cooking

Food’s role in my life has, over the years, gradually changed. After university I spent four years living on the road in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, eating in street stalls and cheap restaurants, and dreaming about cooking for myself, even something as simple as breakfast. Once I had a kitchen – first in a mountain cabin, then a residence hall in London, then Barcelona - food became a tool, and I began using it to alter mood and recreate emotions, to find comfort, to give pleasure. It moved from the exotic to the domestic, from the unfamiliar to the familiar. Once I settled in Barcelona I reveled in understanding just how interlinked it was to Catalan culture. This has, if anything, profoundly informed on my continuing travels, especially around the Mediterranean.

Food is perhaps the single topic where everyone is an authority. Every person has memories and experiences and their own specialties. As a traveler, this is gold. This is conversation, connection.

I am like a jackdaw, collecting those stories and scraps of history, those dishes. And then back at home I try to convert them into words and into recipes.

Sometimes I’m asked about my process of writing recipes. In general there are two ways. The first is working backwards towards a memory, something I ate on the road. In my Barcelona kitchen, I try to recapture the tastes and textures. (I try to be faithful to the process but more important to the result. This is especially true with restaurant cooking which has a whole different way of building dishes.) Sometimes this is relatively easy, say when I had hovered over the cook’s shoulder and have six pages of notes. Other times less so. Few notes and less familiar spices, or even when there is a strong emotional attachment to the experience that taints the objectivity of my taste buds.

The other way moves in the opposite direction, forward toward a visualized taste. These can be new dishes or ones with changes. What if it was made with duck instead of hake? And added shoots of tender garlic? What if the paella was soupy and made with winter vegetables? Or they can be dishes that I have tasted half-a-dozen times and want my version to be have elements of each. The end result is often very different than I had anticipated.

Apart from my cookbooks, I have developed recipes for Gourmet, Food & Wine, EatingWell, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and Tin House.

In the May 2006 issue of Gourmet Ruth Reichl wrote in her Letter From the Editor this about my recipe for a grill-top paella with rabbit and artichokes (that accompanied my a piece on the joys of cooking paella over wood): “In Valencia, we discovered the ultimate Spanish paella. Cooked outdoors over smoldering coals, the delicate mixture of rice and rabbit slowly absorbs the flavor of the smoke, giving the dish an indescribably mysterious taste. Make the recipe on page 98 once, and you’ll discover an entirely different personality that any you have ever known.” My Lemon-Cinnamon Flan was featured last year in Food & Wine as a “Last Bite” – the sumptuously photographed dessert on the last page of each issue. This, another ten or so recipes of mine from the magazine, can be found in the Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2006.

In the autumn, Chronicle Books will publish Soup’s On!: 75 Soul-Satisfying Recipes from Your Favorite Chefs. Inside is my classic Spanish gazpacho. Other contributors include Alice Waters, Thomas Keller, Traci des Jardins, Elizabeth Falkner, Joyce Goldstein, Charlie Trotter, and Jacques Pépin. A portion of the proceeds will go to NextCourse, a nonprofit organization that advocates the importance of healthy food for the physical and mental well-being of adults and children (learn more about it).