In their splendid The Heritage of Spanish Cooking, Alicia Rios and Lourdes March say that in the Valencian mountain interior, rice dishes are based on the broth of a cocido — a dish of boiled meats. The recipe is adapted from one in their book. In Spain today you can buy good cocido broth, but here, use beef or chicken stock.
Although this dish calls for only a few ingredients, it delivers big, robust flavors and can be prepared almost completely in advance. The diced squash can be roasted several hours ahead so that at serving time all that is necessary is to arrange the cubes on a platter and sprinkle them with crumbled goat cheese, chopped walnuts, and minced parsley. My local supermarkets sell butternut squash that is already peeled and halved, and if you can find it in this convenient form, it will shave a good amount of time off the prep.
This is a pretty standard pickle, good for both sea rocket pods and saltwort. If you are inland, you can also use it for purslane, another succulent plant. Keep the proportions of salt, vinegar, and water and you can then vary the flavors to your liking. This recipe can be halved.
Slice each eggplant lengthwise into five or six long steaks. Sprinkle with sea salt and allow to stand for up to an hour or so while you make the creamed feta.
This is a succulent rustic lunch or light supper. The aromatic, bitter flavor of the hyssop combined with the sweetness of the peppers and ripe tomatoes is delightful. Make sure you serve this with some crusty fresh bread so you can mop up the juices.
Asparagus take to the easiest kind of cooking. A few minutes in boiling water turns them tender with a little crispness still intact, then it's a case of how you want to flavor them.
Serve this on toasted pita wedges or over raw vegetable leaves, such as endive.
This is a lovely, light vegetarian supper. The preparation is simple because, quite frankly, the meatiness of the mushrooms against the cool, delicate greens and the mellowness of good cheese cannot be bested.
I have made cauliflower every which way: I’ve blanched it, sautéed, boiled it, mashed it, deep-fried it, and eaten it raw. Until I read about it on eGullet.org, though, I never knew I could roast it. This recipe really brings out the richness of the cauliflower and matches it perfectly with the robustness of the spices. I use my fennel rub along with a few other spices. If you have sea salt, it works really well with this recipe. The cauliflower tends to shrink when roasted, so one head of cauliflower is about right for 2 servings.
One of my cousins was married to a Kashmiri gentleman, and for the period when he was working at the United Nations in New York he had brought along a manservant. My cousin let me have him once a week to cook and clean. His repertoire was limited—he could only cook dishes he had learned from my cousin, such as this simple Kashmiri staple, which we loved. Soon he was making it week after week, and it remains one of our favorites. In Kashmir, collard-type greens and rice are eaten as commonly as beans and rice in Central America, the season for them lasting from spring (when the greens are tender) until the snows start to fall in early winter (when the greens get coarser).