Monday, June 09, 2008

 

My Definitive Recipe for Arroz al Horno

Baked rice is probably my favorite Valencian recipe, if not my favorite Spanish dish, if not one of my all-time favorite meals. I prefer it to paella if for no other reason than that I don't really have the stove needed to cook a huge pan of paella, a dish that requires a constant heat to the whole pan—at least to do it well. Traditional paella is usually cooked over a wood fire for this reason. Arroz al Horno, as the name states, is cooked in the oven. An oven I got.

I have made this dish more than just about any other dish in my repertoire—perhaps once a week. I have developed my own tricks for it and my Arroz al Horno is pretty damn good, just ask anyone who has tried it, and all my friends have tried it. Mine recipe detours a bit from the traditional method on just a couple points. I love potatoes so I use more potatoes than you will find in traditional Arroz al Horno. I cover the entire baking dish with potatoes. I also brown them and they always come out great. The potatoes act like a heat shield—just like on the space shuttle. The spuds protect the other, more delicate ingredients. I don't use bacon. I love bacon but it's really not necessary in this dish. Other than that mine is your typical Spanish granmother's Arroz al Horno.


Arroz al Horno

2 cups rice (I use Fallera Valencian rice)
5 cups stock (chicken, beef, or pork will do)
3-4 Chorizo sausages
3-4 Morcilla sausages (I sometimes substitute blanquet sausages)
Pork ribs cut into cubes
5 plum tomatoes
1 ½ cup cooked garbanzo beans (I use a 400g. jar)
1 bulb of garlic
3 large potatoes
Saffron, salt

Begin by peeling the potatoes. Boil them until they are just a bit tender. Remove from the water.

Heat the stock to a boil. Add the pre-cooked garbanzos and when stock returns to a boil take it off the heat and add the saffron. You want everything to be hot that goes into the baking dish.

Cook the ribs in olive oil until they are browned but not over-cooked. Remove. Slice the chorizo into bite-size bits and cook them. Remove and put the meat in the baking dish.

Trim the tops from the plum tomatoes and slice them into thirds along their width. Season both sides of each slice with salt and a bit of oregano.

Sauté the rice in olive oil as you would with risotto. Stir constantly. When it has cooked a bit add it to the baking dish.

Pour the stock with the garbanzos into the baking dish. Stir the contents of the dish so everything is mixed well.

Add the tomato slices to the dish. Lay the morcilla sausages around the dish. Place the garlic bulb in the center.

Slice the potatoes at about ¼ inch thickness and lay them on top of everything else in the baking dish. Salt the top of the potatoes.

Place the dish into a pre-heated oven at about º190. When the tops of the potatoes begin to brown remove the dish, flip the potatoes, season the tops, and return the dish to the oven. When the tops of the other side of the potatoes are browned a bit, cover the dish with aluminum foil. Remove the dish when the stock has evaporated.

Labels: Food, Spain Food

10:58 AM

(3668165303449926604)

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

 

Zuppa di Cozze (mussel soup)

Mussels
2 peeled and seeded tomatoes, diced
1 onion chopped fine
2 cloves of crushed and chopped garlic
1 16 oz can of Italian tomatoes
1 cup of white wine
2 bay leaves
¼ cup olive oil
salt to taste

I learned this recipe from an Italian cookbook years and years ago and I haven't changed a thing, so why change the name? If I remember correctly, the book was The Food of Italy by Waverly Root, a famous food writer. I have used mussels from the Mediterranean, Maine, and Penne Cove in Washington state. Penne Cove mussels are la puta madre (a good thing, in this case) of mussels but this dish is splendid with any sort of mussel. I made this at some friends' house the other night as we were having a dinner party and this dish doesn't travel well, even though we only live two blocks from each other. This isn't so much a soup as just a bit of broth to accompany the mussels. I will sometimes put a big baked croûton in each serving dish as an added touch. Nothing could be simpler than Zuppa di Cozze and few dishes are better when you are preparing mussels, wherever they were fished.

