Inspiration from Barcelona! Seafood Paella

Back in June, I finally went on my first trip ever to Europe! Hands down my favorite city was Barcelona, and a big part of that reason was the delicious food. We went tapas hunting all over the place, but always ended up back at our favorite place, Taller de Tapas, for seafood paella. 

I had never been a huge seafood fan growing up, but it's pretty much impossible to hate seafood in Barcelona. Everywhere we went, all the seafood was cooked to perfection. This paella also had such a rich, salty, savory rice with scallops that I could eat all day long. Needless to say, this is on my to-make list. If I can get it to be half as delicious as the seafood paella shown here, I will pretty much die from happiness. 

Here are just a few other tapas/drinks that I remembered to take pictures of before devouring on the spot:

A deliciously refreshing mojito:

I don't remember the exact name, but it was grilled shrimp with garlic and peppers:

 And chorizo!

Looking back through these pictures is like torture because I miss the food in Barcelona so badly! I had tapas the other day in Boston, and while it was not bad, my taste buds are permanently spoiled by my five day feasting in this beautiful city. I'll just end here with a gorgeous picture of the beach at night. 

-jennkay

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July Recipe: Chocolate Chip Shortbread Bars

It's my first official summer in Boston, and I gotta say that the weather is confusing for a California girl like me. One day it's hot and humid, the next it is pouring rain and thunderstorming all over the place. Anyway, I took advantage of one of the cooler, rainier days to bake a little snack for myself. Seeing how I had run out of eggs, shortbread immediately came to mind. So I took a popular recipe from allrecipes.com for Tina's Shortbread Chocolate Chip Cookies (link), and made them into bars. 

At first, the dough was really crumbly as seen in the picture below. So I really got my hands into it, and it finally started forming a cohesive ball of dough.

The dough was actually a really nice, moldable texture without being super sticky like traditional cookie dough. That made it pretty easy to mold into a rectangle on my buttered pan.

After about 17 minutes in the oven, I pulled them out and let them cool for a little bit. While they were still warm, though, I cut it up into bars with my spatula.

And the resulting bars were very buttery, flaky and delicious! I'm very pleased with how they turned out. I think next time, I would substitute chocolate chips for something a little lighter and less sweet like pistachios or maybe even dried fruits? Anyway, this was a really great recipe for the shortbread base dough, so I'm definitely keeping it bookmarked for the future!

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