Category: Recipes

  • Conill al Romesco (Romesco Rabbit)

    Conill al Romesco (Romesco Rabbit)

    A rustic rabbit recipe from Catalonia that’s delicious enough to turn even bunny-phobes into finger-licking fans. Rabbit’s not what it used to be. The miserable, mass-produced specimens that line the chiller cabinets of Catalan supermarkets don’t have much to recommend them in terms of either flavour or farming ethics. I’ve talked about this before. You…

  • Fricandó amb Moixernons o Cama-Secs  (Braised Beef with Wild Mushrooms)

    Fricandó amb Moixernons o Cama-Secs (Braised Beef with Wild Mushrooms)

    This classic dish is a staple of menus across Catalonia with as many variations as there are cooks. It’s really an autumn dish but it can be made year-round using dried mushrooms. The combination of tender meat, savoury fungi and rich onion and tomato sauce is finished with a characteristically Catalan touch: a picada (paste) of…

  • Rabbit with prunes and pine nuts — Conill amb prunes i pinyons

    Rabbit with prunes and pine nuts — Conill amb prunes i pinyons

    I don’t eat much rabbit. Not because I don’t like it but because the battery-farmed, flavourless specimens usually available to buy are unjustifiable, either ethically or gastronomically. Fortunately I recently happened upon an organic rabbit which was much more like the real, wild thing. I decided to improvise a dish using some classic Catalan/Spanish flavour…

  • Mmm…bacon!

    Mmm…bacon!

    Last week I bought some organic pork belly from BioSpace (www.bioespacio.com, C/ València 186, Barcelona) and set about making some bacon as an experiment. Nothing complicated, just rubbed in a cure of sea salt, black pepper, soft brown sugar and some crushed bay leaf, put into a big, airy tupperware in the fridge then turned,…

  • Escudella i Carn d’Olla

    Escudella i Carn d’Olla

    This is as Catalan as it gets. Escudella i Carn d’Olla, which can be roughly translated as soup and poached meats served over two courses, is the Catalan ur-dish. This is the taste of home, of hearth; the kind of peasant food that makes locals go all misty eyed and start talking about about their grandmothers…

  • Ravioli

    Ravioli

    I’m aware that I’m straying quite regularly from the Catalan brief implied in the title of my blog but I’ll excuse myself on the grounds that Barcelona’s a fairly cosmopolitan place and food’s too interesting and too international to bury in dull regional coffins. I first learned to cook in Italy — but not in…

  • Embutido…

    Embutido…

    …and lentejas Or embutits and llenties if we’re staying all Catalan, but spiced sausages and lentil stew are such pan-iberian staples that it seems best to stick to the more familiar terms. This is comfort food and convenience food both. Lentils offer all the wonderful, winter-warming goodness of other legumes but without the need to be…