Olive Me

People around the Empordà differ on the subject of who makes the best recuit––the wheyful cheese of Catalonia that’s so perfect on a little toast with tomato jam. Or drizzled with honey for dessert.

There are those who like the cow’s milk recuit made by Quim, a sweet guy with a roadside stand just outside Fonteta. He makes a good goat’s milk version too, and I prefer its tang. Others swear by the recuit––also goat’s milk––made by the crotchety Nuri in the village of Ullastret. I’m in their camp.

Despite the inviting cursive of the “Nuri d’Ullastret” sign hanging above her door near the road out of that village, you can pretty much count on Nuri to act annoyed to see you coming. There’s something exciting about wresting a little pillow of cheese from her. You tell yourself her attitude is calculated to keep outsiders from scooping up the small batches meant for regulars.

Now there is another recuit in the neighborhood. Made by Manel and Natalia at Formatgeria Mas Marcè, this one is in a class by itself. It is also hard to get because most of the production goes to restaurants. Sometimes they have it at their farm stand in Siurana d’Empordà, near Girona.

I met them at the region’s big cheese show, La Fira de Formatges Artesans del Pirineu in La Seu d’Urgell with some of their prize-winning aged cheeses: El Set is a dense, butter-colored cheese with a natural rind, firm and slightly shardy at two to four months. Llanut is whiter, soft, and melting, eaten just a few weeks old. Manel wraps it in a layer of clean wool––you remove that, of course, before digging in. It makes the cheese just a little sheepish.

But it is their simple recuit de drap that matters in my memory right now.

What makes their little cloth-wrapped fresh cheese so unforgettable is fat. Ewe’s milk fat. And not from just any ewes. Manel and Natalia are raising Ripollesas––a breed of sheep native to Catalonia, but now so rare they’ve been put on the Slow Food Ark of Taste for salvation.

The milk Ripollesas give is much richer than that of other breeds at upwards of 8% milk fat. But hardly anybody raises them because they produce damn little of it: each ewe gives only about 30 liters per year. Meanwhile, Manel tells me, farmers here have gotten used to imported breeds that produce up to 600 liters a year. “You can see why my father, a sixth generation shepherd, who grew up with that level of production, thought ours was a terrible idea.”

A smile takes over Manel’s face as he looks out over the pasture. “That’s him out there with the sheep. He works as our shepherd now.”

The formatgeria is small, but the family’s commitment to it is huge. Besides bringing the Ripollesas back from the edge of extinction, they’ve brought the land into line with standards for certified organic pasture. While they were at it, they decided to revive another lost tradition: they make their cheese with vegetable rennet. The thistly cardoons they use to produce it grow wild on their land.

One more thing Manel’s dad thought was crazy: Manel and Natalia wanted to bypass large cooperatives––a guaranteed outlet for their milk––and keep everything from grazing to cheesemaking right on the farm. Manel set out looking for customers who would care about their project, taking samples of his milk and cheeses directly to chefs. Sure enough, Ferrán Adrià (mastermind at El Bullí) became a customer for the milk, and Jordi Roca got Mas Marcé to start making yogurt for their Michelin three-star Celler de Can Roca.

The difficulty of getting to those places for my everyday cheese has had me thinking about raising a couple of ewes.

Meantime, there’s this: if you can get your hands on good buttermilk and whole milk, turning them into a decent homemade version of recuit is only slightly more taxing than boiling water.

Manel and Natalia would not approve, but even they would have to admit that this stuff, made with organic cow’s milk and no gums or fillers to give it listless water-weight gain, is a hundred times better than store-bought ricotta.

Recuit

Makes about one quart

1/2 gallon (8 cups) whole milk
1 pint (2 cups) buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
cheesecloth and kitchen twine or a rubber band

Warm the milk, buttermilk, and salt in pot––an enameled one, pale and weighty, is perfect: it seems never to scorch. Slowly heat the mixture, stirring now and then to be sure it isn’t sticking on the bottom of the pot.

