Escalivada recipe: Delightful for the summertime

Once again we have to ask: Are you missing Barcelona and all the delicious food that you ate in there? Or, did you visit Barcelona and forgot to taste this marvelous meal? Escalivada, is a roasted vegetable dish typical from the region of Catalonia, and also popular in Aragon. Its name comes from a Catalan verb, “escalivar”, meaning “To roast in the embers”. But don’t worry, if you don’t have embers in your place, an oven will work too… (Sorry… We were trying to make a joke in here… ;)) It’s a simple, healthy and tasteful Mediterranean dish, with rural origins, made from roasted tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and onions. It is typically served warm or cold with crusty bread, or to accompany meat or fish in warmer months, it is suitable to eat all year-round. Some people say that  it is better to prepare and eat the Escalivada on the same day; some others think that it will be better if you put it in the fridge and eat it the day after. Both ways, it is a delight. The best of it: Even if cooking time takes 1 and half hours, preparation time is only 10 minutes! 5 minutes at the begining and 5 minutes at the end. So you can finish whatever you need to do while you wait for it to be cooked. 🙂 Ingredients:

• ·  4 tomatoes
• ·  2 medium eggplants
• ·  2 red bell peppers
• ·  2 medium onions
• ·  1 bulb of garlic
• ·  Extra virgin olive oil
• · 1 to 2 little cans of anchovy fillets.
• ·  Salt and pepper

Preparation: 1. Heat your oven to 180ºC or 355 ºF. 2. Rinse all the vegetables and rub with the olive oil the skin of the tomatoes, the red bell peppers and the eggplants until they are totally shinny by the oil. 3. Once done, peel the onions and cut the eggplants and the onions in half. Make small cuts on the skin of the eggplans so it doesn’t explode while they are being cooked. (By the way, we mean a little “pop” by “explosion”). 4. Place all the ingredients, except the tomatoes, in the roasting pan and pour some oil over all them and sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Add the garlic bulb to the roasting pan without peeling it. 5. Place the pan in the heated oven, in a medium rack. Roast it for about 1 hour, flipping upside-down the vegetables after the first half hour. 6. After it’s cooked for one hour, just place the tomatoes to the pan and continue roasting until they are totally cooked. (approximately 20 or 30 more minutes). 7. Once it’s finished, you will realize that the bell peppers’ and eggplants’ skins are burnt. Let them cool for around 20 minutes and then peel off and discard the skins of the bell peppers and the eggplants. 8. Cut the roasted vegetables into strips and place them on a dish, pour again some salt, pepper and olive oil and finally stir well. 9. Recollect the juice of the oil remaining in the roasting pan and pour a little bit of it to the dish where you prepared the cooked vegetables. Maintain the rest in a bowl. 10. Serve the vegetables all together in the same tray along with some anchovy fillets. Put in other dish slices of bread.

Try it, and you will enjoy one more time a traditional and tasteful meal!