Crunchy zucchini salad with pine nuts -and a few days in Rome
For the most part, food ingredients taste different depending on whether they are cooked or not cooked. Mushrooms, peppers, broccoli or cauliflower, as well as carrots or brussels sprouts, can be prepared in many ways: sautéed, fried, baked, battered, in tempura, and even raw, in salads or smoothies. But few ingredients have such different flavor when you use a different method of dicing or cutting.
To me, zucchini is one of those. While I don’t usually eat raw zucchini, raw zucchini cut in ribbons is the exception, and I can eat as many of those as crispy battered zucchini (get the recipe here). (more…)
We are enjoying the last of the tomatoes, for tomato season is (almost) over. I had been holding on to posting the recipe for salmorejo until we got really good tomatoes, and now the season is slipping away. No matter, I made salmorejo with the last of the good tomatoes and here you have the recipe. Save it until next summer.
I have been away from these pages for too long. You know it, I know it. So to make up for it, I bring you a star recipe: pimientos de piquillo de carne, meat stuffed piquillo peppers. I still have to find one person I’ve served these peppers to that doesn’t like them. They are a crowd pleaser, and I make them on special occasions, precisely because they are so special. I make piquillo peppers stuffed with meat as well as stuffed with cod, and both varieties are just as delicious, and a success among family and guests alike.
One year after his graduation from high school, this blog post is for my son Ethan. I wanted to choose a dessert recipe to go with it, something sweet, because that’s how he is. I chose my recipe for lemon mousse tart, a light dessert I’m sure you will love as much as we do at home.
Culinary Diplomacy Spain took place at the Joseph Decuis farm on March 22, 2019. A lot has happened since then (I published a book!), but now it’s time to talk about that great evening, and share with you one of the recipes the guests enjoyed, mojo picon with wrinkly potatoes, mojo picón con patatas arrugadas.
The article started with this paragraph:
Rice stuffed red peppers, pimientos de arroz, is one of the dishes of my childhood and young adulthood (or the period prior to my moving to North America after I married). Medium grain Valencian rice, seasoned and cooked in a tomato based thick broth, bakes to perfection inside sweet red peppers that roast until almost caramelized.
It is a fact that many families in Spain make an effort at Christmas time to buy a leg of ham, and not just any ham, but the best ham they can afford. That might seem like a strange concept for my American audience, but most Spaniards would understand it. In Spain you can buy jamón serrano, cured serrano ham, of various qualities, all the way up to the crown jewel, what is considered a luxury product, a leg of Iberian ham.
I know, I know, two posts in a row with recipes for fish. Not only fish, but mollusks, so popular where I come from, Spain’s Mediterranean coast, but not so where I live, Indiana. There’s an explanation, I’m still on detoxification mode from sweets after Christmas, and hard on the Mediterranean diet, the tried and true. But don’t fret: Valentines is around the corner, then a number of family birthdays, and soon after, Easter. Lots and lots of opportunities for sweets. So tag along with me, follow the Mediterranean diet, and your heart (and your waist) will thank you.