If you’re a Catalan countrywoman you probably know by looking just when to turn off the fire. It’s not too far south of the boiling point, when the milk is wiggly and threatening to simmer, that you’ll see the milk seem to separate a bit, and a few curds begin to form. I use a candy thermometer and this all happens between 170 and 180 degrees F.

As soon as you get the beginnings of curd formation, turn off the heat and stop stirring. It won’t look like much at first, but if you keep cooking, the cheese loses its delicate flavor and texture. The recuit will continue to develop as it stands. Let it stand for five minutes.

Line a strainer or colander with four layers of cheesecloth. Be sure you use squares of cloth big enough to allow you to wrap around a quart-sized blob of cheese. Using a skimmer or slotted spoon, scoop the curds into the cheesecloth-lined colander. Keep scooping until all that’s left in the pot is the whey and the itty bitty squigles that are hard to catch with your slotted spoon.

(Why not just pour the whole mess through? You can. But then your cheese is wetter and takes longer to drain. Instead, use a separate piece of cheesecloth to strain the last bits of curd out of the whey, chill it, and drink it later on. I sense a healthy bottled whey drink craze coming on.)

Now gather up the corners of your cheesecloth and tie it with a piece of kitchen twine or a rubber band. Tie the bundle to your faucet and let it drip into your sink for 20 minutes. Don’t let it go much longer or it gets too dry.

This is so good just unwrapped and drizzled with honey while it’s still at warm room temperature. But you can leave it wrapped and store it in a shallow bowl for a few days in the fridge, and use it as you would ricotta.

It has always seemed to me that cooking over a wood fire requires a certain restlessness. Cookouts with my Catalan friend Jaume prove this is true even on Mediterranean shores. The mood around his fire might be mellowed by fall sunshine and hits of wine from a porrón, but still, there are mushrooms to move from one side of the grill to the other, arguments to be fanned regarding the best way to grill a coca (pizza’s Catalan cousin), and embers to be jabbed.

That’s why it struck me as a little odd that Assumpta, who was, after all, in charge of dessert at this particular October cookout, was making herself so comfortable. “I’m doing pomes a la pedra,” she said from her hammock: apples on a rock.

And there they were, teed up at the front edge of the fire: four flat rocks, each with an apple on top. At home, she had sliced off the top of each apple, pared out cores and seeds, and filled their centers with chopped toasted walnuts and honey. The tops went back on, leaving the apples looking whole again, with only a fine line around their tops giving away the fact that they’d had some work done.

“I make these at home, too,” said Assumpta, “on cool fall nights when we have a fire.” She keeps a few flat rocks on the hearth just for this purpose. She puts an apple on each rock and sets them next to the fire to slow roast through dinnertime and on into the evening. She has perfected a technique for turning the apples: “I nudge the rocks around with my toe every so often while we’re sitting around the fire.” Dessert is ready when the apples begin to blister and their sugary juices bubble out onto the rocks.

They’re not bad oven-roasted in an ordinary baking dish. If you add a few drops of good Spanish brandy to the filling, and eat them next to a warm wood stove, they might even taste a little like the smoky ones from Assumpta’s hearth.

Slow-Roasted Apples

I like a smallish apple for this dessert, unless you’re sharing. Honeycrisps, which are descended from Macouns and goldens turn a very pretty pink color when roasted.

For each apple:

1 tablespoon toasted walnuts, chopped (or one prune, chopped, or a combination)
a pinch of cinnamon
2 teaspoons good brandy
2 teaspoons honey
a pat of butter (about one teaspoon)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Pour a tiny bit of water, a scant 1/4 inch, in the bottom of your roasting pan (apple cider or orange juice work nicely if you happen to have those). Cut off the top 1/2 inch of each apple, on the stem end, and reserve the tops. Carefully cut out the stem, seeds, and cores, but don’t go all the way through to the bottom of the apple––the apple to will hold its filling and juices better that way.

