paulj, I think Trinxat is Catalan, not Basque. Fried potatoes and cabbage, with salt pork or lard. Somewhat like colcannon, or, bubble and squeak? but with garlic.

blue room: glad to be informative about ingredients in the Spanish kitchen.

Thanks, BigSal. It was a link to that recipe that drew me into Chowhound pages! Delighted to join a discussion about Spanish food and cookbooks.

Thanks, Gio. I just put the blog address on my Profile page. Wasn't sure of etiquette. But, I shouldn't put the link in my Chow posts?

The recipe for fava bean salad with mint also appears in Coleman Andrews' CATALAN CUISINE. He credits it to the great chef Josep Mercader. I included the recipe in my own MY KITCHEN IN SPAIN cookbook, not knowing where it came from. Today I am making it with fresh favas from the garden. With, of course, serrano ham, not prosciutto!

No, the difference between hot and mild is variety of pepper, as all are picked ripe (red). Hot pimentón is never as hot as cayenne.

I wrote about "Pimentón, in Translation" on a recent blog. Here's the lowdown on this ruddy-good spice: Pimentón is made from dried red peppers which, depending on the cultivar, can be sweet, bittersweet or hot (picante). After drying, the peppers are milled—ground—to a fine powder. The most used peppers are the choricero, elongated, and the ñora or bola, a sort of mini bell pepper, about the size of a plum. Both are sweet to bittersweet.

Pimentón is produced both in Murcia, in eastern Spain, and in the La Vera region of Extremadura in western Spain.

In Murcia, in eastern Spain, the hot, dry Mediterranean climate allows the peppers to be sun-dried (or, industrially, dried with hot air). In autumn when the peppers ripen in La Vera, early rains in the Atlantic climate of Extremadura make sun-drying impossible. So, the peppers are smoke-dried 10 to15 days over smouldering chunks of wild holm oak. Both kinds of pimentón are used in making chorizo sausage.