A Sicilian Feast

When you’re looking for easy pasta recipes, you might not think that there’s anything intrinsically difficult about cooking the pasta itself. You might worry more about the complexity of the sauces or perhaps the more difficult work to create the accompanying meat recipes. But there are a few things about cooking pasta that can make it turn out less than perfect if you don’t do them right, so even those initial basic steps need to be given proper attention if you want a perfect pasta meal.

Spain is country with a mixed and complex heritage and Spanish cooking displays this fact. While Spain is a Mediterranean nation, and plenty of Spanish dishes owe much to this, Spanish food also includes native foods imported into the country from Spain’s former ex-colonies in the New World such as beans, peppers, potatoes and tomatoes. Other Spanish dishes draw on the country’s Jewish and Moorish heritage – it is worth recollecting that much of Spain was governed by the Moors for over 7 hundred years. Even the Reconquista (the Christian reconquest of the Iberian pennisula from Muslims) has left its traces in Spanish cuisine – pork is popular in Spain, and historically was a political statement of Christian identity as it wasn’t eaten by Jews or Muslims.