The first step is to clean the mussels. You need to de-beard each mussel which just means ripping the fibers from the shell. After this I like to use a piece of steel wool to thoroughly scrub each shell. Let the mussels sit in a pan of fresh water after they have been cleaned.

In a large soup dish, sauté the onion and garlic in the olive oil. When this has cooked thoroughly, add the chopped tomato. Let this cook until most of the moisture has evaporated. When the mixture is beginning to stick to the pan, add the cup of wine to de-glaze the pan. Add the can of whole tomatoes (I crush them by hand in a bowl before I put them in), throw in the bay leaves, and season with salt to taste. Allow this to simmer for about 15 minutes.

Next, add the mussels and cover the pot. They only need a few minutes to cook and as they do the shells open. Discard any which do not open.

You can serve it at this point. I have also made another version in which I pull all of the mussels from the shells and discard the shells. Then I add some sort of cooked pasta to the pot to make a noodle soup. Here in Valencia I use fideos which are very fine, small noodles that they use to make a form of noodle paella called fideua.

I have been making this dish most of my life and it has always been a treat. My Spanish friends enjoyed it especially since I gave it an Italian name.

Labels: Food, Spain Food

1:20 PM

(1396161475131891535)

Friday, May 23, 2008

 

Roasted Chicken with Cabbage and Cherries

I remember having this dish—or a version of it—at one of my favorite Seattle restaurants called Marjorie—the restaurant, not the dish. I don't know what the dish was called or what I should name it but it was (is) wonderful. After I had it at Marjorie I returned a couple weeks later only to find that the dish was no longer on the menu. I asked the owner, Donna, about this and I can't remember what her answer was or if she answered. I have tried to cook the dish myself a couple of times but without a recipe I have met with something less than success...until yesterday.

Cherries are in season here in Valencia and I always looking for something to do with them. I thought I would have another go at this dish. I think I pulled it off rather well. Here it is.

One whole chicken cut into two halves
1 green cabbage chopped coarsely
¾ Kilo of pitted cherries (I know that it's a pain in the ass but it will give you a good excuse to buy a cherry pitter which can also be used with olives. I actually brought mine with me)
¼ cup toasted rye seeds
1 cup red wine vinegar
Olive oil
2 table spoons of flour
Some sort of mild white cheese

In a large pot with a lid throw together the cabbage, rye, cherries, and vinegar and simmer until the cabbage has wilted, add salt to taste. Heat oven to 190°c. In a large baking dish throw in the cabbage concoction and lay the two chicken halves on top (I use my big clay dish I use for arroz al horno). Flip the chicken when the tops have cooked and cook the other side. When you remove the dish from the oven there will be a lot of liquid in the pan. Pour the liquid into skillet and reduce it a bit. In another skillet heat a few spoons of oil and add sifted flour to it to make a roux. When the roux is ready pour in the liquid and stir well. To this add the cheese and stir it in well. The sauce should be thick enough to coat a spoon but it shouldn't be pasty. You can simply spoon a layer of the sauce on each plate and then add the cabbage concoction with the chicken on top.

This came out really well. I served this with roasted potatoes. Sorry I don't have a picture.

Labels: Food

11:52 AM

(8228221487388084922)

Saturday, May 10, 2008

 

Lasagna with Bolognese Sauce (sort of)

Lasagna is a fairly simple dish. I have only made it a handful of times in my life. This is due to the fact that it is time-consuming to prepare and it isn't exactly my favorite dish in the world. I am only making it today because I had lasagna the other day at someone´s house that they bought pre-made from the supermarket and I told them that American lasagna is a lot different and better. The lasagna here comes with béchamel sauce which I have never seen in American lasagna. I use a simple meat and tomato sauce, ricotta and mozzarella cheese, and a bit of Parmesan. The pasta noodles here are also different than those you get in the States. The ones here are smaller than a paperback book and thinner that the first 25 pages.

Here's what I use:

2 cans whole tomatoes
1 can tomato puree
1 can tomato paste (tomato paste here isn't as concentrated)
3 onions (chopped roughly)
4 cloves garlic (diced or crushed)
2 pounds ground beef and pork mix
1 glass red wine
Salt, pepper, 3 bay leaves, oregano, basil, red pepper flakes

Fresh mozzarella cheese
ricotta cheese (I use queso fresco here in Spain)
Parmesan

Lasagna noodles.

