Delicioso: The Regional Cooking of Spain: A Review Focused on Product Education by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Delicioso: The Regional Cooking of Spain: A Review Focused on Product Education by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The book Delicioso: The Regional Cooking of Spain by Penelope Casas offers readers well-organized insight into the broad 7 regional cuisines of Spain, tapas (appetizers) as a national food trend, and product buying tips displayed as inserts within chapters.

The product information inserts I found most beneficial include the following 7 tips:

1-olive oil production and buying tips for the various grades of olive oil

2-how to buy high-quality paella rice and pans

3-how to buy high-quality real saffron

4-how to buy high-quality Manchego cheese

5-how to cook with Spanish earthenware dishes

6-how to use and maintain a mortar and pestle

7-how to buy and prepare salt cod

The book has large-print and is 460 pages long.

The eight chapters Casas lists with their most distinguishing culinary feature follow:

1-Spain as an entire country – tapas (appetizers)

2-North Central Spain – sauces

3-Northeastern Interior Spain – peppers

4-Catalunya – casseroles

5-Central Plains Spain – roasts

6-Southeastern Coastal Spain – rice

7-Andalusia – fried foods and gazpacho

8-Canary Islands – mojos (uncooked dipping sauces using products from Africa and Spain)

The regional foods chapters contain more than 350 recipes.

There are 19 regional photos, an index, and introductions to each chapter that describe the region’s food from entrées to dessert.

Delicioso: The Regional Cooking of Spain by Penelope Casas details the interplay of geography and history to produce unique foods in Spain’s different regions even when using the same agricultural products sometimes.

I like this book for those reasons alone.  I would love it if cooks from the Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other countries would use its organizational model to write about regional foods in their homelands to expand upon the work of Penelope Casas.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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The Foods and Wines of Spain - A Review Focused on Food Self-Sufficiency - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Foods and Wines of Spain – A Review Focused on Food Self-Sufficiency – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Ruth Paget’s Mediterranean Diet – Spanish Style

I am not selling this diet, but this is what I have developed for myself as a nexus of budget and personal preference over 3 decades.

I look for recipes that fit the following pattern when I look through Spanish cookbooks:

-Monday through Thursday:

I eat protein combinations from 3 to 4 appetizer dishes and at least one pantry meal made from rice, beans, or pasta.  I snack on homemade popcorn with sea salt.

-Friday:

Baked fish plus baked, potato wedges with Italian seasoning are my favorite.

-Saturday

A chicken or pork dish

-Sunday

A seafood dish three times a month and beef once a month.

Sometimes the order is reversed on the weekends.

In Monterey (California) where I live now, I tend to eat chicken and seafood at Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean restaurants.

I like Spanish food, because the basic ingredients can grow in almost all 50 states during summer and in greenhouses during winter.  Hydroponic irrigation/agriculture systems in greenhouses might make this possible.

Reading Casas’ cookbook at a young age made me think that many American states could be self-sufficient in food and have a surplus to sell or store in the form of gazpacho.

Gazpacho is like V8 with the addition of garlic toast all blended and chilled.  You can store some brands at room temperature and refrigerate them after opening.

Purdue University or Cal Poly need to test if gazpacho is a complete protein.  Bread is made from wheat grains, but do seeds in tomatoes, cucumbers, and pepper constitute the “grain plus seed” formula to make a full protein?  Fact check needed for a delicious and nutritious cold soup drink or salad in a bottle.

Using my region as an example, South Monterey County is also ranching country for beef, the coasts can provide fish and seafood, Idaho is close for chickens, and lamb for Easter can be shipped in from New Mexico or New Zealand.

Monterey County might even be able to make a surplus for storage or sales to other places of some items.

We already have crops growing in our county like lettuce that is the size of Vermont and New Hampshire put together.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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The Foods and Wines of Spain - A Review Focused on Food Self-Sufficiency - Part 1 - By Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Foods and Wines of Spain – A Review Focused on Food Self-Sufficiency – Part 1 – By Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

After receiving my first freelance assignments to provide recipes and menus for the Barcelona Summer Olympics in 1992, I became a frequent library user at the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) in Paris, France where I lived at the time.

The Centre Pompidou was a reference-only library with an extensive gastronomy collection in addition to collections for engineering, sociology, anthropology, and art history.

I wanted to learn about Spanish food for the entire nation for future writing assignments.  I had written about Catalan food for the region that surrounds Barcelona in northeastern Spain, but wanted to broaden my knowledge on the topic.

At the time, the most comprehensive book about Spanish cuisine in English was The Foods and Wines of Spain by Penelope Casas.  My local bookstore on the rue de Rivoli did not carry the book, and I wanted to use the book now.

Not being able to take home the book was a challenge, but I worked with it in the following way to make Spanish meals using Casas’ recipes with ingredients you could find in any Parisian or Californian supermarket.

I made more than one visit to go through The Foods and Wines of Spain and ended up memorizing its contents before I finally bought a copy of the book on a trip to London.

The following method helps with reference-only situations when you need recipes:

1-Look up sample menus to know what kinds of food go together and in what order in a Spanish meal

2-Look up recipes in the index, which has a page number where you can find the recipe. 

3-Write down recipes you want to use in your own language

4-Read the introduction to get an idea of regional foods and ingredients

5-Spend at least 2 hours working on the hors d’oeuvres and appetizer chapters alone.  Eating 3 or 4 appetizers often makes a vegetarian protein combination, which lets you buy high quality fish and seafood for the weekend.

6-I have eaten a pretty Spanish Med Diet from the Pyrenees region for 3 decades with the overriding theory that you have to have the combination of protein-carbohydrate-vegetable present at each meal.

The portion size and number of vegetables changes with scientific research, but that general idea helps me do vegan meals up to prime rib ones thanks to protein combinations that you can read about on the Purdue University online page on that topic.

My “Med Diet Plan” for Spanish food follows on my next blog.

End Part 1.

To be continued…

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Hearth-Side Sushi: Robata Grill and Sake Bar - Part 2 - Reviewed by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Hearth-Side Sushi: Robata Grill and Sake Bar – Part 2 – Reviewed by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

A fresh green leaf along with tender lemon slices decorated the dish of octopus sashimi that I ordered.  I shared the octopus sashimi with our family friend.  We both agreed that it was chewy without being tough.

I could taste the ocean in the octopus slices.  I am wary of fresh octopus, though, since my first try of it left a sucker attached to my lip; I like fresh food, but not that fresh.

Sashimi is raw fish without rice.  It can serve as a prelude to sushi, which is raw fish with rice and wasabi and often nori, a black-green seaweed sheet.  California rolls, by the way, are usually cooked fish presented like sushi rolls.

I prefer Japanese omelets called tamago to sushi however.  My Japanese host mother made tamago for me when I was an exchange student in Japan.  (The owner of the restaurant came from the same town where I stayed in Japan I later found out.)

The flavor of tamago omelets disconcerts most Americans to begin with, because sugar goes into the omelet’s preparation.  The flavor of the rolled omelet I ate had rice inside and nori seaweed outside reminded me of salty-sweet French toast.  I liked this treat dunked in soy sauce without green horseradish wasabi.

Laurent ate grilled sand dabs with a Sapporo beer while I sampled a Kirin beer that seems to go well with sweet Japanese sauces.

A green tea ice cream put the finish on our lovely meal.

It was easy to say, “Thank you.  We have eaten well,” when we left.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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