Set the apples, cored end up, in the roasting pan. Stuff them with the chopped nuts and/or prunes. Add a pinch of cinnamon to each. Spoon in the brandy and honey. Poke in the pat of butter. Place the top of each apple back in its place, covering the filling.

Roast for about 45 minutes, or until the apples are tender. Spoon any pan juices over the apples before serving them.

“Melmelada de tomàquet is not so much a tradition as it is a necessity,” says Georgina Regàs, the creator of Catalonia’s Museu de la Confitura. “You know how tomatoes are, they come in such overabundance.”

That’s easy for her to say. She lives in l’Empordà––a kitchen-garden-rich corner of Catalonia with a ridiculously long tomato-growing season. No one on my cold New England sandbar would dare to speak so casually of that kind of success with tomatoes, for fear of being struck down by blossom end rot.

But this year we did have tomatoes. And once the thrill of tomato sandwiches (thick slices, white bread, mayo, salt) eased up, the season kept on long enough to allow us to act like Catalans. That is, pa amb tomàquet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Until I remembered the tomato jam with locally made fresh cheese at Georgina’s little confiture workshop in the village of Torrent.

When I called, she didn’t really want to talk about tomatoes. She was gearing up for her autumn classes. “The madrones are so beautiful right now. They say if you eat them in full sunshine, they’ll get you drunk. Plus, they’re loaded with pectin.”

“Wait a minute, is madrone jam traditional in Catalunya?” I’ve seen madrone trees there and in California, but I never knew those little orange fruits were edible.

“Probably not,” she says. “Catalans are not really a serious jam-eating people. But I’m into the recovery of the art of preserving. I’m not interested in limiting myself to traditional Catalan jams.” Georgina started her museum after an English visitor turned her on to lemon marmalade as a way to use the fruit that was littering her dooryard. “This project is more about nature’s treasures than it is about national ones.”

I think maybe Georgina is herself a Catalan national treasure. She is 79 years old and started this project just seven years ago. She does have a business partner, Teresa Millàs. “I had to cut her in,” she says, “Because I’d go to the bank for a loan on kitchen equipment and they would say I needed someone who was going to be around a while to back it up.”

“But really,” she goes on, “the only part of this I’m too old for is Facebook. I’ve lived my whole life without it just fine.” (Nonetheless, you can “like” the museum here.)

Teresa and the rest of the museum’s small staff all share Georgina’s passion for preserving and teaching. And in spite of their prize-winning forays into foreign jams (they won a gold medal for their kumquat marmalade at the Dalemain Marmalade Festival last year, which landed their jars on the shelves of Fortnum & Mason in London), they do teach classics from her region, including tomato jam.

Georgina approves of my totally simple recipe, though she would add an apple to the pot. Its pectin will make the jam set faster, which she says translates into fresher flavor. She also recommends another combination locals are fond of: tomato-watermelon jam. Both are traditionally eaten alongside fresh cheeses for breakfast or for a mid-afternoon snack. A smidge on a cracker loaded with goat cheese makes a nice American style hors d’oeuvre. I predict we’ll soon see see tomato jam as part of a fancypants restaurant dessert in New York or Barcelona. I imagine it alongside, say, basil ice cream, with a drizzle of arrop.

“After the war, when nobody could afford sugar, preserves were made with arrop––grape juice, boiled into a thick, slightly caramelized syrup,” Georgina says. “But yes, I hear arrop is in fashion again.”

Melmelada de Tomàquet — Tomato Jam
makes about 4 half pints

3 1/2 lbs perfectly ripe plum tomatoes
1 1/2 lbs sugar
1 oz (two tablespoons) freshly squeezed lemon juice
a big pinch of salt
a sprig of fresh thyme

Blanch the tomatoes for half a minute in boiling water. Then peel and core them and drop them into a large, heavy jam-making pot. Add the sugar, lemon juice, salt, and branch of thyme. Bring to a simmer, then a steady boil, stirring every few minutes. Watch the jam closely as the water cooks off and the juices become syrupy: you’ll need to stir it steadily to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Squash any big chunks of tomato while you’re at it. Skim off any sticky foam that forms on the surface, too, since those dense little bubbles will cloud the jam’s sparkle later. The jam will begin to set up in about 25 to 35 minutes. When it’s softly set, remove the thyme and ladle the jam into clean hot jars and seal.

