Another Day in Paradise

I love cooking. I love trying out recipes. I also love making simple (and, I trust, healthy) dishes with what I have around.  On Sunday I made a delicious (if I say so myself!) four course meal, which, with the exception of the dessert, hinged on doing tasty things with olive oil. There must be thousands of articles about olive oil entitled Liquid Gold, so the Phil Collins song title will have to do.

The first course was amanida d'endibies amb nous i formatge blau - a salad of endive with walnuts and blue cheese. All cut up and thrown into a bowl, and dressed with a quick vinagreta: extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Then came carxofes al forn - baked artichokes. Done in a hot oven with olive oil, salt and black pepper. The real joy of this dish is mopping up the sauce with chunks of fresh bread. The main course was tonyina a la plantxa amb oli d'all i julivert: tunafish on the griddle with garlic and parsley oil. The traditional garnish for all kinds of meat and fish is garlic and parsley, finely chopped. Recently I've found it quicker and easier to blitz the garlic and parsley with olive oil in the processor, making a sauce you can spoon over the food (and can keep in the fridge in a jar). For dessert we had maced?nia de pinya i mango: fresh fruit salad of mango and pineapple with shreds of lime peel (use a canelle knife), which gives a marvellous tang. The word maced?nia caused some some puzzlement at lunch recently with a group of expats. Fruit salad? How come? According to Wikipedia... well, for a laugh, I decided to put the Spanish text through Babelfish instead of translating it for you myself. Here goes: The name with which it has been baptized gastronomically to this fruit concert comes from the formidable military-political creation of Alexander Magno (356-323 a.C.), the Maced?nico Empire, historical and geographic frame in which they alternated, in gigantic crucible, religious races and cultures, languages and traditions, legacies and artistic, tributary styles and others of diverse sources vern?culas. This true cocktail of towns and nations served as model so that, by the end of century XVIII, to the popular "salad of fruits" was called (egregiamente) ' macedoni?." You get the gist.