Gazpacho: A refreshing cold soup made with blended vegetables, usually served during the summer
But there is one dish that truly takes the cake and has put Spanish cuisine on the worldwide map!
For this week, I cooked and tasted paella! This food is native to Valencia, a city on the eastern coast of Spain. It’s a rice-based dish, flavored with saffron, giving the rice a yellow color, and it's mixed with delicious seafood, chicken and vegetables that soak into the rice as it cooks. It is one of the most well-known Spanish dishes, and it's the absolute best to share and bring people together!
This dish made me feel immediately warm and at home. There is a nostalgic feeling that the dish inspires, even if you haven’t tried it before. This may be because of how much time it takes to cook and how carefully it is prepared. I enjoyed how flavorful it was and how well-blended the ingredients were. The taste of seafood was not overpowering, so some of my friends who were nervous about trying shellfish expressed their pleasant surprise at the subtlety of the flavor. With every bite, I’d encounter the perfect combination of moist rice, spiced vegetables and marinated meat. When the plate first comes out, it’s hard to stop your mouth from watering from the rich smell, but there are so many flavors to take in that it’s a meal worth the wait.
