From Ca'n Picafort to Quarantine

¡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 a competitive market stuffed to the gils with 10,000 word odes to the author's latest batch of baked gnocchi? Playlists! 

 Given that few things in life are as elementally enjoyable as cooking a meal while listening to good music, it made sense to combine the two. As such, each post will contain both a recipe and a playlist. The idea being that you at home can, if you so wish, both cook and listen along.

 Balaeric Kitchen 's ethos is simple. Taking utmost inspiration from the freewheeling Balearic musical idealism established by Alfredo, Jose Padilla, Leo Mas and all the other lads from way back when, pretty much anything goes. Even Queen.

 Grilled sardines might be paired with a smattering spiritual jazz, a mountain of linguine could come accompanied by the cook's favourite smoothed-out Italo house records, and if you want to combine a recipe for killer chicken karaage with old Julee Cruise B-sides you can. This culinary and cultural church is a broad one. 

 Part real-time cookbook, part playlist repository, Balearic Kitchen is an attempt to make food writing fun again. Imagine Keith Floyd clinking glasses with DJ Harvey by the pool at Pikes and you're there. 

 So, from now until the end of lockdown and beyond, expect recipes, playlists, more recipes, and more playlists. 

 See you on the beach.


 Bucaneros Binibequer, Binibeca - Restaurant Reviews & Photos ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thea's Ned Kelly pie

Image
Another week, another recipe. This time around we have a guest contribution from Balearic Kitchen friend Thea Everett. A leader, a hero, and a certified legend, Thea is one of the best home cooks in South London. I was lucky enough to attend a barbque she hosted last summer and I still daydream about  You can see what she's been knocking up in the kitchen over on her own cookery blog, the incomparably great What's That You're Cooking, Thea ?  For our latest dish, we make a pretty substantial journey as we p ack our bags in Greece and follow Thea all the way to Australia. If you've never heard of a 'Ned Kelly pie' before, you probably aren't alone. But after reading the following recipe, I'm pretty certain that you'll be clamouring for one.  This has got "lazy Satuday afternoon cooking project" written all over it, so why not use your allotted exercise time later this week to pick up supplies for the best pie you've eaten all l
Read more

Braised cabbage with chorizo and chickpeas

Image
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
Read more

A Spanish lentil and green bean stew

Image
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
Read more