“Hello, my name is Montserrat, I'm from Plans de Cornet I'm eighty-three years old, and today I'm going to make you a wild boar stew”, she tells us, as she opens the farmhouse door for us. If we look in the Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear we find that singlar, also written singlà, appears “as a synonym for senglar" in Igualada, Calders, Centelles, Manresa, etc. Our wise woman is from Bages. She lives in a neat farmhouse, where geese, dogs, rabbits, and chickens also live, in addition, of course, to part of her family. Today she is accompanied by one of her granddaughters, from Manresa, who, smiling, tells us: “I'm her assistant, but she goes on her own!” It's true. Our wise woman is agile, she doesn't stop moving, lifting pots. She immediately cuts fuet (homemade) to offer it to us.

"Welcome to Clos de Ca Gras. I invite you to a calçotada and I'll make the sauce for you," she tells us. It's Pilar Dolç, a surname—what sonorous surnames, Catalans!—that seems to have predestined her in the kitchen. She's the daughter of farmers and now, at seventy-eight, she's still going strong.

Arnau Pérez de Tudela Guasch is from Valls and runs a communications agency in Altafulla. A few years ago, Gerard Cañellas Prades, from Riera de Gaià, joined the agency. They both always said they had to do something to bring together everything in the world of calçots (where to make them, where to buy them, where to find the sauce...) and one day they had a lightbulb moment. Inspired by the hit app where people noted where to make hearty breakfastsThe CalçotApp has arrived.

The calçotada season is reaching its peak these days. The farmers who planted the calçots are harvesting them nonstop, and the restaurants that organize calçotadas are filling up with reservation after reservation. Amidst this constant activity, there's one restaurant that stands out precisely for the tranquility in which you can savor its calçots, its meat, and the entire experience that a calçotada entails. It's Esportell del Bou, a quiet, family-run restaurant that has gradually earned a place on the list of must-visit spots for enjoying good food.

It's a common, everyday conversation that always comes up when calçotadas return. Are there enough calçots for all the calçotadas held in homes, farmhouses, and restaurants? In an era of free movement of food entering our markets from all over the world, the question is more relevant than ever. Is it possible that our farmers work themselves to the bone to cultivate the best calçots in the world, but those sold in markets come from other countries and haven't undergone the same quality controls as ours? The answer, at least according to the data, is no. We eat Catalan calçots.

Waiting for the city of Valls to organize as every year The great calçotada festival, which this year will be on Sunday, January 26, in which participants break records for eating calçots per minute, we recommend some of the places where you can go to eat with the sole aim of having a good time. There is probably no other meal that unites friends and family more in a delicacy in which it is necessary to look up to the sky, as the late director Bigas Luna said: "The calçot, the porrón and the castellers come out of the earth and make me look up to the sky." And finally, eating is Enjoy good nutritional properties, because calçots provide fiber and they are beneficial because they feed the bacteria, especially those that should be more present in the colon: lactobacilli and bifidobacteria. Be that as it may, here is a suggestion for restaurants to sit down at while looking at the sky.