Calçotada season

Calçotada season starts in February and last till the end of March, beginning of April. It is a gastronomical Catalan tradition where calçots are consumed in exaggerated amounts. For the ones who are wondering what da... is a calçot we will explain: Wikipedia says that a calçot is a variety of scallion known as Blanca Grand Tardana from Lleida. If still you don't have a clue of what is it, we will try it with our words: It is a kind of onion more tender and softer. A calçot looks like this:

Altought this event it's called calçotada, the main actor here are not calçots, but the sauce, mmm.... romesco :) (Again wikipedia translation looks convincing :P)

15th of February we went to Helena's place in la Garriga (a village 40Km from Barcelona) to have our first calçotada from the season, and the first ever for Vikachuu. As you can see she was super excited :D

But she was also a little bit scared watching how they were "burning" what has supposed to be our food, and indeed, calçots are cook with a very strong fire that make them black from outside but very tender from inside.

Manual to eat calçots:

0. Cover your dear clothes with a napkin

1. Peel them, removing the black carbonised skin

2. Hold the calçot from the upper part (the green one) and soak it into the sauce

3. Rise the calçot above you heat and open you mouth

4. Enjoy!

5. Reapeat from 1 to 4, 10 times

6. If still not dead go to 5

7. Now you are ready to continue with the meat :)