The paella-pilot had a heart attack

So the plan for today was a family paella lunch cooked by my brother-in-law Bob, who is a dab hand with a paella after being trained by his Valencian brother-in-law.

When we turned up Bob rushed in, said he had a meeting, and handed the paella responsibility over to me. Now, dear reader, if you’ve been following along you’ll remember I did a two-hour paella course in Valencia so I’m obviously qualified to take the controls and land the paella plane when my paella trainer brother-in-law fakes a heart attack.

It’s probably worth explaining at this point that I have known Bob for a long time. In Spanish I generally refer to him as my ‘hermano’ or brother. Unless he does something particularly annoying, in which case he gets downgraded to ‘cunado’ or brother-in-law.

So my cunado left me in charge of the paella.

It was totally entertaining trying to remember what came next. I think the main thing I got from my course, other than a certificate, is an idea of what each stage should look like. End result, with Bob taking over the last bit, was pretty tasty.

But wait, there was more. Not satisfied with a huge lunch we went out for an even larger dinner.

We had a very fine fish meal which was, slightly mysteriously, accompanied by ‘live lettuce’ – there were in fact no signs of life although we spent some time watching it closely. Then we just enjoyed the excellent meal.