After a long winter of knobbly root vegetables, March brings a huge explosion of leafiness, colour and variety to the market stalls, from baby courgettes and fiery pink radishes to chicory, tiny sweet carrots, asparagus and watercress.
The first sweet peas from Llavaneres start to appear, and by the end of the month it’s time to celebrate the Festa del Pèsol de Sant Andreu de Llavaneres. The top dish here is pèsols ofegats (stewed peas), a simple recipe of fresh peas, onions, garlic shoots, fresh mint, a few drops of anisette, and many recipes call for bacon to be thrown into the pot too.
Super-food watercress (créixens in Catalan or berros in Castilian) is also at its best in early spring. Once known as ‘scurvy grass’, it is packed with vitamin C along with iodine, iron, magnesium and zinc, and was used to treat anything from anaemia to infertility, although that might be stretching things a little. In the stalls, look for crisp, dark-green leaves with no sign of wilting. Eat on the day of purchase if you can, or put the stems in water and refrigerate to keep for another 24 hours.
March is also the time to find spring bolets (wild mushrooms) in the mountains after the winter snows have melted. Look out in the markets for múrgoles or the charcoal-coloured carboneres (also known as marçots), along with the delicate, thin-stemmed cama-secs (or carreretes) and dumpy little moixernons. One of the favoured ways to eat these locally is to throw them into a pan of scrambled eggs or simply eat them lightly pan-fried in olive oil with lashings of garlic. --NF
MUSSELS
The huge popularity and relative cheapness of mussels makes them available year-round in Spain, but March means Galician mexillon (Gallego), musclos (Catalan) or mejillones (Spanish) are in season. They are a particularly meaty variety with creamy, orange-coloured flesh and perfect for cooking, though if you get them super fresh they can also be good raw with a squeeze of lemon juice and drop of Tabasco. Aside from the popular tapa of tigres (scattered with breadcrumbs, garlic and grilled on the shell), I think the best way of eating them is to pile them up in a big casserole with a steaming broth—be it white wine and herbs, tomatoes and garlic or something more exotic like Thai coconut, then roll up your sleeves and dig in.
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re recipe
Posted by Tina March 11, 2010 19:18:23