If you need instructions on testing jam for doneness or on preparing, sealing, and processing your jars properly, the people at Ball jars are more than happy to tell you what to do.

El Museu de la Confitura is on the Plaça Major in the village of Torrent, Tel: +34-972-30-47-44. Summer classes are for kids, but during the rest of the year, the museum offers classes for adults, about once a month. A typical Saturday class covers techniques, hands-on preserving, and a light tasting menu that can stand in for lunch. Don’t be afraid to join a class just because your Catalan is rusty: Georgina speaks Spanish, French, and English and, besides, when people are cooking, they nearly always understand one another. Coming up, Saturday, October 4: madrone jam and picapoll grape jelly. Winter classes move on to preserved pumpkin, and for the holidays, there’s Cava jelly, and citrus marmalades.

Once I placed a few shards––say about five bucks worth––of Spanish tuna, the kind packed in olive oil, on my tongue, there was no going back. Does it do any good, in this economy, to argue that a fabulous lunch for two can be made with just one eighteen-dollar tin?

What does it matter when the fact is, the kind of tuna salad I grew up on now tastes distinctly like a bowlful of fish oil soaked spit wads?

Now it’s Ortiz or bust. The ventresca is ultra-luxurious, even though it comes in a can. One that looks just like the same ring-topped oval that my dad would pop open for his Saturday post-golf ration of cottonseed oil-laced sardines. This is so much better. Scroll back the lid and you’re face to face with a few perfectly delicate long strips of tuna belly.

The larger, firmer, but still luscious slabs of loin that come in a jar are great in a puttanesca or a salad.

Whether ventresca or not, it’s bonito del norte you want: Thunnus alalunga, which is known as “albacore” in the American market. (For the species conscious, albacore is not to be confused with thunnus albacares, which we Americans call yellowfin tuna but the French, naturally, call albacore.)

Maybe the best use of a stash of this stuff: Toast a diagonal slice of baguette; drape on a forkload of tuna; give it a pinch of crunchy sea salt (because this tuna is not overly salted, the way the American tunas are) and a twist of black pepper, and away you go.

Maybe too, just a few slices of tart pickle or sweet onion on top. Definitely a piece of pimiento de piquillo, if there’s an open jar in the fridge.

And for a summer lunch, here’s a whole ‘nother tuna salad. I won’t give it a Spanish name, but it does have a Spanish accent.

Summer Rice Salad with Spanish Tuna

Serves 2

3 ounces Ortiz bonito del norte (part of a jar, or for the profligate, one tin of ventresca)
2 cups leftover white rice, cold
2 heaping tablespoons pesto (preferably a supply that hasn’t had any cheese added yet)
about a dozen cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1/4 small sweet or red onion, sliced thin
one small unwaxed garden cuke, diced small
sea salt and fresh black pepper

Put the rice and vegetables in a bowl and stir in the pesto to dress it all. Taste and season with salt and pepper if need be. Gently toss in the tuna, so it doesn’t get too busted up.

This week marks the end of El Bulli as we know it. Or at least as some people know it. For those of us who never went, there has been plenty to feast on: blow-by-blow descriptions of 40-course evenings; journalistic debates about whether Ferran Adrià’s kitchen performances are food or art, “molecular gastronomy” or “techno-emotional cuisine”; cookbooks; day-in-the-life books; descriptions of staff meals; presentations at Harvard.

Just in case you haven’t had enough, now there’s a movie, too. The Film Forum in New York City is celebrating the restaurant’s closing with a two week run: “El Bulli: Cooking in Progress,” a documentary by German filmmaker Gereon Wetzel (and his Catalan wife Anna Ginestí, who collaborated on the script). Fittingly, Wetzel says his approach was influenced by that great silent observer of prisons, schools, zoos, and “hospitals for the criminally insane,” Frederick Wiseman.

