Lockdown’s cooking in Barcelona

Lock-down has brought us together, strengthening many communities, even in those cities packed of busy suits. This has meant meeting our neighbours, and enjoying meeting them, and for us, it has meant discovering new dishes at the same time!

Yes, if we don’t go to get food, food comes to get us! 🙂 It is a powerful chemistry!

Now that we have become friends with the couple next door (talking on our balconies), I cannot believe we never talked over the 1 year we have been here!

It’s crazy how shy we are of the people who live so close to us and I love the fact that we have become more human thanks to this unexpected situation.

Going back to food, our ‘vecinos’ are fish lovers and offered to bring us some fish from the fishmonger they buy from (he’s from the amazing Basque Country and obsessed with having fish at least 3 times a week apparently). We let them choose it and were blessed with monkfish the first time (the fish exchange was very funny as they left it on the carpet, rang the bell and went into their flat – all very safe). Obviously, we had never bought monkfish before so it was not only a delicious dinner, but also a new and funny experience for us, which I value a lot as it is already part of an unforgettable memory for me 🙂

This is how we cooked it.

Ingredients:

Onions

Garlic

Parsley

2 fillets of monkfish

Paprika

Methodology:

Heat the oven at 180° and cook for 20-30 minutes.

Another delicious dish we recently cooked that we had not made for 1 year at least (don’t ask me why) is ‘Spaghetti carbonara’. We found a very good bacon at the shop and cooked it our favourite style.

Ingredients:

100 grams spaghetti per person (brand Rummo is my favourite)

1 egg per person

Grated Parmesan cheese

Bacon cut in small bits

Ground pepper & salt.

Method:

Heat a pan and add the bacon until crispy. In a bowl, whisk the eggs together with the Parmesan, pepper and salt. Once the pasta is cooked, drain it in a colander and tip it back to the pan with the bacon. Switch on the heat again and add the mix from the bowl. Cook it at your own taste: I personally like it not too raw and not too cooked, which takes less than 1 minute in the pan and looks like this! 🙂

Have you noticed how cute these plates are? We bought them on Amazon during lockdown as we were tired to keep washing dishes every meal, I mean, we did own only 1 set of 6 so it was quite hard 😉

And then we have a classic, risotto with courgettes. I found a new trick which is adding a splash of red wine to my risottos, and it really makes the difference to the intensity of the taste. I added it to a mushrooms’ risotto I made and it tasted so good. But if you can, try a risotto with chorizo, it’s the most satisfying meal I had recently.

Ingredients:

1 litre stock (I always use chicken)

400 g arborio rice

Extra-virgin olive oil

5-6 table spoons of Parmesan cheese (I put more Parmesan to replace butter)

Any veggie you like or meat

Methodology:

Bring the stock to a boil in a sauce pan.

Heat a pan with 2 table spoons of extra virgin olive oil and then add your veggies, and/or meat. Cook for 10 minutes and stir every couple of minutes. Then add the rice, stir for a couple of minutes and start adding the stock little by little. Keep repeating this until the stock is completely absorbed by the rice (it normally takes around 20 minutes). 

Remove the pan from the heat, add the Parmesan and stir. Now it’s ready to be served, enjoy 🙂

***Have you ever tried ‘Risotto alla Bolognese’? My mum used to do it and it is such a simple, cheap and delicious dish! 🙂 I found this lovely recipe for it if you want to try it: https://www.cookingwithnonna.com/italian-cuisine/risotto-alla-bolognese.html

I am getting hungry now…

What about you, which dish did you enjoy eating or cooking the most lately?
xxx
Sara