June Massell
One of the joys of travel has always been sampling foods from different cultures and trying new and unfamiliar ingredients, tastes, and sauces. For many, travel has included a culinary journey as part of the itinerary.
While the pandemic has temporarily suspended physical travel for most of us, we can still have a culinary adventure! With a little imagination and a lot of help from entrepreneurial online food marketplaces, we can travel without a passport. No airports, no security, no long lines, and plenty of delicious authenticity and hard-to-find international ingredients. Just click, and an entire meal, or the ingredients to make one, will appear at your door. So, today we welcome the foods of the world, and experience colors and scents from all across the globe.
Our world food tour begins in Spain whose chefs are world-renowned. La Tienda means store in Spanish, and tienda.com has an amazing selection of Spanish food products from all over the country. Craving Paella? They’ll send you a kit with the ingredients plus the Paella pan. Just add the fresh vegetables, chicken, or seafood. How about the famous Tortilla Española? Several varieties of this potato omelet come perfectly prepared and imported from Spain. Heat, serve, and you can almost hear the flamenco in the background.
Perhaps you want to sample the artisan cheeses from the Mancha, such as the real deal Manchego made from sheep’s milk. Or, try the San Simon, a smoked cow’s milk cheese, from Galicia in the north of Spain. Add some slices of Serrano or Iberico ham to go on the cheese plate and decorate with Spanish olives (stuffed with anchovies or peppers) and almonds. If you really feel like splurging, you can order a whole Iberico de Bellota ham, which is generally recognized as the finest cured ham in the world.
Imagine being at the famous seafood market in Santiago de Compostela. La Tienda can send you octopus, mussels, razor clams, cockles, sardines, and white belly tuna that come from Spain’s north Atlantic coast or the Cantabrian Sea.
And if you know and love Horchata, they have that too. Not the Mexican version made from rice that is sometimes found in the United States, but the Horchata drink from Spain that comes from the chufa nut grown in the fields near Valencia.
If you live near Williamsburg, Virginia, you can visit La Tienda’s restaurant and retail store. Otherwise, order online at tienda.com. They ship nationwide.
