Two firsts for me today: I filleted a whole fish and I prepped and cooked a whole squid. I went about both the way you’d hack out a log jammed into your lawn mower, but it seemed to work okay. The fish was a sargo, which I’m told is sort of like a croaker. I just picked it from amongst the piles and piles of fish at the Tavira market that had just been pulled out of the ocean hours ago, because it looked to be about the right size and I guessed it would be the right balance of oiliness/meatiness. The squid started out about eight inches long and weighed about a pound before I removed the parts that I suspected would be unpleasant to eat. They both went, along with some chorizo and little tiny clams, into what turned out to be a lovely caldeirada, which is basically a Portuguese bouillabaisse.

I also have a couple of pounds of salt cod soaking in the fridge right now, enough for two attempts at bacalhau, a traditional Portuguese Christmas dish that we were served at the Douro winery where we spent the night on the way down here after driving through 500km of snow, ice, and impenetrable fog along switchback roads on the side of a mountain without a guard rail.

The point of all this is that right now I’m having such a nice time not doing any of the things that I’ve been doing the last 12 weeks that I might not get around to catching up on the blog like I’d hoped. Also we have the view out of our terrace to stare at (pictured), which takes a surprisingly large amount of time. We’ll see how it goes.