Two clips that tempt me show that Adrià does actually have ideas about how things taste. He doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who uses language to express himself, but he makes himself clear, recoiling nastily when he’s served up an experiment he doesn’t like. Later, he squirms with demanding delight when his minions hit on something that’s right.

Colman Andrews, the former editor of Saveur and one who pointed Americans to Catalan cuisine when Adrià was a mere dishwasher, is speaking at the August 5th showing. See you at the movies.

The Manhattan User’s Guide recently published its selection of Spain-oriented reference points of the moment in New York City, The Spanish Dossier. Their seductive advice for armchair travelers starts with the New York Botanical Garden’s faux Alhambra Palace, complete with date palms, pomegranates, and fountains, and ranges to Jaume Plensa’s sculpture in Madison Square Park. They like the one-woman show, “My Audition for Almodóvar,” and list the best places for Spanish food in New York City, too.

I’m sorry that tonight’s dinner is out of focus, but I think if you take a good look, you will understand why. Xesca was my saucy backdrop at D.O. in Barcelona’s Gràcia neighborhood. Here is her decolletage behind a superb platillo of escarxofa confitada amb botifarra negra. A neatly trimmed artichoke heart, gone tender in an olive oil bath, but with its flat top caramelized, the whole thing settled into a dab of pureed potatoes and topped with a few slices of blood sausage, also slightly crisped on the edges.

Then, Gambes amb favetes i menta, seared red shrimp, that special breed from Palamós (head-on, how else around here?), with a scattering of ingredients from a classic Catalan spring salad: fresh favas, mint, and lemon zest. Nice, though we felt funny about the little coral-colored eggs that filled each shell and asked for an opinion from the kitchen. Answer: “Those are considered a good thing.” Which is indeed a good thing, because by the time we got that report we had eaten them all.

See, we started down this path to a few platillos thinking we’d eat light. But these are the pig’s feet that threw us giddily off course. Canelons de peus de porc amb salsa de vi negre that were pure unctuous pigginess, wrapped in a thin sheet of pasta (after mingling heavily with the Italians in the middle ages, the Catalans came away in posession of the cannolo form); around them, a thin drizzle of fruity red wine sauce. (This is what platillos are all about, by the way––a Catalan small plates tradition that goes back to the days before “small plates” were actually small.)

Here is the cleverest idea yet regarding the problem of calçots for city folks: roast them en papillotte. Though these were a little underdone, the fiber involved, we figured, was an excellent counterbalance to the pig’s feet.

Dessert. Just one, and really good: a sliver of genoise formed a base for a Canut de Formatge Idiazabal amb Codony. It was a lovely little cannolo, wrapped in thin slices of quince paste and filled with Idiazabal cheese-spiked cream.

D.O. Carrer Verdi, 36, Barcelona. Tel: +93-218-96-73. Open Mon-Sun from 8pm to 1am. Closed Tuesdays.

I hear that in France people settle for just one day to celebrate fat: Mardi Gras, that happy Tuesday before Lent and all its pious negation begin. In Catalonia, the fat-eating starts almost a week ahead of time, on Fat Thursday. First thing in the morning on Dijous Gras, they reach for a slice of coca de greixons to get the ball rolling.

“Ooh-la-la,” say the French, when you tell them the other name for this barely sweet, mysteriously savory breakfast flatbread,coca de llardons. Yes, those little bits in the dough are, well, they are not exactly lard. They’re bacon.

Coca de greixons is a simple one-rise brioche dough. The butter and eggs are dialed back a notch to compensate for the other gras, which you’ve slowly crisped so that it practically amounts to lean cuisine anyway. Roll it out into the traditional oblong coca shape, paint it with olive oil, and give it a scattering of sugar and pine nuts for crunch, and voila! Or, as I believe I said at my first confession: Je regrette rien.

