I won't need to eat for a couple weeks. I just returned from spending nine days in Spain. Certainly one of my most visible but hopefully not too long lasting memories of Spain is the four pounds I gained eating there. Spanish food is delicious but it is rich and loaded with calories.

It all started with breakfast. Near our hotel in Madrid there was a bakery that filled its front shop window with hundreds of tempting looking pastries. I'm not sure what time the elderly couple who ran the place got up to start baking but certainly by 8:30 each morning when we walked by on our way to begin our daily sight seeing trips it already smelled like heaven. There were plates stacked high with fluffy croissants, caramel twists, apple tarts, chocolate coated biscotti, glazed cinnamon raisin buns and cream puffs. My husband would stand staring in the window for many minutes and change his mind dozens of times before making his final selections.

Lunches were simple affairs usually bread, cold meat, cheese and olives. However there were so many special kinds of cheeses that one was tempted to try as many as possible. One day we ordered a plate of cheese in a restaurant and were served a huge tray artistically arranged with soft, hard, tangy, sharp, creamed, crusted and crumbly cheeses. We barely ate half of it. Luncheon meats were spicy and filling and thankfully usually sliced paper-thin. A fruity sangria was the natural accompaniment to our lunches.

We tried many different dishes at dinner but my favorite was the paella. The waiter would bring you a huge plate of buttery, saffron flavored rice. Hidden inside were chunks of tender chicken, pieces of shrimp, green and red peppers, tomatoes, Italian sausages and sometimes squid, clams or oysters. Arranged around the edges of your plate were mussels still in the shells. Often this came with a green salad and jars of herbed oil and red wine vinegar. As many times as I told myself there was no need to clean my plate I always did and to my embarrassment would sometimes find myself licking the last grains of the delicious rice off of my mussel shells and plate rim.

Our eating didn't end with supper however. There's a wonderful tradition in Spain of having chocolate con churros in the evening before you go to bed. This is a small cup of rich, dark, thick hot chocolate accompanied by thin, deep fried, horseshoe- shaped, ribbed pastries sprinkled with powdered icing sugar. Several of our evenings in Spain were quite cold. Chocolate con churros was just the thing to warm you up before bed. I remember one chilly night sitting for a couple hours in a dark, cosy, underground restaurant in Madrid with my husband and our friends sharing chocolate con churros, stories and laughter.

I wore the same pants to fly home from Spain that I'd worn on the plane to Madrid nine days before. They were significantly snugger on the return flight. I just downloaded all my photos from Spain and thought I could visibly notice the difference in my body shape between the beginning and end of our journey. I may need to add a couple extra miles to my exercise walking regime for the next few weeks in order to shed those four pounds I've gained but I'm more than willing to pay that price. The mouth watering food I enjoyed in Spain was definitely worth it!

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