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Last Saturday we celebrated this year the last  Calçotada, Calçots end.

Today is cloudy and a bit cold but even though we are on springtime. But on Friday, when I went to the market, I forgot this small detail.

Springtime is time for diets,  on Saturday at home we were 12 people but in fact only eight ate. The food the most went directly to the frozen except the onions. What did I do with them?

Sunday a cooked coat in batter onion my favourite way to eat them.

To cook them we need:

Obviously Calçots

Flour

Egg (only one)

Water (COLD VERY COLD)

Salt

Oil to fried them and music but today’s music and the reason is on the recipe’s end.

First of all,  cut and clean the calçots.

Before I coat them directly but now according to Mercede’s advice (Mercedes is a lovely old woman) I blanch the calçots at first. Like that.

Later, this is very important, get dry the calçots. Like that.

Meanwhile we prepare the batter. It is a flour, egg, and water mixture. To precise the quantities it is very difficult.

I begin whisking the egg, later I add flour until thicken following I add water (COLD WATER) gradually until it looks like that so batter stick the onion but not so much quantity, we are looking tasting the onion not the batter.

Don’t forget to salt.

Fried them on hot oil, and later put them on a kitchen paper or something similar in order to absorb the oil excess

That’s all. I accompanied them with calçotada sauce.

And now the music.

In fact calçots are onions a very special onion but after all onions.

At once I thought looking for a musical piece which makes weeping with them.

At first I thought about La Traviata but it is too much popular following I thought about Tosca and my friend Sebastian who always cry from the note until the end.

In the end I asked myself when I saw more people crying one’s eyes out around me on the Liceu. The answer was easy, on 2004 at the end Montserrat Caballé’s recital.

That day Montserrat’s encores included this Catalan popular song.

This song talks about an emigrant who feels how his heart get broken when he leaves his homeland and how in the distance he yearn for mountains’s colours and bird’s sings.

The emigrant leaves his homeland knowing he never will find a town as beautiful as his own town. On death time, he only wishes to lie in his homeland where he was born, where he wishes to die, Catalonia
Ese día y con esta canción lloraron mis hermanos, mis suegros, mi primo que es más que un primo, y con ellos medio Teatro.

That day, with this song my brothers, my father-in-law and his wife, my cousin and half theatre cried one’s eyes out.

Yes, in fact Montserrat has changed, she is not in her best days but everybody will go through that.

That day those presents expressed our affection, respect and admiration for a woman who one day borrowed the angels’s voice.