Stein squeezes us in

I'm hardly a fan, but Rick Stein's series on Spanish food has at least taken in some beautiful locations and great dishes. Last night in Extremadura he helped himself to some guy's migas in a shed on an allotment in Trujillo, and was treated to ajo blanco by the Duchess of somewhere or other in a stunning aristocratic dehesa - a hunting estate complete with stags, wild boar and cork-oaks. Then crossing into Andalusia and arriving in Seville, he claimed to have accidentally stumbled upon El Rinconcillo - the oldest and most famous tapas bar in the city, a fixture in every guide book and travel article on Seville ever printed, and in my limited experience (I've only been once), very disappointing. To be fair it's not Stein or his cooking that annoys me, but the tired and desperate efforts to make the whole thing more engaging by having him drive an old camper van (alone but for a crew of maybe thirty people), having him 'help' with the saffron harvest or whatever, mugging to camera at every opportunity and mispronouncing everything. And all with the most appalling background music. For contrast, check out The Good Cook with Simon Hopkinson on BBC1 at the moment.
No novelty form of transport, no pretending to be best friends with the fishmonger, no groups of implausibly attractive friends round for brunch. Just Simon Hopkinson making five great dishes per episode; simple, honest and brilliant.

Anyway, just when you thought it was over, Stein found ten minutes to visit Chris and Anne Stewart of Driving Over Lemons fame, down our way in the Alpujarra Granadina. The Stewarts live on a cortijo in the river valley at (I think) Barranco de la Sangre, not far from Orgiva. They served Stein some not-very-good-looking tabbouleh (which isn't Spanish, let alone Alpujarran) and a kind of wild boar tagine which probably tasted great, but which looked terrible on the telly. Stein drove a LandRover along a dirt track (the camper van wasn't up to it), but other than that, and the Stewart's terrace, you didn't see anything of what's probably the most beautiful region in Southern Spain. He kept going on about how remote and difficult it was to get to - so after making the effort, you'd think they'd have shot a bit more footage.

The only time I've bumped into Chris Stewart, he didn't have a parrot on his head. It was in the Pizzeria in Capileira, a restaurant which despite its name does much more than pizza, including fabulous boar and extraordinary wild asparagus with scrambled egg. I'd recommend it highly - along with the rest of the eating places in that pretty, busy little village.