Barcelona: Catalan Cuisine

Today I want to show you some typical Catalan foods and tell you a little bit about them. As somebody who is completely fascinated by food, I tried my best to find out information about the following dishes and so here is some of it! All the following foods were from Restaurante Can Miserias, a very small restaurant run by an older Spanish man and his German wife. They were both very nice and even though I don't speak Spanish, I was at least able to speak with the woman, who is also the cook - so she was the one to thank anyway! :))

These are just some appetizers we got on the table - the olives tasted very savoury, as if marinated in mustard. Funny fact - there was a little leaf of mint on pretty much every plate from which I ate when in Barcelona.



These are croquetas, a very typical Catalan dish. You can make them with cheese, ham, mushrooms or - this is very typical in Barcelona - codfish. These were with jamón ibérico (Iberian ham), which is a type of cured ham, similar to Italian prosciutto. At first I was disappointed, because the dish looked quite ordinary, but as they say - don't judge a book by its cover. If you're in Spain you absolutely must try croquetas, they're amazing!



The dish in the front is made of codfish - in Catalan, codfish is called bacallà and I recommend you remember this word if you're planing on visiting Barcelona, because they don't really have English menus - and freshly squeezed tomatoes. The fish is served raw, with a little fresh lemon and tomato juice, pepper and olive oil in it. I did not really see the point of adding the hardboiled egg, but why not ;)



This food was totally awesome - it's cooked artichokes with Iberian ham, which I already talked about above. There was some lemon juice and garlic mixed into this food and I really liked it.



This was tuna with asparagus - I wasn't so blown away by this food (probably because I hate asparagus), but the fish was pretty amazing. It was freshly caught in the port, so it definitely gets some bonus points for that!



This was one of the tastiest foods from the entire selection, even though admittedly it was nothing innovative. It was pork with a creamy Roquefort sauce - sometimes this cheese can taste a little too harsh, but here it was perfectly balanced and very mild.



The first dessert was ordinary cheesecake - I don't think I have to introduce cheesecake to you! :) It had a very creamy texture and I liked it.



This was an apple pie with nuts, exactly my type of thing. But I didn't eat much because...



...I was too excited about my very own dessert. This was something a little like the Italian panna cotta, which is possibly one of the best desserts ever. I don't know about this thing, but panna cotta is made by simmering  milk, sugar and cream and mixing that in with gelatin. Usually it is served with caramel, chocolate or strawberries on top, like in this case. Yummy!