Sauté the onions in olive oil. Add garlic when onions have turned color. When garlic has cooked a bit I de-glaze the pan with the cup of red wine and add the canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, and paste.

Brown the meat separately I a pan with more cooked onion. Pour of the fat and pour in a bit more red wine. Add this to the tomato sauce after the sauce has cooked for at least an hour. Let this cook together for another 45 minutes or so.

Cook the noodles a few at a time in boiling water with olive oil and salt. Just allow them to loosen up a bit; they don´t need to cook too thoroughly. Place a layer of the noodles in a baking dish. Add a layer of meat sauce and a layer of cheese. Repeat this and top the pan with another layer of noodles. Bake this at °170c for about 1 hour. The cheese should be bubbling.

As I said, it´s an easy dish and every time that I have made it I was pleased with the result. I would rather just make something with another type of pasta, like zitti or rigatoni using the same ingredients and technique, more of less.

Labels: Food

1:29 PM

(4445615594398634141)

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

 

Kitchen Iconoclast

I get a kick out of how conservative Valencianos can be when it comes to the recipes of their emblematic dishes. Change a single ingredient of traditional paella Valenciana and you are going to get an earful of abuse and complaints. I suppose I see their point. These dishes have been around for centuries and have come to define the people in this corner of the Mediterranean. It took their ancestors a long time to develop the dishes Valencianos call their own so why would you want to tinker with them? If these recipes were good enough for grandma and grandpa, they should be good enough you—especially if you are a foreigner, and worse, a guiri from Ronald McDonald Land. For Valencianos, changing a single ingredient in their dishes is almost as serious an affront to their faith (cooking and eating) as drawing a cartoon of Mohammed is for Muslims.

However, as an American I have been influenced by a dozen different national cuisines so I tend to pick and choose and experiment using all of them. I have created a few signature dishes through trial and error, innovation, and often by pure accident. Sometimes I will see a dish and just be impressed with the way it looks. I will then set out to make a dish that looks similar to the one that I admired but without consulting the original recipe; I’ll just wing it. I will detour from a recipe of a familiar dish and use ingredients that I think would go well with the cooking technique involved. This was the case with my latest blasphemy against Valenciano cooking.

I started with the basis concept of the Valencian staple arroz al horno (baked rice), or arross al forn in Valenciano. I had just tasted a risotto someone made at a dinner party in which they used spinach. I thought spinach would go well with baked rice. I also though that since I was going to veer from the traditional recipe I may as well go all the way and really switch things around. Instead of using garbanzo beans I opted for garrafón which are large butter beans (lima beans?) common in Mediterranean cooking.


Spinach Baked Rice

2 cups rice
5 cups stock (chicken, meat, or vegetable)
2 cups cooked beans
1 cup peas
Spinach (either fresh or frozen)
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 tomatoes
3 potatoes
For seasoning I used saffron, cumin, and salt.
Some sort of meat is optional

Peel the potatoes and boil until they are cooked most of the way. Bring the stock to a boil. Sauté the onions and garlic in olive oil and when translucent, add the chopped spinach. Cook only a minute or so until the spinach wilts. Add the cup of peas and remove from fire when peas have heated up. Place this in your baking dish. Sauté the rice in a bit of olive oil for just a minute or two as with risotto. Add the rice to the baking dish and mix with the vegetables. I usually heat the pre-cooked beans in with the stock. Usually the beans that come in a can are a bit under-cooked so they need a few minutes to be more al dente. I added a saffron packet and ground cumin to the boiling stock before I pour it into the baking dish. If you are going to use any sort of meat in this dish it also needs to be cooked almost thoroughly before going into the oven. I used two different types of sausage common here (morcillaand blanquets that don’t need to be pre-cooked. Add the slices tomatoes to the dish along with the cooked meat. Cut the potatoes in ¼ inch slices and place them on the top of the entire dish. I like to salt the top of the potatoes. The potatoes sort of protect the rest of the dish from the heat. Bake at about °200 Celsius. After about 30 minutes in the oven you may want to place a sheet of aluminum foil over the dish to keep the potatoes from burning. It takes about an hour to cook but you can tell when it’s done because the stock has all been absorbed.

