Is it me or does the squid look reproachful?
I dithered a bit about the title for this recipe. Should it be squid with romesco or romesco with squid? If this was a Hollywood musical (bear with me) the sauce would be Ginger Rogers and the cephalopod would be Squid Charisse. Continue reading
My father-in-law would have been proud of me. When his children were young he would drive home from their holiday cottage to raid the garden for sweetcorn, runner beans, tomatoes, potatoes …
Admittedly he didn’t have far to go but I think he’d have been tickled that we took our home-grown asparagus and our hens’ eggs all the way to Spain last week. Continue reading
Sarah and the Valencian apartment where she worked as an au pair
Sarah, my sister-in-law, once worked as an au pair for a wealthy family in Valencia in Spain. She had her hands full looking after a gaggle of children, the eldest of whom sounded like a proper little madam, and found herself awkwardly placed between Upstairs and Downstairs. Continue reading
This is the simplest recipe going but oh-so-delicious and one of my favourite tapas nibbles. Try it with a fat wedge of tortilla and a few French beans tossed in olive oil and lemon juice – it’s not quite as good as getting on a Costa Brava plane but it’ll still make you want to sing “Y Viva España”. Well, maybe. Continue reading
Picture courtesy of J.C. Gaudi
One of my favourite Catalan meals is a takeaway. Pollastre a l’ast is the Catalan take on spit-roasted chicken and it is sublimely good. The chickens sit side-by-side in tiers, each row dripping down and basting the burnished birds beneath. (See what I did there?) Continue reading
This blog has its genesis in a hand-written cookery book, now in its second volume, that I began 17 years ago in Aigua Blava in Catalonia.
I am fortunate enough to have married a man who, with his siblings, inherited an apartment in this lovely village on the Costa Brava. I’m even luckier to have married into a family who are as fond of food and cooking as I am. I am custodian of my late mother-in-law’s cookery books, one of them written in the back of the medical notes she made when she was training to be a doctor. Dissecting the inner ear on one page, paprika chicken on another. Continue reading