Rachel Laudan

  Black-eyed peas are one of  the four common dried beans and peas here in Girona, Catalonia, Spain, the other three being lentils, chickpeas and alubias (white beans). Because I wasn’t sure how they were served, I asked an expert, the butcher’s wife who sells them ready cooked. With a drizzle of olive oil. Or [...]

Shortly after my last post, Jeff Koehlerl, long-time Barcelona resident, now part of a Catalan family, and author of the compelling Rice, Pasta, Couscous: The Heart of the Mediterranean Kitchen (Chronicle, 2009), wrote me.  I had, if anything, underestimated the centrality of canelons to Catalan cuisine. Dec 25 and Dec 26 are the big holidays [...]

If you can talk about as American as apple pie, a dish that was surely not American in origin, then you can talk about as Catalan as canelons (cannelloni). They are everywhere.  Butcher’s shops have foil boxes of gratineed canelons ready to be cooked at home. So do grocery stores and the many take out [...]