This was one of the better things that I have come up with in my cross-cultural cooking fusion. I think the dish would also go well with chicken as the meat or even some sort of fish. I think that you could also sprinkle parmesan cheese on top of it a few minutes before you pull it out of the oven. As I said, I mostly just borrow the cooking technique and the basic idea; from there it’s all fair game.

Labels: Food, Spain Food

11:24 AM

(1023829934331492955)

Sunday, November 25, 2007

 

Greek Lemon/Egg Chicken Soup

I don’t know what inspired me to make this classic. I was looking for a new Spanish dish to try. Instead I decided to whip up this soup that I haven’t made in ages. It is one of the easiest Greek dishes in my repertoire. The simplest Greek dish in my repertoire is a Greek peasant salad and that is still probably my all-time favorite dish.

Avgolemono Soup

1 whole chicken
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
3 bay leaves
3 eggs
1 Lemon (juice)
1 ½ cup rice
Salt & pepper

Place the whole chicken in a pot with water. Add the onion and garlic with the skin, bay leaves, and salt and pepper. Boil for about two hours. Drain the stock through a colander and pull the chicken off the bone and set aside. Return the stock to the burner and add the rice. Beat the whites of the eggs until they are a bit stiff and then add the yolks and continue beating. Add the lemon juice to the eggs. Add a little of the hot stock to the egg/juice mixture making sure not to let it curdle. Keep adding hot stock a little at a time until the eggs and stock are thoroughly mixed. Add this to the stock along with the boned chicken.

That’s all there is to this dish. It is really satisfying, especially on a cold day (We don’t really have cold days here so how about cool days?). It has a great sweet/salty flavor and the eggs act as a thickener like a cream-based soup. I ate two big bowls of it earlier today and I feel like the button on my jeans is going to blow out and kill some innocent bystander.

Labels: Food

9:16 AM

(3156997915094777340)

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

 

I miss you, old friend.

Spice is the Spice of Life
or
Lo Que Pica, Sana

Every once in a while I get an urge for Mexican food. I tell people here for a laugh that what I miss most about the United States is Mexican food. People here aren’t too partial to spicy food and I have learned to leave out the hot stuff when I cook, unless I am certain that I am the only one who is destined to eat the spicy stuff. The bag of wonderfully hot red pepper flakes I bought at an Indian grocery store here has gone almost unused.

I also miss my almost thrice-weekly visits to one of several Vietnamese restaurants in Seattle that specialize in phô, a beef broth with noodles, fresh basil, bean sprouts, and lots of hot sauce. I would put in so much sriracha sauce and hot pepper oil in my bowl that it looked like tomato soup by the time I was finished. When the soup came to the table I would add the shredded basil and a squeeze of lime. Then I would thoroughly mix the noodles in the broth. Only then would I add the prodigious amounts of hot sauce. The noodle-mixing part can be a bit messy and if you have already added the hot sauce you are more likely to stain your clothes with the bright red mixture (If I thought of it beforehand I would also wear a dark, phô-friendly shirt on Vietnamese restaurant days).

Then comes the hot sauce. First I would take the squirt bottle of sriracha sauce and paint a little scene on the surface of the bowl: perhaps a couple of palm trees and a bright sun, or maybe a sailing ship. After this I would add a couple spoonfuls of hot pepper oil for some real heat. By the time I had finished eating I would be crying like a 13 year old girl at the end of Titanic. Part of my phô-eating ritual is going into the restroom at the end of the meal to blow my nose.

