Do you have guests over for a snack today? Do you want to cook with the kids? Or do you simply feel like putting on an apron? Make this apple pie proposed by the chef of the Semproniana restaurant, Ada Parellada. It is very simple, too.

Garlic is an extraordinary ingredient. For this reason, the chef at the Semproniana restaurant revisits the Italian carbonara recipe, but makes a version with roasted garlic.

Autumn is here, and that is synonymous with Catalan traditions. Panellets and sweet potatoes, like this stuffed one. But there are also new foreign traditions that are taking hold. We make it work so we don't stop having panellets, by adding a touch of terror.

Today the chef from the Semproniana restaurant brings us a very simple autumn dish: sweet potato stuffed with blue cheese, bacon, dates, and walnuts.

The chef of Semprionana, Ada Parellada, makes us a dish of Italian tradition that triumphs at Catalan tables: the parmigiana.

Ada Parellada, chef of the Semproniana restaurant, recommends a chicken with garlic, a casserole dish that we can cook in the morning and take with us in a lunchbox.

We cannot eat them every day, but what a joy is this giant cookie by Ada Parellada. Let's see how the chef from Semproniana makes this cookie of large proportions.

This zucchini invention devised by Semproniana chef Ada Parellada is quick and a way to put the oven to work.

It doesn't matter if you call them meatballs or 'pilotilles'. With this recipe from the Semproniana cook Ada Parellada, you have no excuse not to make these succulent little balls of happiness so traditional to Catalan cuisine.

The chef of Semproniana, Ada Parellada, makes a good, healthy, and affordable sardine dish. A very Mediterranean bite that is prepared quickly.

Rabbit stew is a traditional dish that makes you want to eat bread with it. Ada Parellada, chef at Semproniana, makes this succulent dish with a main ingredient that is cooked less and less despite being very local and very healthy.

Ada Parellada, chef at Semproniana, explains how to make a simple yet effective zucchini and goat cheese omelet.

The chef of the Semproniana restaurant Ada Parellada prepares for us an eggplant stuffed with tuna.

The chef of the restaurant Semproniana Ada Parellada returns to the ARA. Every week she will prepare two recipes for us, which you will find on the newspaper's website and on social media. What kind of recipes? She summarizes it like this: "Real cooking with homemade ingredients". Precisely, the first dish she brings us is a local classic of what in English is called comfort food: traditional, simple and comforting food. Let's start the week with some macaroni au gratin.

Ada Parellada isn't interested in summer nights "in the towns on the Catalan coast that have become shopping centers at all." "Forget Cadaqués, give me western Catalonia, which is still free and where authentic things still happen," she claims. "You go to Les Garrigues and you still find authenticity there, doors that don't lock, the sepulchral silence at three in the afternoon because everyone is home napping, the neighbor who arrives and parks in the middle of the main street, and the couple of kids who defy the scorching sun and play football".

