Tips on how to cook a perfect Mediterranean meal 0
Buying ingredient at the farmer market!
The quality of the ingredients you use to prepare a dish is what makes the real difference in your plate and most of all …in your mouth!!
Buying your ingredients at the market is a really good investment, which will definetely result in a more tasteful dish, certainly appreciated by your beloved ones and friends.
A very fresh ingredient has lots of taste, which means that you don’t have to add any sauce or dressing to give flavor to your dish.
Also a very fresh ingredient does not need to be cooked for too long and in this way you preserve all the good properties and vitamines it may contain.
Moreover, a very important feature is that at the market you usually find local products produced by the local farmers. Every season you find different vegetables and fruit and every season you can prepare different seasonal recipes. Creativity and variety is one of the beauties of cooking!
This is why Puglia cuisine is very simple but SO delicious at the same time. The region is a big producer of all vegetables you can think of (artichokes, eggplants, zucchini), tomatoes, fish, durum wheat, legumes. In Puglia, all ingredients are cooked in a very simple way…but the result is always terrific.
Finally, not everybody has the time to go to the market every day. Then, how do you store your ingredients? or how can you have “fresh” ingredients out of the season, without importing them?
In Puglia, for example, we produce lots of tomatoes in the summer. To have fresh tomatoes in the winter (without making them dry), we prepare the so called Pendola tomatoes in the summer.
Also, in Puglia we produce lots of vegetables in the summer, such as eggplants, zucchini and bell peppers. We preserve them in extra virgin olive oil..so that when the winter comes we still have the local vegetables bought at the local market.
