The creative team at Disfrutar's restaurant has done it again. They've invented a new culinary technique, now featured on the restaurant's Festival tasting menu, which recently celebrated its eleventh anniversary. It consists of eight colorful spoonfuls, each a textured food created using starches. These are presented on a white plate, like an artist's palette, and eaten with a spoon. "The waiter explains to the diners that they can eat them one by one or mix them together with their cutlery, which is what they end up doing," say Mateu Casañas, Oriol Castro, and Eduard Xatruch. The result is a dish that's visually stunning, thanks to the starches that give the food its natural sheen, and also delicious, thanks to the precision of the cooking. The dish represents a novel technique, preparation, and concept: playing with the idea of painting on the plate.

His name is Hidenori Futami. He was born in Osaka, studied gardening in Tokyo, and for the past ten years has been cultivating three vegetable gardens in the town of Pals, which have become the pantry of the best Catalan restaurants. It all started when he and his wife thought about changing their careers because they didn't like what they were doing. "My wife worked as a cook in the town of Kobe; I worked as a waiter, but we both wanted to work in the fields," Hidenori explains one bright Sunday morning as we begin our tour of the first of the three vegetable gardens he rents in Pals. I tell him that there isn't a chef I interview who doesn't talk to me about him. I make a list: "He's talked to me about you in Carlos Pérez de Rozas, the Roca brothers, Rafa Peña, Jordi Cruz, Albert Raurich, Albert Adrià; and I have more names written down, but you already know them."

If you're one of those who dream of eating zucchini in January or would love to eat salads with delicious tomatoes in December, you should make preserves now in the summer, allowing you to capture time for enjoyment at any other time of year. And while the word "preserve" may connote a complicated technique, the reality isn't; it's simple, easy to practice at home following a few steps, which are usually the same for all foods. First and foremost, the essential thing is to have time. If you have it, you're ready to capture the life of summer and uncover it in the harsh winter months.

A small balcony, spaces that fit four pots, and even the tightest corners can be converted into a vegetable garden. You don't have to be a farmer to harvest your own tomatoes and other vegetables full of vitamins and energy. Now that the warmer weather is fully upon us and the days are long, aromatic herbs and vegetables reach their peak on the balconies, terraces, and patios of many homes, where all kinds of plants are grown, even if only in small yields. A little bit of sun, and above all, a willingness to get dirty with the soil, is all it takes to harvest homemade organic vegetables.

That in our big cities a normal salad has become a chimera is abnormal. Celery, peeled if necessary, radish, perhaps cut into a flower shape, tomato, with gusto, of course, and "peasant" lettuce. Today, if they gave me radish and celery in a restaurant, I'd burst into tears. Or, at most, it's a handful of sprouts. Restaurants, too. Without overwhelming them. Salad is refreshing and allows you to eat more fat. One who wants to diet. No part of our diet has been as savagely perverted as that of vegetables. Frozen, inside. When it was time to set the table, the child or teenager carrying the salad would be told: "Carry it singing!" bland, plastic-wrapped spinach, a canned carrot?

I interview Josep Lluís Sabatés Ibáñez, known as Pep Salsetes (January 30, 1945), one Sunday morning at his farmhouse, located in the Ocata mountain range, on the outskirts of the Ametlla del Vallès area, on the way to the Sant Bartomeu hermitage, at an altitude of seven hundred meters. When I arrive, I find him at the exit, in front of the chicken coop, and he's very focused: he's planting seedlings of long lettuce from Can Güell de Serinyà, an ancient seed. Pep Salsetes talks to you about seeds and recipes (squid must first be thoroughly coated in flour; then, for the coating, it's best if it doesn't contain egg, oh! And the tender leaves of the lemon tree, coated without egg, are also very good), as well as the names of varieties. He has practiced so many jobs—like that of a cook—that all together they have given him a good understanding of the country. As coquesa –as he defines the work of a catering chef– traveled with his van loaded with food. The book that Rosa dels Vents publishing house reissued, From Garden to Plate: Or How to Eat Well Year-Round, is a compilation of "collective recipes," as he says, that he learned from talking to the neighbors in the towns where he worked. He first published it in 1991, but returned with the amendments and additions he'd wanted to make since it was first published. He's lived in L'Ametlla del Vallès for forty years, but he's "an urbanite," he says, born in the Sant Andreu neighborhood of Barcelona, ​​​​where his mother, Consell Ibáñez, owned a butcher shop. TV3 pays tribute to him with a Non-fiction, a documentary in which he explains his life and career. And he does so on the day Pep Salsetes turns 80.