Coca de Greixons

This is one of those rare breads for which a sturdy stand mixer comes in really handy. If you have one, you let the dough go for a good five minutes while you clean up the kitchen or make a phone call. If you don’t have one, be ready to spend about 10 minutes kneading a very sticky dough.

3/4 cup milk (whole or reduced fat, just not skim)
1 package active dry yeast (about 2 teaspoons)
3 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar, plus 2 Tbsp more for sprinkling on top
1 tsp salt
1 tsp anise seeds
1/4 cup cold sweet butter (1/2 stick), cut into chunks
1 large egg
1 Tbsp anís (optional; Spanish anisette liqueur; Pernod or pastis will do)
1/2 cup chopped greixons*
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/3 cup pine nuts

Warm the milk. Make sure it is not too hot (about 110F is just right. At 120F or more, you’ll kill the yeast––if you don’t have an instant-read thermometer, stick your finger into the milk and aim for hot-but-tolerable; later, go and spend the $7 on a thermometer), then sprinkle the yeast over the milk and let it begin to dissolve and activate while you start the dough.

Put the flour, sugar, salt, and anise seeds into a mixing bowl, and give it a whirl using the mixer’s paddle attachment. Drop in the butter and beat the mixture for a few minutes, until the butter is well distributed and things have a sandy texture.

Change out the paddle attachment for the dough hook. Beat in the milk and yeast slurry on low speed, then add the egg and the anís liqueur, if you’re using it, and beat them in, too. Bring the speed up to medium and let the mixer go for a good five or six minutes.

Add the chopped greixons* and mix or knead them in well, for a minute or two.

The dough will look rather wet, but scrape it out of the bowl onto your lightly floured countertop and you’ll see it holds together in a supple, elastic way. Knead the dough gently, giving it just a few turns and shaping it into a smooth ball. Smear on a little olive oil to coat the dough’s surface, cover it lightly with a clean floursack towel or plastic wrap, and set it aside to rest for a half hour.

Roll the dough into a big oval or circle, aiming to get it a little under an inch thick. Line a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper and lift the dough onto it. Spruce up the coca’s shape after the move. Brush the top with one tablespoon of olive oil, then sprinkle it with the pine nuts, smoothing over them gently with your hand to be sure they’ll stay put.

Let the coca rise. It needs about one and a half hours at warm room temperature. Heat the oven to 350F. Brush the top of the coca with another tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle it with the two tablespoons of sugar. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until it is deep golden.

When making this for breakfast, I’ve prepared the dough and just let it rise overnight, no problem. You can also let it rise, then refrigerate it for a day or overnight to hold it until you’re ready to bake it; just get it out of the fridge when you first get up, before you even begin preheating the oven.

* Greixons, llardons, let’s face it, these are bacon bits. Homemade. From good pancetta or very thick cut bacon (uncured, nothing smoked, nor mapled, herbed, peppered…). A half pound cut into cubes or 3/4 inch sticks will yield about the half cup you need for this recipe. (If you make extra, it’ll freeze.) Cook the bacon over low heat, stirring frequently. You want it evenly rendered and caramelized. You’ll end up with at least a half cup of bacon fat as a handy by-product.

Suquet, everyone will tell you, is Catalonia’s  bouillabaisse––a thrifty fishermen’s stew made from the less promising creatures amid the day’s catch. Next thing you know, they’re serving you a rich bowlful of the stuff, scented with brandy and saffron and topped up with luxury goods like langoustines.

Who wouldn’t put it past those Catalan fishermen to take a little extra time at sea to flambé their lunches? (more…)

“La Crisis” cut so deep this year in Spain that my friends will first have to gather their lottery winnings before they can mail my year-end turrón supply. That said, I am not terribly worried about suffering a turrón-free 2011 because the chances of my nougat suppliers winning at least a little something in the Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad, to be drawn in Madrid tomorrow, is around 15 percent. In lottery terms, if you buy a billete it’s a cakewalk to win a piece of El Gordo, the big one: 0.0012 percent (one in 83,333).

