Blog

The past year’s dreams of long-lost travel, little by little, can start to mutate back into real plans.

The heated political tension that hit the streets of Barcelona these past few days (and now seems ubiquitous) was what finally encouraged me to spend a rare, sunny Friday morning at home alone coming back to myself through the space that is this blog on Sobremesa. And I knew I had to make an effort to recover the mood that Sifnos left me with after our week there this summer, the most relaxing and enjoyable, real vacation time I’ve spent in many years.

Congratulations to my family! Today marks our one year anniversary of moving back to Barcelona. Pardon the cliché, but it has certainly flown by.

When I started Desayuno con guisantes, my Spanish blog, many years ago, I wrote about the zen of shelling peas and the beauty of simple things. For favas you need twice the patience, as they need to be shelled first, and then blanched and peeled. Some people eat the outer skin to avoid that tedious second shelling, but I assure you it’s well worth the effort.

Connecting people, connecting with people and creating solid, enduring memories and relationships is without a doubt the most important possible outcome of the effort of putting food on a table, and people around it.

I thrive on ritual. I wake up at 5am every day so that I can have a good hour or two before my family wakes up, for my personal morning rituals : a brief meditation, a long sitting with countless steepings of tea, some yoga.

No matter how long I do this, I am still in awe of the magical effects of sitting down to share a meal: deep bonds are almost immediately established. Mutual understanding and the sharing of a pleasant meal seem to go hand in hand.

Greetings from San Sebastian, one of my favorite cities in the world. Though I have been coming here regularly for many years, but every single time I am in awe of its beauty.

Sleep has been scarce, which doesn’t help, so I have found myself making versions of these truffles on repeat as a way to gain energy for the day via nutrient-dense calories.

Last Monday October 1 was Sake Day, which in Japan traditionally marks the beginning of sake production in the country. Due to our mutual admiration and love for Japanese culture and cuisine, my friend Chiara decided it was the best day possible to inaugurate Slow Food Kitchen Barcelona.

I’ve been waiting a while to tell you about this project I’ve been working on, and the time is finally (almost) ripe, so…… introducing Slow Food Kitchen Barcelona!

Last week I celebrated a weekday, just because, with a girls’ lunch with my two lovely new neighbors.

This year Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, took me entirely by surprise, as we were unpacking our boxes (yes! our container has finally arrived!) and putting things in place. Last week I wrote about baking with no equipment; well, by now my stuff was finally here and the least I could do was bake a honey cake, if nothing else. Honey is a traditional Rosh Hashanah food, symbolizing a sweet entrance into the new year.

On a culinary front, this post could also be called: What you do when you’re sick of waiting for your container to arrive from the other side of the world, you’ve been living in an empty house for 8 weeks, you really want to bake something for your kids (and maybe yourself too) on the last lazy Saturday afternoon of the summer, but you have no kitchen utensils to work with.

Lately, especially in the afternoons when blood sugar levels tend to drop, I have been craving sweet. I'm generally not big on sweet; a small piece of very dark chocolate usually does the trick, and I will always go for a savory treat over a sweet one. But these days, maybe because winter is seeping into spring (today, as I write, is the first day of spring and it's grey and rainy in the Bay Area), or because I'm still trying to get my energy back after recovering from the worst flu of my life, I have been drinking sugary beverages like chai tea lattes and kombucha on a daily basis, and craving baked goods (which, when you can't have gluten, is not all that easy).