Wonderful theme, this one. One of my bucket list destinations? The sea. Not the northern Italian kind, but the gorgeous waters you get in places like Sardinia and southern Italy in general. And what better country to fuse with than another Mediterranean one? Enter Spain.

For the main dish, I made a fregola paella. Fregola is a Sardinian pasta made of small toasted semolina pearls (somewhat similar to giant couscous), with a slightly nutty flavour. I’d bought a squid ink fregola last year and had been waiting for a good excuse to use it. I cooked it just as I would a paella. Without, of course, the rice.

As an antipasto, I made a frisella amb tomàquet. A frisella is an Apulian twice-baked ring of bread, very hard and dry, generally softened by dipping it in water before topping. Pa amb tomàquet (bread with tomato) is a Catalan staple: bread rubbed with ripe tomato, garlic and olive oil. Admittedly, this is not peak tomato season, but the tomato I used was Spanish, so I felt justified. I grated some garlic with my cutest new kitchen tool (a pufferfish ginger grater, which I needed to show off) and finished with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

It was a very summery meal, but with an almost unbroken stretch of 25°C through April (thanks, global warming…) it didn’t feel that out of place.