foodblog - Choice of Magic

Easy Portuguese Caldo Verde Soup Recipe

September 23, 2025

Yesterday was the first day of autumn, and it lingers in the air. I’ve already gotten my butter croissant candles out, washed our fluffy blankets, and I am fully embracing maroon as a colour for my wardrobe. And I thought I´d kick off the season with a recipe for my favourite Portuguese soup – the caldo verde. I confess that this soup intimidated me at first. I love cooking Romanian sour soups (ciorba) and actually make some pretty tasty ones, but soups to me are such an intimate heritage of a region that I very often stay away from the really traditional ones, quietly admiring them from afar. That was the case with caldo verde until last winter, when I ventured to do one, following the recipe from Portugal The Cookbook, the same recipe book I took this Pão de Ló recipe from. I confess I have since adjusted both ingredients as well as method quite a bit and here´s my final take on the caldo verde.

Portuguese Food

Traditional Portuguese Pão com Chouriço

May 23, 2025

From the series of ” traditional dishes that have always intimidated me ” comes the Portuguese pão com chouriço, a national staple . Often portrayed together with the caldo verde, another iconic local dish (coming on the blog soon), you’ll find pão com chouriço in most pastries and supermarket pastry sections. But making them at home and bringing them to a party will convey you a whole different superhero status. So let´s make some dozen pães com chouriço after a traditional recipe (the original we inspired ourselves from, with halved quantities can be found here).

Portuguese Dessert Food

Portuguese Sponge Cake Made Easy – Pão de Ló

May 13, 2025

The Portuguese pão de ló can be found in different formats depending on how much up or down the coast you go. This recipe comes from Rio Maior, north of Lisbon, in what we call the Ribatejo area. To me it seems like the easiest sponge cake variation there exists in Portugal. So I thought of sharing it here, knowing that even a child could do it. I found it in Portugal The Cookbook by Leandro Carreira and I just diminished the initial whisking time a little as I feel it was slightly too long. Otherwise the proportions and instructions are true to the original recipe in the book. To make it, keep reading. And if you’re looking for another easy cake to make, check out this walnut cake whose recipe I got from Nonna´s niece, Esther.

Italian Food

The Most Easy and Crispy Chicken Piccata

July 31, 2024

In an effort to add more dishes containing meat to the blog, and since I’m best at cooking chicken – here’s a chicken piccata recipe that will leave you wanting for more and more. The piccata is an Italian – American dish that as far as my research goes is cooked with veal in Italy and with chicken in the US. I’ve used chicken here and made sure the fillets are quite thin so that they get really crispy. So if you are looking for a new way of cooking chicken, and like the flavour of butter, lemon and capers – give this a try.

Disclosure: my recipe is and adjusted version of this recipe from the Modern Proper.

South American Food

The Most Flavoursome Chimichurri Sauce

July 18, 2024

During an Argentine barbecue a few weeks back, I was talking to my friend Vanessa about chimichurri and how quintessentially Argentine it just is. Whether the Argentinians actually make it at home, or buy it at the store (the spices are often sold as a mixture and you’d only add oil to them), it is present in any Argentine barbecue, and just altogether a fantastic meat marinade. So here’s my attempt (after a lot of reading) to give you my chimichurri recipe. These proportions will be enough for a barbecue, but I usually double them to have some left over in a jar. And if this is not to your liking, an alternative recipe from Bon Appetite can be found here.

Portugal

The 12 Best Brunches in Lisbon

July 8, 2024

If you know me, you’ll know that brunch is my favourite dish of the day (perhaps you understood it when I published the list with my favourite brunches in Sibiu, my hometown in Romania). Call it pretentious, call it smug, but a meal that is literally designed around letting you sleep in, and letting you have champagne with your orange juice had my heart since 2011, which is the year I moved to Berlin and learned about the concept of brunch. So with all due respect to the simple yet yum Portuguese breakfasts I have these days, brunch to me has remained sacred and is something I do at least biweekly if not once a week. Hard as I tried to make a list of lesser known brunch places from all over Lisbon, by now all these places are swarmed by locals and tourists alike. Having said that, I´ve only ever reserved a table at Kefi (number 4 on the list) and managed to get into all the others on an impromptu basis. I tried recommending different dishes from each of these places, but truth be told I would most likely eat anything off their menus as they are all just finger licking good. So let´s look at the list and travel all throughout Lisbon.

Middle Eastern Vegetarian Dinner Food Lunch

The Most Delicious Creamy Butter Beans with Herb Oil

July 3, 2024

One more recipe from Ottolenghi – his butter beans with preserved lemon, chilli and herb oil, is an all time party favourite of mine so I just had to bring some minor adjustments to it and add it to my blog. You can find his original recipe in his book Shelf Love. And if you’re as big of a fan of his recipes as I am, you can find one more of my favourites which I published on the blog a few months ago. As to this one, just keep on reading for a fantastic dish that you can enjoy directly from the pan!

Middle Eastern Breakfast Food

Lahsa – The Delicious Breakfast From Yemen

June 19, 2024

This recipe is a delayed part two of what I wish to be a series of breakfasts from around the globe that have eggs as a base. You can find part one – Portuguese Peas and Eggs over here. Additionally find here my green version of shakshuka (which does not count for the series as I’m trying to brand the series as alternatives to the by now way too famous afro mentioned shakshuka). So we’re starting with lahsa – the Yemeni breakfast with eggs, tomatoes and cream cheese. You might have seen it on Instagram and TikTok already, personally I discovered it with Chef JJ over here. My recipe is pretty consistent with his, but since I couldn’t find it on any blog, here goes my blog written version of it.

Mediterranean Vegetarian Food

Exotic Fennel Salad with Burrata and Smoked Salmon

June 14, 2024

Lately I’ve been challenging myself more to cook with ingredients I am not that familiar with, and fennel is just one of those. While analysing this tendency of mine, I’ve reached the conclusion that it might be a consequence of growing up in post-communist Romania. Being deprived of much of the non-native to Romania produce that the West had access to, I’ve grown quite obsessed with them. It can get quite maddening when guests come over and instead of serving a regular dish that would work with everyone, I´ll run a risk and come up with something half crazy – salads in particular refuse to do the boring way, as demonstrated here. So I took inspiration for this particular salad from a fennel and tangerine salad online from this site, but I swapped it for oranges and added the salmon before coming up with this final version, which now that I’ve tried over and over again, I am happy to share with you too.

International Dinner Food

Fantastic Prawn Orzo with Marinated Feta

April 25, 2024

Let me start off by saying that this marvellously flavourful recipe is Ottolenghi´s, not mine. I honestly make so many of his recipes (like this rice puttanesca) that I should add a tag on the blog for them. I’ve been meaning to cook with orzo (or risen, as Italians would call this pasta type) ever since I’ve seen it used over and over again in Mihai Gateste´s recipes, but I failed to find it in supermarkets. Until now…

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