For those readers who enjoyed reading my book about starting new life in southern Spain, you may find Lisa Rose Wright’s memoir equally entertaining. Unlike most expats, Lisa and her partner choose a path less travelled and decide to attempt the good life in rural Galicia — a part of Spain famous for its cooler climate and frequent rain.
Her memoir, Plum, Courgette & Green Bean Tart: A year to write home about, documents the first year of their search for lavida dulce in Northern Spain. Here’s my review in Spain in English.
Lisa’s passion for cooking, inventing new recipes from home-grown produce and adapting English recipes to preserve a seemingly endless supply of apples, apricots, and walnuts in autumn, and the titular plums, courgettes, and green beans in the summer, is formidable. Galicia, often labelled as the Switzerland of Spain, is probably the most well-known to readers from travelogues depicting the Camino de Santiago — the famous pilgrimage, and nowadays a popular hiking route, that leads to Santiago de Compostela.The book covers a year in Galicia where the reader gets to live vicariously through their experience: from the never-ending chestnut collection in autumn, clearing the land to grow vegetables, fixing the roof, trying to stay warm in a house without windows, making endless preserves from an abundance of fruit and vegetables, keeping bunnies and chickens, and learning how to slaughter a pig to provide enough meat for a year.
Plum, Courgette & Green Bean Tart by Lisa Rose Wright is available on Amazon on kindle and as paperback. smarturl.it/PlumetcYearWriteHome
Sabina Ostrowska 