Beetroot and barley casserole

Hei!

yesterday we attended a Finnish typical food masterclass, it was amazing!! We could discover so many new ingredients and one of the recipes we liked best was this one, for the simplicity, and for using totally new ingredients!

Ingredients:
- 1/2 kg beetroots
- onion
- 2 dl barley
- vegetables stock
- butter
- garlic

For the barley, we used this broken one, the result feels like a thicker couscous.

As we said, the recipe is really easy, it takes a bit of time though.

Wash the beetroots and peel them, cut it in small cubes, fine chop the onion and the garlic. Add a knob of butter to the casserole and add the beetroot, onion and garlic, saute for 5-10 min, season with salt and pepper.
Add the barley and the stock, let it simmer under the lid for an hour or so, we added 1 liter, it need a bit more. The time of cooking might be different, the barely doesn't take more than 15-20 min of cooking, but the beetroot need longer cooking time. We added a bit of timjami as decoration.

Escalivada

Being today 11-9, Catalan national day, going to show you how to make THE MOST traditional Catalan dish ESCALIVADA

Actually it is not a main dish, but a side dish or a base to make many other meals, but the base is always the same.

It is prety easy, you don´t need to be Gordon Ramsey as to make escalivada, ingredients:

- Red peppers

- Eggplant

- Onion

- Garlic

Onion and garlic are not mandatory, but beeing a garlic addict as we are, we cook it as many ways as we can imagine. About the red peppers, just make sure you can get some nice, fresh and thick red peppers, otherwise if they don´t have much "meat" they will, most likely, burn.

As to prepare the red peppers and eggplant rinse it with water and chop off the green part of the eggplant and put it to an oven tray, we did put aluminum folio as to be easier to clean later. Then put it to the oven at 200-250°C for about 30-45 min. Depending on the size of the vegetables it might take longer, so keep an eye on them.

Once they are soft, take them out of the oven and let them cool, if would be much easier to peel the vegetables. The red peppers are really easy to peel and to remove the seeds.

As you can see, there is a lot of food out of one eggplant and 2kg of red peppers, we did so much red peppers cause we found them really cheap, otherwise the typical way to do it its having 50/50 each.  With this you can eat it right away, put it in fridge and eat in in couple of days, or putting in small freezing bags and eat it whenever you want.

So, how to eat escalivada, as we say earlier, there is many dishes in catalan cooking where escalivada is one key ingredient, we might post some in the future, but my preferred way to eat those is the eggplant little bit hot, with some maldon salt and a blast of good olive oil. As for red peppers, i recommend, as a side dish for a big steak, fry few garlic nails with little bit of this red pepper.

Hope you like it, and have a nice Catalan day!