The day before the trial of the Kitchen case began at the National Court, the PP announced that its strategy was to create a firewall. "Feijóo is not the Kitchen," party sources proclaimed. This has been the popular party's approach throughout the first and second days of the oral hearing. The argument that current PP leaders repeat both in public and in private is that it is a matter related to the past, which has absolutely nothing to do with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the current popular president's team. The person in charge of verbalizing this on Tuesday was Alicia García, spokesperson in the Senate, in a press conference focused on attacking Pedro Sánchez for the alleged corruption surrounding him. "We are talking about a case from more than ten or fifteen years ago, but today a case from fifteen minutes ago from the PSOE is being judged. And those that remain," she defended.

Today we will have meatballs with potatoes, which with the basics I have in the freezer are quick to make and ideal for days, like today, when we have a lot to do before lunch.Will the girls give you a hand?

This week, two trials are set to begin in Madrid that will undoubtedly have a significant impact on Spanish politics. This Monday, the trial for the Kitchen case kicks off at the National High Court, and on Tuesday, the Supreme Court will try the former minister and former organization secretary of the PSOE, José Luis Ábalos, for the first case affecting him: an alleged scheme to collect commissions for selling masks to various state institutions.

For work reasons, I live and share meals with a group of young people in their twenties and thirties. I've cooked with young people before, of course, but the meals were always prepared or paid for by me. This is different—we eat with a few scrapes from work—because I can observe their culinary habits and customs.

Girona will once again become the epicenter of gastronomy in February. From the 9th to the 11th, the 12th edition of the Fòrum Gastronòmic Girona will take place, a must-attend event for the restaurant, gastronomy, and Horeca sectors. It will bring together more than 200 companies and 150 speakers at the Palau de Fires and in the Devesa Park area. This year, escudella and carne de olla—one of the great symbols of Catalan cuisine—will be the focus of an edition that will celebrate tradition as a driving force for innovation and the future of cooking.

Located in the heart of the Alt Penedès region, the Olèrdola workshop is much more than a kitchen: it's the laboratory where a significant part of Almendro Origen's culinary offerings take shape. Since 2006, this 4,000 m² space has been producing tortillas, soups, creams, gazpachos, broths, and a wide variety of prepared dishes that arrive daily at establishments throughout Catalonia, with the same love and care as if they were made at home. Six years later, in 2012, the company opened a dairy section to complete its product range and strengthen control over the entire process, from fresh produce to the final dish. In the last year alone, the workshop has produced more than 5 million creams, gazpachos, and broths; more than 13.3 million dairy products; more than 1 million tortillas; and more than 1.8 million prepared dishes. A production that reflects not only the team's skill, but also the dedication and passion we put into every recipe.

I interviewed chef Óscar Álvarez Moreno (Barcelona, ​​1991) in the last days of December 2025 at his newly opened restaurant, Barra Oso (Muntaner, 248). It's curious because I also interviewed him at the beginning of the year, but at a different restaurant. Mesa Lobo, from which he resigned after six months despite being a partner and it being one of the great successful openingsHe calmly tells me what happened, but above all, he talks about his great passion: the restaurant he just opened with the help of partners, where he's created a menu of seemingly simple dishes that are actually quite complex. He prepares all the dishes right there in the restaurant, Barra Oso, which has a large central bar for sitting and eating. There are also platters. In just a few days, Barra Oso will become the restaurant everyone's talking about: good food, prices designed to make you want to come back the next day, wines served by the glass, and a relaxed atmosphere. Next door is one of the long-established trendy spots, Luz de Gas, which will help it become well-known quickly.

On Monday, wise grandmothers gathered at Mont Sant Benet. It was called the Great Gathering of Gastronomic Wisdom. The hosts, from the Fundació Alícia, who have been working tirelessly for years, managed to bring together grandmothers who are cooks from all over Catalonia. The mayor of Sant Fruitós, while speaking, greeted his aunt, and Councilor Ordeig, also from the podium, greeted some friends of his mother. Between selfies and slices of coca (a type of flatbread), we talked and, above all, listened to projects from across the region, all centered around the cuisine that boasts the oldest unwritten Latin recipe book in Europe. The legacy we are obligated to pass on belongs to them. They have cherished the recipes, written them down in neat handwriting, with humility and a desire to serve; I mean, without any desire for the limelight. A good cook knows that the dish is the star, not herself.

Whichever channel the viewer chooses, it's almost impossible not to see someone on screen wielding a knife and chopping vegetables. This is more likely on TV3 than on any other channel. La 2 Cat, in its efforts to appear more or less a traditional television channel, has added a well-intentioned cooking show to its schedule, but it's so poorly made it's almost painful to watch. The program is titled... Brutal cuisineThis already demonstrates a lack of imagination on the part of the network, appropriating Marc Ribas's quintessential adjective from TV3. A symptom of a lack of its own personality that doesn't bode well for the network's pretensions. "Brutal" is part of this trend towards impoverished language, towards impact devoid of content. "Brutal" has become the cliché of false expectations.

At a congress dedicated to the future of Catalan cuisine, the most cited book is 700 years old and is the Feel SovietFor three days, at the Gastronomic Forum in Barcelona, ​​veteran chefs like Josep Lladonosa, young chefs and Brand-new chefs of the year like Jeffrey Ruiz and Helena Termes Academics like Toni Massanés have referred to them. There aren't many culinary cultures that have such an ancient document to draw upon. To know where we need to go, we need to know where we come from, of course. What a shame that Paco Solé Parellada and Antoni Riera passed away this year and couldn't participate in the debate.

