was so nice and unassuming, they asked before dinner if we were dining with them! Very nice but of course we could not even though our new waiter, Tony, was here with us. WE were busy getting those plates out there, dirty ones in and cleaned. After dinner though, we sat with them and sang and Ivan danced with one of the girls. We were with them until 4AM.
All in all, a good Christmas. While we did not spend the holiday with our families, it was a good Christmas all the same because we spent it with very nice people.
Now we are in the midst of preparing for the big New Year's Eve Dinner. Ivan has been preparing food in the kitchen since yesterday already. We are serving our usual eight course dinner with wine, cava and grapes at midnight (as per the Spanish tradition, one grape with each gong of the bell it strikes midnight). Ivan is making consume of langoustines, terrine of fresh cheese with brazed vegetables with a sauce, grilled scallops with sweet potato, quail with dates, lemon sorbet, fillets of monk fish with an aubergine alioli and finally sucking pig confitado with a spiced honey sauce. Dessert is a 3 chocolate brownie with red fruit sauce and whipped cream. WOW, that's sounds yumilicous to me and is making me hungry as I have yet to have some lunch.
I have been busy setting the table, preparing the packets of grapes and helping in the kitchen as well. We have the bar closed today as is our custom on this day because the kitchen is quite busy with all these plates of food coming.
We plan to take some holiday in January, closing from 19 January until 3 February. Bookings for 2009 are starting to roll in as well. We have a booking for 2 January and then a group in February, and bookings in March and May already as well. Our group bookings are improving as well so things are looking up for us these days. Hopefully the first few months of this new year will not look anything like 2008 as this was a pretty miserable time for us, Jan to July that is.
The weather here is cooperating as well as it is dry and cool but not cold. We just had a wood delivery yesterday of 3,000 kilos; that should last a few months. Good burning wood as well, encima and olive.
Well, it's time for me to put some food in my belly so I will sign off here with my last entry of 2008. Oh, one more thing, I have enable a counter on this blog page as I was curious to see what kind of traffic I get here. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I have some very interested readers, some who come back and check me out here once a week. To those dedicated readers, I saw sorry for the long break without new entries, I was recuperating from my fall and then lost my momentum here. But now it's back and and I am in full swing with a couple of entries a month, at least. So, keep on reading.... and thank you for reading.
Happy New Year everyone!! Let's all hope it's better than 2007 and 2008. (Well, any year WITHOUT George W. Bush as President of the United States of America has GOT to be a good year!!!)
Ciao.