On Wednesday I was at the summer party of ARA, where, besides greeting colleagues and readers, I heard live the conversation between Albert Om and Ada Parellada, who in September returns to the newspaper to share her recipe book with her numerous followers. Ada is a whirlwind of a woman, and you can easily imagine her cooking four dishes at once. But she is a person with a very thoughtful discourse, in which enthusiasm responds not only to impulse but to a method and an idea. When I hear her, or Maria Nicolau, or Empar Moliner, and so many other people who talk about the land, the product, the wines, and agriculture, I realize that behind their fiery speeches there is not only hedonism, good habits, and environmentalism, but a whole idea of country, of how what is now called the territory should be managed, of how food connects us with a way of doing and living that are also past, heritage, and culture in all senses of the term.I would venture to say that, in these times of political discredit, these proclamations are an authentic reformulation of Catalanism, that concept which, as Josep Pla said, links with everything, and which always knows how to reinvent itself and disguise itself in the most useful way to approach the objective – which is, as always, the defense of the right to exist of a national community–. In the 17th century (and until 1714) Catalanism was revolt; in the 18th, economic development; in the 19th, simultaneously and not always friendly, it was cultural renaissance and social revolution. In the 20th century, political Catalanism exploded, harshly repressed by two dictatorships. And now, in times of political weariness and authentic demographic metamorphosis, one of the safe havens of Catalanism is the land, also threatened, but which continues to function as a mirror of the values and intangible heritage of the country. If cuisine is – back to Josep Pla – the landscape put in a pot, the nation is a human collective living together in the same space. If the political landscape is a wasteland, and the human landscape changes constantly, the natural landscape, the space where we exist, becomes even more the repository of some essential truths that define us and allow us to face changes with the tranquility of knowing that some things – the fruits of the land and culinary tradition – remain unaltered, even if they are enriched and diversified over time. They are the roots that prevent the tree from having to suffer from the length and reach of the new branches, which alter its shape without damaging its essence.This Catalanism of the land, or of the fruits of the land, does not only serve to claim escudella, garnacha, sea and mountain or ratafia. It is also the guarantee of a model of country that respects the environment, the sown fields, fishing and livestock; a country that does not let itself be swallowed by exorbitant growth or the greed of tourism. A country, in short, that respects itself, that does not renounce offering all the good it has to the world. Of this, in politics, we would call it sovereignty. And while history shows us that politics ends up being necessary to defend the country's model, we also know, as is tradition in this land, that when politics fails it is society that protects and organizes itself, shines with its own light and makes the country remain despite not appearing on maps with its own color. I toast, therefore, to all the farmers, ranchers, fishermen, restaurant or home cooks, sommeliers and disseminators who help us understand that, under a surface increasingly battered by plastic and cement, there is the land, watching the centuries and millennia pass, reminding us who we are.

What you will read here, more than an interview, is a gastronomic manifesto that the cook Ada Parellada (Granollers, 1967) let go of on Wednesday, in a disordered, fun, and captivating way, at the ARA summer party, in front of 200 newspaper subscribers. Born into the family of the mythical Fonda Europa in Granollers, owner of the Semproniana restaurant in Barcelona, author of a dozen books, and disseminator of traditional Catalan cuisine on Instagram, Ada Parellada will collaborate again with ARA after the summer by publishing two weekly recipes on video.What does returning to the PRESENT mean to you?

I interview the cook Ada Parellada (Granollers, 1967) one afternoon after she has finished recording recipe videos. She offers me a piece of a blueberry pie, delicious, which she has prepared with nine ingredients. Only nine ingredients, because that way everything is easier, she says. We start the interview by talking about the last one I did with her, in which she told me the story of her family, and how it was that she decided to open the restaurant Semproniana with her partner. Ada Parellada has just written the book Els plats del dia (Rosa dels Vents), in which she vindicates set menus, like the ones she prepares at her restaurant daily for 23 euros, and which are dishes made from start to finish, and elaborate Catalan cuisine.

Ten years ago, chef Ada Parellada decided to host a four-euro dinner at her restaurant, Semproniana, to raise awareness about food waste. On June 16, 2015, Parellada created a dinner with foods that had either not entered the food distribution system or had left, proving that they were good, very good. This Tuesday, the Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food launches the fourth edition of the campaignWe take advantage of food, which, of course, has the Semproniana chef as its driving force, and a total of seventy restaurants have joined the campaign. Until October 31, menus are available at very affordable prices (three dishes for around twenty euros) with the aim of raising awareness about the importance of making the most of food.

Ada Parellada (Granollers, 1967) comes from a family that has been serving food for seven generations and over 250 years and is a great advocate of recycled cooking. As a summer read, she recommends A life in the mountains (Now Books), by Abraham Orriols. The journalist and writer born in Berga in 1996 collects in this book the life of the Marina Vilalta, the oldest shepherdess in Catalonia. "Marina is almost 100 years old, and she goes out to graze the sheep every day," Parellada recalls.