08.28.10 (tapas and A GIVEAWAY!!)

Wild Mushrooms with Herbed Cheese

This time last year saw us frantically scrambling in our beloved New Haven apartment as we packed and cleaned and squeezed all of our possessions into a U-Haul on our trek to Manhattan (and this was after only finding out where we were moving to eight days prior to our move-out date). The month of August was, to be honest, a period of great uncertainty and stress for many reasons: my commute was becoming so bad that taking back roads from Milford to New Haven was preferable to standing in traffic on I-95, our apartment had been leased out for September at the beginning of the month and we didn’t have an apartment to go to in NYC until a week prior to our move-in, and we were faced with all of the normal stresses of moving without knowing where the fuck we were going to until the last minute possible…or so it seemed.

A small respite in the midst of all of that uncertainty was a trip to Barcelona’s New Haven location for a lovely meal for Michael’s birthday. I knew that the geniuses behind the restaurant had released a cookbook around that time and was hoping to check it out while we were there. While the food was amazing as always, the service was off and we ended up leaving in a huff (without me looking at the book) and I ended up bitching about said service on Twitter. They responded quickly, apologized profusely and even offered to give us a meal on them, but given that we weren’t living in the area anymore, I never took them up on it because we no longer lived in New Haven.

Of course, I ended up getting the cookbook as a birthday present a few months later and for the past year we have cooked our way through much of the book with every recipe taking us back to fun nights we’ve had at the restaurant…and that’s where our giveaway comes in.

Sweet and Sour Figs with Chorizos

Between the two of us, we recreated much of the dishes we enjoyed at that dinner a year ago, from the almost-obligatory chorizos with sweet and sour figs to the life-altering calamari a la plancha. Que delicioso. What we lacked in ambiance (we were hanging out in pajamas and watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia–hardly cool-restaurant-vibe–we more than made up for in with flavor.

Calamari a la plancha with Smoked Pepper Sauce

And now for the giveaway details!

Barcelona has kindly given us a few autographed copies of its amazing cookbook to dole out to our readers, so to enter, simply answer this question by leaving a comment:

If you could recreate the food from a restaurant, which would it be and why?

UPDATED: To give you a better idea of how much we love this book, here are the recipes we’ve given a try so far: