Cooking Lessons from the Algarve

The kitchen was in an apartment in the centre of Faro, right in front of the fish market. A multicoloured terrazzo floor, a gas stove, and a back balcony where my grandmother had installed a red picket fence, fearful I'd tumble down the stairs once I found my feet.

That apartment was the centre of everything.

The pargo I never learned

If I close my eyes, I can still smell pargo no forno — whole red sea bream roasting in the oven with potatoes, onions, tomatoes, peppers, and generous amounts of olive oil. My grandmother made it effortlessly. It was one of those dishes that seemed to just happen: the fish went in, the kitchen filled with that unmistakable aroma, and an hour later the family gathered around the table.

It's one of my strongest memories, and one of my deepest regrets. I never got the recipe from her. I didn't discover my passion for cooking until I was 27 — years after the chance to stand beside her and ask, "How much olive oil? How long in the oven? How do you know when it's done?"

Now I reconstruct it from fragments of memory and instinct. Every version gets a little closer. None is quite right.

My mother carries the same passion. It's something she inherited and kept alive, and when I'm in the kitchen, I recognise more of her in what I do than I sometimes let on. Cooking is the thread that runs through three generations — and one of the things that will always connect us.

Simplicity as a principle

Portuguese cooking, especially Algarvian cooking, is radically simple. That pargo had maybe seven ingredients. Grilled fish has three: fish, olive oil, salt. Pastéis de nata are eggs, sugar, cream, and pastry.

The magic isn't in complexity — it's in quality and timing:

• Fresh fish from the market across the street, bought that morning
• Olive oil poured generously, never measured
• Tomatoes so ripe they split when you look at them
• Coriander picked minutes before serving

There's a lesson here that applies to work, too. The best processes aren't the most complex ones. They're the ones with the fewest steps executed at the right time with the right inputs.

The rhythm of that apartment

What I remember most isn't individual dishes. It's the rhythm. Morning café com leite brewed in the Bialetti, with paposecos from the bakery across the street — those small, crusty bread rolls I've been desperately trying to reproduce ever since. Mid-morning trip to the fish market. Long, slow lunch preparation. Afternoon rest with the shutters drawn against the Algarve heat. And sometimes, evening meals on the terrace on the top of the building, past the red fence and the adventures I found behind it — the inner courtyard of the apartment block was an entire world for a boy under six.

My grandmother ran that kitchen like a conductor — no project plan, no Gantt chart, just decades of practice and a clear understanding of what needed to happen when. I appreciated what she did, even then. I just never took an interest in doing it myself.

Bringing it to Switzerland

Now I cook Portuguese food in a Swiss kitchen, and it's not quite the same — the tomatoes aren't as sweet, the fish isn't from that morning, and there's no terrazzo floor under my feet. But the principles transfer perfectly:

1. Prep everything before you start — mise en place isn't optional
2. Use the best ingredients you can find — no technique compensates for bad inputs
3. Don't overcomplicate it — if a dish needs seven ingredients, don't use fifteen
4. Respect the timing — some things can't be rushed

The recipes section of this site is my attempt to document the dishes I grew up with — not as casual food blogs, but as proper spec sheets you can actually follow. Some are faithful recreations. Others, like that pargo no forno, are still a work in progress — pieced together from memory, hoping to one day get it right.