When I moved to North America years ago (to Canada the first three years, then to the United States) I brought with me a notebook of recipes that I had gathered at home in Spain for my new life in the New Continent. These were recipes that I had grown up with, of meals cooked by my mother or my grandmothers, or by my aunts or my friends’ mothers. Yes, there were many cooks around me growing up, great cooks of the traditional dishes eaten in the different regions of Spain. Many of those recipes were quite simple, not in the sense of being bland or lacking imagination, but in that they were home staples, eaten often, and not just on special occasions because they required expensive or hard to find ingredients. Whether it was paella on Sundays, or sopa de garbanzos y acelgas (chick pea and Swiss chard stew), or merluza rebozada (battered hake) any other day, the ingredients used in our home cooking were readily available when in season. In fact, most meals that the women of my family prepared had as their main ingredient one that was in season, and was therefore readily available and at the peak of its flavor.

I have fond memories of gathering one of the freshest of all ingredients, prepared in one of my favorite dishes, caracoles en salsa picante (snails in spicy sauce), that was cooked both by my mother and my grandmother with similarly delicious results. After a rainfall, my mom or my grandma would gather my sisters and I, often also our cousins, and we’d go look for snails crawling on the branches of the fruit trees that grew in our orchard. Each of us children carried a basket that we’d line with fig tree leaves so the baskets wouldn’t get smeared with the snails mucus. Fig tree climbing, of course, was part of the fun, as were the competitions we held to see who gathered the most snails. Once at home we’d empty the baskets, chock-full of snails, in a pot of salted water (a method for releasing the snails mucus), rubbed the edges of the pot with wetted salt, and wait and watch how the snails tried to crawl out. The snails came in all sizes, from hazelnut to walnut size. While we assigned names to the snails and held races to see which one climbed faster to the edge of the pot, mom or grandma would whip up their magic in the making of the sauce, whose fragrance filled the kitchen. Snails in a spicy tomato sauce, family around the table, toothpicks doing the work, bowls filling with empty shells, licking of fingers. Ahh. Memories.

Fast forward a number of years. I’m a Pharmacist doing research in the Swiss city of Basel when I meet the love of my life and my future husband, Dave. After almost five years of international dating (Madrid, Basel, London, Barcelona) we tie the knot in my hometown of Onteniente, celebrate with friends and family in coastal Gandía and honeymoon in the Islas Afortunadas, the Canary Islands (back to this and their mojos later) before landing in the big city of Toronto.

Toronto, while not the nation’s capital (that honor goes to Ottawa), is certainly Canada’s financial capital, and one of the most multicultural cities in North America. Not surprisingly, my first order of things in my new city was to learn to navigate its many ethnic neighborhoods, explore its sites, and of course, its supermarkets and stores. The city is a melting pot of cultures, nationalities and ethnicities, each of them concentrated in well defined and distinctive neighborhoods —it’s worth noting that more than one hundred languages and dialects are spoken in the city and its suburbs. So whether it was little India on the east end, little Italy on College Street on the west end, or the Ukranian and Polish communities of Bloor Street West by High Park, or Chinatown in downtown, alongside the regular chain supermarkets you’d find anywhere else, each of these neighborhoods would also house small (and not so small) grocery stores stocked with the products used in the regional cooking of each of these communities’ countries of origin.

After a few weeks of rambling the streets and cooking for my brand new husband, I realized that my notebook of Spanish recipes was not very useful, as many of the fresh and seasonal ingredients needed for my dishes where either impossible to find or too expensive for the just-married-couple pocket.

 

Months passed while I awaited for the approval of my work permit in Canada, and during that time my morning routine started to look something like this: I’d wake up bright and early and had breakfast with Dave before he left for work. I’d then turn on the TV and watch a Canadian cooking show, The Urban Peasant (I wonder if they still run it). I’d take notes of the daily recipes and then head to the gym, list in hand. On the way back after my workout, I’d stop at one or two of the small supermarkets and grocery stores that lined Bloor West Village, where we lived, and head home with my bounty to try the new recipes. Other mornings I’d venture into other parts of the city, where I discovered the richness of its culture.

A bit hesitantly at first, my techniques started to evolve, and my notebook of recipes filled with new additions. It wasn’t long before I felt pretty confident in the kitchen, more often than not using the rare to me ingredients for my newfound recipes, alongside the few Spanish dishes that I could easily find the ingredients for. But a Spanish cook can never be found too far away from a bottle of olive oil and a head of garlic…

Fast forward three years and you’ll find me in America’s Midwest, in the State of Indiana, where I have resided ever since. I’m a new mom of one, two and, by 2006, three boys enamored with the cultures that make up their genetic pool and their cultural identity. American born, but with Spanish and Canadian split hearts. By now I’ve been perfecting my cooking, and today, many years after leaving my beloved Spain, I have found the ways and methods to prepare my favorite Spanish recipes with the ingredients available to me. I’ve tried and tested the shortcuts, the substitutable ingredients where applicable, and the cooking times and methods to execute the recipes of my homeland, the ones that bring me closer to my roots, and that my family enjoys. When I cook Spanish dishes in my Midwest kitchen, they taste the closest they can possibly taste to the ones I grew up with. As a Spanish home cook in America, I can’t get away from using some Spanish kitchen staples, like garlic and pimentón (paprika), not to mention olive oil, almonds and piquillo peppers, among many others. Fortunately, they can now be easily obtained, even in the Midwest.

Welcome to the cuisine of Spain in my American kitchen.

‹Go Back