Romesco Sauce

I will take a break from sharing my opinion that the Republican party has been taken over by idiots, although I reserve the right to return to that boringly obvious subject in future posts.

Instead I want to share a culinary discovery. The subject is new to me, but perhaps it is familiar to you.

A little more than a week ago the NY Times Dining section had an article about Romesco sauce, an all-purpose Spanish (Catalonian) sauce that I had not heard of. The author of the article was familiar with the sauce, because she is a food writer after all, but the gist of the article is that she had no idea how many variations existed.

Given that fact that I simultaneously learned (1) this sauce exists and (2) there are a lot of variations, I decided to just google Romesco sauce and see for myself what were my options. Indeed, there are a lot of recipes. The common ingredients in all of them are some kind of roasted pepper, and either almonds or hazelnuts, and garlic. Most of the recipes also call for tomatoes and paprika and, this seems really odd, some amount of stale bread.

I could give you the link to the recipe I opted to use, but I look at other recipes and know for a fact that they would be good too. So I will recommend the sauce and let you select your own recipe.  One of my reasons is that the recipe I have used, twice now, uses roasted red bell peppers. Many recipes call for roasted ancho peppers. I would love to hear from someone who used peppers with just a little more zing than the ones I've used.

The sauce itself is incredibly versatile. It is good with meat, chicken, vegetables and pasta. It is also said to keep well in the freezer, although I haven't tried that yet.

Heitor loved this sauce so much that he told a friend about it. This friend is a film critic and part-time chef, known to us as "Cigi, the cooker." Cigi didn't know about this sauce so Heitor took some pleasure in telling him he should "get Gerry's recipe." I told Cigi the same thing I'm telling you: why do you thing Gawd invented Google?