I do sometimes invent recipes, but I read, borrow, and adapt a great many others. Tonight’s dinner is owed almost entirely to three very good cooks. The meal was made of two relatively simple dishes:

Scallops with Curried Onions and Lime

Fregole Sarde with Zucchini and Parmesan

Geographically, this meal starts in Portland, Maine, where our very good friend, Pat, introduced us to the cookbook, MEZCLA, by Ixta Belfrage. Pat had made a dinner for us featuring several recipes from this book, so I bought a copy as soon as I got home. I copied several recipes that looked good to me and put them in my online recipe file. Tonight I made the Scallops dish as a first course, although I must admit that I forgot the lime. Chalk it up to old age.

Here is a short bio about Ixta. You can see that her cooking brings the influences of Brazil, Italy, and Mexico, which is probably why I find the recipes so intriguing.

The main course comes directly from a cookbook author and blogger, Clotilde Dusoulier. I had discovered her blog, charmingly named Chocolate and Zucchini, very early in my food blogging days. Lively inventions from her Paris kitchen have been collected into my recipe files, and tonight, her Sardinian dish, Fregola Sarde with Zucchini and Parmesan got the call.

It tasted even better than it looks. I restrained myself and had only three helpings. A glass of Lugana was a nice match for both dishes.