What a day...and more of Spain

Well I planned on blogging after my lunch but today has been quite busy. I am leaving tomorrow for my sisters, she lives in Sonoma- SEVEN hours away driving, geeeek! So I have to un-pack from Spain, re-pack, pack snacks and wrap gifts.
I finished wrapping gifts and I thought I would share my cheap and nifty gift idea. This year I am giving wildflower seeds, bought from Home Depot for $1.99 each, in little Christmas theme pots I found at Target for $1.00.

All you need is:

-scissors
-scotch tape -tissue paper
-small pot
-flower seeds
-gift bags
-old Christmas paper
Then place seeds in pot, place pot in center of tissue paper, match corners of paper around pot and place in gift bag.

For the "To and From" tags just cut a corner from some nice looking old or left over Christmas wrapping and tape a corner inside the bag and fold over edge. Cute, simple, economical and good for the enviorment!
Now on to my Lunch and dinner. I had the same for both, boring I know but since I have to leave tomorrow it prevented me from doing a shopping and cooking day. So I had a big salad with butter lettuce, radicchio, baby carrots, red onion, Persian cucumber (I love these guys from TJ's), a bit of 2% shredded Mexican cheese with Tapatio and Dijon mustard as my dressing. I also had a microwaved low fat Havarti cheese on WW bread and some grapes.
here's a close up...yumm how I have missed homemade salads!
Later I had an apple and an All Bran snack bar I bought in Spain, they are soo good! Very moist like a soft cookie with the taste of a bran muffin, I hope to find them here in the States!

For dinner, as I said it was the same but I will show you a picture anyways since I have a new dinning table. The boyfriend brought it home from work:) (the perks of being in the Art Dept!) not the best picture of it, you can only see the top, but you will see it in the future I'm sure

For dessert I had a chocolate from my Advant Calendar! Do any of you get these during the Holidays?? They are a tradition in my family, I am very behind from Spain so I guess I will have to eat more than one piece a night and have some in January too, hehehe!
Now more of Spain!!! On the second night our friends threw a party for us and some of their Spanish friends. In Spanish tradition we had lots of food! Including; Jamon (a cured and smoked leg of ham) which I did not like very much, salad, bread, olives, langoustine (big shrimp), lots of wine, Cava (like champagne), fruit, Terron which is a variety of almond and honey sweets-yummy, marzipan ( I liked these so much I bought some to take home!), and a ton of tapas like horderves, my fave was the bacon wrapped dates. Here is the table with the wine and jamon.

These are the bacon wrapped dates!

The lot of us at the table- full of food!

The different Terrons, this one out of it's packaging is very similar to Halava, and the smaller wrapped ones are more crumbly. They are called "dust" is Spanish. But here is my fave the Marzipan!

The inside is yolk and they are truly amazing! This picture does them NO justice!

Earlier in the day we stopped by a cute wine cellar!For lunch we had a very famous Spanish dish- Paella, this one had calamari, artichoke, saffron, olive oil, tomato, and a white fish like cod. It was very good, the rice was a bit aldante and so it had a chewy feel, a great comfort food! But it was a bit too rich so I just had a taste.

For dessert we all shared these two decedent babies, above tiramisu and below chocolate cake with ice cream. The tiramisu was the best I'd ever had, light and fluffy and sooo creamy!

Well another big blog, I'm off to bed to watch White Christmas with Bing and finish packing my snacks which I will show you tomorrow. I'll leave you dreaming of chocolate and tiramisu! Good Night! Tomorrow is Christmas Eve!!!!!

C