Balearic Kitchen

I've only been to Greece once. In what feels like another life now, I used to be a music journalist. Every so often I'd be lucky enough to get sent abroad to 'review' a festival. The deal was an incredibly good one. I'd get a free flights, a few nights in a nice hotel, and the bulk of my food and drink was often paid for by the festival. In return, they'd get a few hundred words of anodyne praise probably read by about 50 people. On one of these jaunts I got posted to Athens for a few days. My memories of the event itself are cloudy; even a trip to Wikipedia to look up the line-up was no help when it came to reverse engineering any kind of table of events. Even my memories of the city itself are (sadly) dull and blurred. A gyro here, a trip to the Parthenon there. Stray dogs and souvlaki. A picture postcard Athens designed to be taken home by lager-dulled tourists like myself. No one is going to festivals now. No one is going to Athens now. No one is g...

In trying times the roasting tin takes centre stage. As enjoyable a means of wasting time as flip-flipping between multiple hobs at once can be, every so often you want to cook, serve, and eat a meal where the oven's done most of the work. Today's recipe is one of those meals. OK, it isn't quite  a Diana Henry-style bung-it-straight-in-the-oven-and-hope-for-the-best job but the hob-work is so easy and stress-free that it might as well be. The combination of cabbage, chickpeas, and chorizo gives the dish a (given the blog, fittingly) Spanish feel, though you could quite easily make the case for it being a pan-Mediterranean meal as befitting of a dinner table in Cadiz as it is one on Crete. Just swap the chorizo for your local highly spiced and super fatty sausage and you're away. I can only begin to image, in fact, how ludicriously tasty the combination of sweet cabbage and merguez would be. Whatever sausage you go for, this one's a winner. The recipe comes fro...

Today's recipe - and it's a real Friday special - comes courtesy of Leeds-based writer and photographer Tom Glencross. If this recipe leaves you intrigued and you want to keep Tom in mackerel and 35mm film, I highly, highly recommend sliding into his DMs and arranging the purchase and delivery of a print of one of his incredible photos. No home should be without one.  Oh, and in the spirit of supporting artists at this trying moment in time, head to Bandcamp and buy avant-sax guru Ben Vince's latest LP, the Glencross-featuring screamer Don't Give Your Life . Perhaps somewhere down the line we'll find a dinner befitting of that record's spooked-out charms. Halloween'll be here in the blink of an eye... For now, though, let Tom talk you through a piscine dream... Mackerel – the eternal wanderer. It’s a pelagic fish - always darting about - and it keeps it’s energising oils on its skin and in the flesh ready to be metabolised at any moment. Luc...

Cooking lets us explore the world around us without having to do much more than traipsing down to Sainsbury’s - which is quite handy given that the likelihood of any of us eating a pre-dawn Pret baguette in Stansted ahead a weekend of long, languorous lunches in Paris, Prague, or Porto in the next year or so seems pretty, pretty slim. With that in mind, our first lockdown recipe whisks us away to the Basque Country in the company of Michelin star-holding super-chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho and her seriously sturdy lentil and green bean stew. The recipe originally appeared alongside another three Spanish stews - though as you'd expect, the gourmands who populate the comments section of The Guardian 's recipes section quibbled about the so-called Spanishness of them - in a newspaper article last year. It's easy to conjure up images of sizzling, garlic-drenched prawns or village-sized paellas when thinking about Iberian cuisine, but even those sun-soaked Spain...

¡Hola! This blog - a blog! In 2020! - has been established as a means of staving off boredom during the lockdown. But it's spirit was born in a different time, in a different place. Sat on a Mallorcan beach last summer I began thinking about writing up recipes. Hardly an original idea I know, but lying semi-supine on the shores of the Mediterranean sea with a can of Estrella Dam daydreaming about earthenware dishes filled with albóndigas, gambas, or pulpo a la gallega it made sense. Then the holiday ended and life got in the way and I stuffed the idea in the drawer where it sat amongst other half-baked and unrealised projects.  But with food playing an even more outsized role than usual in most of our lives, now feels like the perfect time to collate and collect the recipes that are seeing us through the early days of an extended, house-bound, unprecedented and near-global lockdown.  Recipe blogs, though, are ten a penny. So how does this one plan to stand out in...