Diabetic Gourmet Magazine Give Vegetable Soup a Spanish Accent

As a city girl who went away to summer camp, I found campfires bewitching. On the weekly Friday night cookout, heating foods over the open fire made me feel like a young alchemist. Even the simple act of grilling a hot dog on a stick seemed magical, starting with the ritual of finding the right branch.

The perfect stick had to be green enough not to burn, strong enough to hold the frankfurter, but slim enough not to rip it apart. Debates over whether to spear the frank in the middle or push it lengthwise onto the branch were fruitless since the likelihood of a partially cooked hot dog falling into the fire was high either way.

As I grew older, my fascination with open-fire cooking continued. As a Girl Scout I earned a merit badge for outdoor skills that included campfire cookery. The mikeys my troop mates and I made - big baking potatoes wrapped in foil and buried to cook in the fire's white-hot ashes - were divinely creamy. But our most memorable success was gypsy stew: a combination of ground beef, canned tomato soup, frozen corn and green beans, boiled together in a pot over the fire.

I was recently reminded of the dish when doing research for a book featuring traditional Mediterranean food. Searching through old cookbooks, I found recipes for a Spanish dish called Olla Gitana, which translates roughly to gypsy stew.

Traditionally cooked in an iron or heavy earthenware pot called an olla, there are many versions of this dish. While many include some form of pork, others are meatless, like this one. They always includes a picada, however - a combination of bread and ground nuts, which Spanish cooks use to thicken and enrich their dishes.

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