Spring food
Spring food is a way of fighting the weakness and fatigue our hard winters leave us with. People here eat a lot of greens during this time of the year, as we have missed most of them for the last months. We use them for salads, soups, hot dishes. Many are just wild plants peasants pick and bring to the market, such as nettles.
Nettles are rich in iron and vitamins and here is a way to cook them. I think you will find this a primitive dish, but actually it's an ancient one. Tasty, too, if you like garlic.
Ingredients: half a kilo of nettles, two spoonfuls of edible oil, one spoonful of flour, salt, garlic sauce, polenta.
Recipe: First, you choose some fresh nettles (their leaves and their tops) and you wash them many times, to eliminate the sand that is in them. Then, you boil them in hot water with salt. After you take off the pot, you separate the nettles from the water. The sauce which results is put away. After that, you put the nettles in a clay bowl and, with the back of a wooden spoon, you mix them till you get a homogeneous paste. In this nettles paste, you add some flour, the oil, the salt and a little part of the sauce in which the nettles were boiled. The rest of sauce, which is rich in vitamins, can be used to prepare some soup or some rice. After 10-15 minutes of boiling the nettles paste, you add the garlic sauce( made of garlic, oil, salt and water). Finally, it is served with hot polenta and, if you want, fried eggs.
3 comments:
Although I'm not particularly fond on polenta, I like how it looks and of course, I like nettles and eggs.
We don't eat the nettles, but small fresh cardoon.
What is that? I don't have it in my dictionary.
What else do you eat in springtime?
What other topics related to spring could there be: works?
The cardoon is the botanic name for the thistle. thistles are delicious when they are very small-
We don't have special food for spring, not nowadays, markets have almost everything the whole year and the amount of villagers coming with their own products is very small.
anyway, we particularly get more fruit from the valleys in the south of Ávila with a semi-tropical climate.
In towns works are the same, that's to say: building mainly. In villages works have to follow the weather clock.
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