Every January, my grandmother's kitchen in Trás-os-Montes smelled like woodsmoke for weeks. That's when the pig was slaughtered and the smokehouse filled with butelo, fat little sausages of smoked pork stomach stuffed with rice,...
Salpicão de Vinhais is one of the great cured meats of Trás-os-Montes, a whole pork loin marinated in wine and garlic, stuffed into casing, then smoked slowly over oak for weeks in a village...
This is old-fashioned, farmhouse breakfast food, the kind my grandmother made on cold mornings before school with whatever cornmeal was sitting in the pantry. It's Portugal's answer to sweet polenta or grits, cooked low...
If there's one dish that proves you don't need a long ingredient list to make something unforgettable, it's tortilla española. Just potatoes, onion, eggs, and really good olive oil, turned into something Spain has...
Arancini are what happens when leftover risotto gets a much more exciting second life: rolled around a cube of melting mozzarella, breaded, and fried until the outside shatters and the inside stays creamy. They're...
This is the soup I make when I want something warm and completely undemanding: a handful of pantry staples, one pot, and twenty-five minutes between me and dinner. Turkish red lentil soup shows up...
Portugal's convent sweets are basically an entire dessert category built on egg yolks, sugar syrup, and nuns with a lot of free time, and papos de anjo is one of the funniest-named members of...
Every village in Trás-os-Montes seems to have a walnut tree in someone's yard and a family recipe for what to do with the green walnuts before they ever get to harden into a shell....
Salt cod does not always have to be baked, fried, or turned into a casserole. This cold, oil-and-vinegar salad is what shows up on Portuguese tables in the summer, when nobody wants the oven...
Caldo verde gets all the attention, but sopa de nabiças is the soup my mother-in-law actually makes more often, because turnip greens show up in her garden long before the kale does. It is...
