Mykitcheninspain

Dinner featuring New World ingredients: from the top, salad with avocados, corn, tomatoes, and chiles; fries of sweet and white potatoes; sauté of squash and green beans, and turkey scallopini with Catalan picada made with chocolate.In 1492 America wasn’t even a gleam in Columbus’s eye or a glimmer in the imagination of Spain’s Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand. When they sat dow...

Small batch of Midwestern-style chili sauce, Andalusian version.When I was a kid I remember every year at summer’s end, my mother would pull out the meat grinder, clamp it to the kitchen table, and push through it peppers, onions, and tomatoes she had pulled from the back-yard garden. The vegetable mush with spices and vinegar simmered for hours. Coming home from school, I coul...

Chicken pieces are rubbed with a spice blend before roasting over a bread dressing. “Do you have recipes for some of the spice rubs they sell in Spanish markets?” my chef friend, Lars, wrote to me. He said he often buys a few hundred grams of spices for fish,  pork and chicken. “I like them a lot. I’m out. Have you ever written about this?”Actually, no. Although I’m a regular at

Rustic, València-style paella.Get out the paella pan! Heat the olive oil and make a sofrito. Stir in the rice. Will you add chicken or shrimp? Some beans or artichokes? For World Paella Day (September 20), the choice is yours. While the celebration started in València, the home of paella, it has turned into a world-wide affair.Here are some paella recipes to get you started (cl...