René Frank (1984, Wangen im Allgäu) is the dessert chef. Or the pastry chef of the kitchen. His Berlin restaurant Coda, with two Michelin stars, opened in 2016, and since then, accolades have poured in. Among others, he's been named the World's Best Pastry Chef by 50 Best and Best Pastry Chef by Best Chef. But now he's somewhat reluctant to have his establishment described as a "dessert restaurant." He's against rigid categories, and that's why, coming from a much more conservative region of Germany, he found his place in the world in Berlin.

The dishes served at the Miramar restaurant in Llançà begin with scraps of paper, which chef Paco Pérez collects here and there and repurposes. Small works of art that eventually emerge from the paper to become edible sculptures, with flavor, aroma, and, above all, soul. Paco Pérez, with five Michelin stars, two of them for the cuisine he creates at Miramar, is considered the quintessential artist-chef. "He's always drawing. In a process of daily creativity, he captures each idea in a sketch on paper, to be interpreted and transformed by his team into a dish that often conveys the essence of the Mar de Amunt to the diner," explains the chef's son, the poet Guillem Pérez. Creating from the raw materials provided by the land he loves so much and that inspires him so much is one of Paco Pérez's obsessions, and he demonstrates this with gastronomic offerings such as Arroz en la Barca, inspired by rice dishes that were cooked "on the high seas, without seeing land, breathing the salty air that makes me feel it." Paco Pérez champions the presence in haute cuisine of the humble seaweed found in the waters of the Mar de Amunt, which embrace the Cape of Creus up to Cervera.

The Instagram chef, yes, adds way more pepper than he should, as if he were sprinkling an abstract painting. He does it like a juggler: he cuts the eggplant in two and shows them off. When he needs to make the cuts, the resulting diamond shapes, so the oil penetrates, he takes the knife and pretends to use a saber. He puts on a show.

At home, they always said that the best sauce is hunger and that water isn't tasteless if you're thirsty. We're so passionate that we needed to be gone to realize the value of what we had. That Paco was a unique character, a genius, an enlightened man, and a Renaissance man, is known by all of us who have enjoyed close contact with him and those of us who have met him occasionally. But aside from all his knowledge, which is already sufficiently important, Paco had flair, a particular style with a good patina of humor that made all this knowledge painful. One might think it was a technique acquired from so many years of teaching as a professor of economics at the School of Engineering, but in reality it was a mixture of innate aptitudes, others inherited, and the immense curiosity that made him wiser every day. He was interested in everything and everyone: technology, history, literature, painting, music (how we will long to hear him play) All of me by Ella Fitzgerald on the piano at 7 Portes), the country's economy, and, of course, the cuisine. Cuisine in capital letters, without exclusions or borders. However, since she took over at 7 Portes, she realized how fragile our Catalan cuisine is. Over all these decades, she has fought tirelessly, not only to showcase a coherent, sensible, and landscape-adapted culinary heritage, but also to delve into the roots of a precious legacy of rice dishes, fricandoso, and flans, which we have received for free and, ungratefully, have swept under the rug. Paco, we will miss you and mourn for you a lot. Rest assured, we will not stand idly by. We will not allow any of the work you have done to be lost, and we promise you that we will continue to be... the resistance from chicken to casserole!

There are nerves and confusion. The ESHOB teaching staff and management, made up of forty people, will be out of work at the end of July because the publicly owned Barcelona Institute of Gastronomy and Restoration will open in the same space on September 1st. Just as the school celebrates forty years since its founding, the two guilds that created the private school, the Restaurant and Hotel Associations, have sold their facilities to the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government). "We know that the amount paid by the Generalitat is very high, and we find it even more outrageous that they didn't take us into account," explains the spokesperson for the teaching staff, who wishes to remain anonymous.

He's just been laid off. He'll be home this year, and everyone thinks he's fine, that he should collect unemployment benefits and rest. His wife tells him yes, he should do it, that if she could—she's self-employed—she'd rest too. That he can't work all his life. They didn't have a wife to do the work, because she did the work herself. Not because she worked less.

Often the things that mark our lives are determined by chance. In 2019, just a few days before the Vuelta Ciclista a Catalunya, the UAE Team Emirates team was left without a chef. They made contacts and ended up reaching out to Esteve Ramírez (Barcelona, ​​​​1990), who had worked in the kitchens of large restaurants and had training in sports nutrition. It was supposed to be a temporary solution, but today this Catalan chef has ended up in charge of feeding the team during the most important competitions. And this also includes the food for Tadej Pogacar, the winner of three Tours de France in the last five years.

For years we have been resigned to the slowness of the recipes of the Kitchens of the after-dinner meal. The soundtrack of the country's siestas is the sound of the 3Cat knife chopping up the onion or any other vegetable that they can't have ready. On top of that, twice as much. First the more elaborate recipe, normally with plenty of butter to give the country's public health system work to do, and the second, in a flash, simpler and, from time to time, with dubious results.

Pablo Casado barely had time to enjoy the euphoria of the PP's victory in Madrid on May 4 (despite the fact that Isabel Díaz Ayuso has now become an internal competitor), before the shadow of the PP's corruption reappeared - and affecting him fully. Former party heavyweight María Dolores de Cospedal's indictment in the Kitchen case for having ordered the theft of documents committed to the former treasurer Luis Bárcenas once again puts the current president of the PP in difficulties. We must recall that Casado won the party primaries against Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría thanks mainly to the last-minute support he received from Cospedal, who also aspired to the position.