Virtually everyone in Spain plays the Christmas lottery. It’s the biggest in the world in terms of total prize payout (a couple of billion Euros) and surely the most democratic. (more…)

Els Castells ja són Patrimoni Cultural i Immaterial de la Humanitat. This is by no means immaterial: UNESCO has declared Catalonia’s castells part of the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” Castells are not just a bunch of Catalans standing on one another’s shoulders in what UNESCO boringly translates as “Human Towers.” They’re collective, athletic performance art. They take years of practice and minutes to build. And while UNESCO says they are a way to fend off the culture-eroding power of globalization, they are essentially done for kicks. What got them on humanity’s heritage list, among other things, is that they are traditional, passed down through generations, yet “living”; they’re part of a particular cultural identity, yet inclusive. UNESCO doesn’t mention it, but what Ed thinks is especially amazing about castells is the important role children play in their making. They’re moving to watch, even if you’re not a Catalan:

Back in New York this week, but comforted by quinces at the Union Square Greenmarket.

I felt a little sorry for them, bitter, lumpy things, and took some home with me. Well, they rolled out of that bag in a cloud of their own perfume, asking who was feeling sorry for whom. They smelled like lemon. Or over-ripe pear. Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit in the flesh. My plan had been to cook them down into codonyat, the Catalan quince gelée that is so perfect with cheese. But now all I wanted was to have them near me. Sniff them. Run my hands over their fuzzy backs. (more…)

Lluís Plà, age 87, is the host of La Carbonera de Forallac, part country barbecue, part Burning Man Project, a wonderfully odd happening that runs 24/7 for nearly three weeks every October. A sign on the road connecting La Bisbal to Palafrugell, hardworking inland towns near Catalonia’s Costa Brava, points the way to the celebration. My friend Assumpta and I showed up mid-morning last Thursday during a lull in the action that allowed Sr. Plà to tell us about what appeared to be a woolly mammoth, alive and snoring steamily at his feet––the centerpiece of La Carbonera. (more…)

The bulgy yellow and red tomatoes stacked up at the greenmarket Saturday gave New York City a sweet glow. That is until the sun turned its back and went down, cold-bloodedly, at barely past six o’clock. Samfaina is Catalonia’s consolation for this particular heartbreak. (more…)

I believe the announcement about the new “Pequeño Museo del Escritor” in Madrid is meant to appeal to “writer fetishists,” but the news of its opening today went straight to my translator’s heart. (more…)

Now that I’ve told everyone not to go to Barcelona in August (same old reasons you’re not supposed to head for Paris or Rome: nobody’s here except everyone from elsewhere, and all those lovely shops that close), I see the Palau de la Música Catalana has a reason to be in town every single night this month. (more…)

“Well, peel you a grape.” That’s what my mother always said to let us know we were asking for too much. Then I went to Spain, where I met Joaquín, a guy whose mother actually willingly peeled grapes for us and fed them to us for lunch. (more…)

Cows are important on Minorca and have been going way back. Archaeologists have found evidence of cheesemaking on this tiny island dating from 2000BC, and historians say Minorcan cheese crisscrossed the Mediterranean with Moorish and Pisan traders in the Middle Ages. Eaters may be interested to know that you can now buy the good stuff — that is, artisanally-made raw milk Maó de Minorca D.O.P. (complete with the Spanish denominación de origen protegida “Mahón de Menorca”) — in the U.S.

(more…)

Fava beans are a bother. But they make such a grand appearance in spring, you really can’t help wanting to give them a chance. (more…)

Still in New York, sniffing around the Greenmarket for the first signs of fruit and smelling nothing but ramps. Of course, if I were in Catalonia right now it would be a whole different story: I’d be bathing in rose petals and eating fruits vermells, the red fruits of early summer. I’ve been working on a dessert as pink and tart as that fantasy. Here it is: a fresh strawberry and raspberry soup (more…)