Food for Thought:  Easy Escalivada – deconstructed

with Suzanne Dunaway

This is the famous staple in Catalan menus, served alongside roasted meats or as an addition to apéros on small toasts made from baguettes or whatever bread you like.

When I make this and it’s right out of the oven, I take a lovely large spoonful and think of all the vitamins I’m ingesting, haha.  And how olive oil is so, so good for the complexion…

I have been advised by a long-time Colliourenc  (native of Collioure) that she never used courgettes in her escalivada, but I find that you can use or not use them, as long as you caramelize the whole shebang!  And I prefer escalivada over ratatouille any day, so I do use courgettes when I have them.

I used to roast my peppers first, because of their sometimes questionable digestibility, but you don’t have to with this simple, all-in-one-pan recipe.

To ensure a pepper’s flavor, choose the wrinkly, sugar-filled red, yellow or orange ones, as the sugar content helps them give up their peel more easily if you choose to roast them for other dishes, such as the lovely anchois/pepper/hard-boiled egg salade of Collioure.

And don’t take this amiss, but I do not ever use green peppers.  Long story about that one, but I find the other rainbow peppers much sweeter and tastier than the green ones.  Green peppers and sprouted garlic are my no-nos.  Fresh green chili peppers excluded!

To roast peppers: Cut the (wrinkly) peppers in half, take out seeds and white inside ribs, and flatten them on large cookie sheet. Broil, skin-side up until nicely blackened all over, then cover with a damp towel to sweat.  When cool, you can peel off the skins easily and cut peppers into strips for other dishes.

The recipe

Ingredients

• 1 medium eggplant, sliced thin and the slices cut again into thin strips
• 2 sweet medium red peppers, sliced into thin strips (roasted and peeled, optional)
• 3 large sweet onions, cut in half and sliced thin
• 4 cloves garlic, chopped coarse
• 3 large tomatoes, sliced thin
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 large lemon
• 2 courgettes, sliced into julienne as are the other vegetables (optional)
• 1 fennel bulb, sliced into thin strips (optional, but interesting)
• Salt and pinch of espelette, if you have any
• Grated lemon peel

Method

Heat the oven to 400°F/200°C

Throw all of the ingredients into a large, non-stick baking pan brushed with a little of the olive oil. Pour the rest of the olive oil over all, salt well, and add the juice of the lemon and its peel, grated. Toss everything around in the oil and then bake the escalivada about 30-40 minutes until the vegetables are almost caramelized, very soft, and you are dying to taste it.

Serve as a side dish or with toasted bread, or pulse it a few times in the top of a food processor and serve over pasta.

Add an -ada

The word escalivada comes from the Catalan word escalivar, meaning “to char”, as the vegetables were traditionally cooked over embers.

The Catalan suffix -ada slots on the end of a word to desrcibe a group of things (eg. vacada = heard of cows).

Add an -ada to many food-related words and you have a collective, festival-style meal, generally based around a single ingredient such as snails, fish, chocolate…

Look out for the bullinada (fish stew), cargolada (grilled snails), ollada (winter stew), escalivada (grilled veggies), calçotada (char grilled onions).[/vc_cta][/vc_column][/vc_row]

ABOUT THE WRITER

Suzanne Dunaway loves “cooking and painting, gardening, singing, playing the piano, her husband’s ex-wife, her two very individual step-children and six step-grandchildren, and she has strong opinions about cooking with indiscriminate dry spices, sprouted garlic, or green peppers, and ordering cappuccino in Italy after 10AM.”
She regularly shares with P-O Life readers her PO-inspired culinary creations.