I haven’t found any Vietnamese restaurants here for phô and the Mexican food I have found is nowhere near as hot as I require. I am afraid that I will start to lose my legendary tolerance for hot food. I will no longer be able to indulge my artistic whims with bottles of spray-on hot sauce. I will have to raise my hand along with the other chumps when the waiter asks who wants the mild sauce on our burritos. I don’t want to be a hot food weenie. I like being the Homer Simpson of scorching cuisine. I like to out-jalapeño pepper my Mexican friends. It has taken many years to turn my stomach and intestinal track into something resembling cast iron and I’m afraid it is going to turn back into regular human flesh if I don’t keep in practice of trying to destroy it once in a while with habañeros and Asian chiles.

I am going to make sopa de tortillas, this being the Mexican variety of tortillas made from corn. This would be a perfect time to spice up a dish to help me with my feared immune deficiency with spices except that my Spanish friends really like this dish so I have to tone it way the hell down as far as the hot seasoning goes.

Sopa de Tortillas

for the stock
Chicken carcasses (They sell these at the supermarkets here for 1€)
2-3 onions (with skin)
2 garlic gloves (with skin)
Carrots
Celery
5-6 whole black peppercorns
3 bay leaves
A few drops of olive oil

Just throw all of these in a large stew pot with water, simmer for 1-2 hours, and strain.

for the soup
Boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 red pepper
1 green pepper
1 onion
10-15 corn tortillas
1 can of sweet corn (optional)
Cilantro

Cut the chicken into small pieces. Chop the vegetables and sauté them with the chicken until browned. You can also grill the chicken first and then cut it up. Chop up the tortillas and add to the simmering stock. Liquefy the tortillas with a hand mixer. The mixture shouldn’t be too thick as it will get even thicker as it cooks. You don’t want to turn it into a paste. When the liquefied mixture is simmering you can add the chicken and vegetables and cilantro. Garnish the soup with diced avocado and a couple of corn tortilla chips.

Labels: Food

8:36 AM

(4425495273135783040)

Thursday, July 05, 2007

 

More Thoughts on the Tortilla de Patatas

I have my own way of making a tortilla de patatas that involves a lot less oil and is much easier than the traditional method. Most Spanish recipes call for cooking the peeled potatoes in a lot of olive oil without browning them. This takes a lot of oil and a lot of time. You almost have to deep-fry the potatoes. I cook my potatoes ahead of time, either in boiling water or in the oven if I am cooking something else that requires the oven. I then take the peeled, almost-completely-cooked potatoes and sauté them in just a bit of olive oil. They will have a consistency close to mashed potatoes. I add this mixture to the beaten eggs in a bowl to blend.

The trick (or one of them at least) is that you need the right size pan for the amount of eggs you are using. I use an eight inch, non-stick sauté pan that works for tortillas with 4-6 eggs. You need to cook the tortilla at a very low temperature so that the bottom doesn’t burn. I cover the pan which I think helps to firm up the top of the tortilla and makes flipping it a little easier. To flip it, cover the pan with a plate and hold the bottom of the plate and turn the skillet upside down. Slide the tortilla back into the pan with the uncooked side down. Reshape it with a spatula. I flip it three times so that it cooks twice on both sides. Whichever side looks the best I leave up for serving.

This simple Spanish dish can be found almost everywhere. It is a popular item on sandwiches. It also fairly screams out for improvisation—something that is frowned upon in most Spanish cooking. The Spanish are never more traditional than they are when it comes to food. As much as I love a traditional tortilla de patatas, I would love to see a clever innovation to this dish. I think the best way to achieve that might be an accompanying dish.

I prefer to eat this dish after it has cooled so this may dictate what would make a good side dish.

Labels: Food

8:44 AM

(8113458682369904572)

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

 

Gazpacho

I made gazpacho for the first time in my life yesterday. Now that I live in Spain and I made it once I guess you could say that I’m kind of an expert on the subject of this cold, tomato soup. I have heard it described as a liquid salad which sounds more accurate than calling it soup. What I can say with authority is that it’s really good and it’s almost impossible to screw up. What more do you want out of a menu item?

Since I have adopted a Castillian accent to my Spanish I now pronounce this simple yet wonderful dish gath pacho. I know, don’t you just want to punch me right in the face? Of course, that would be a little difficult for you unless you finally decide to get your ass over here for a visit, so until you do I will keep annoying the living shit out of you. Did you know that the French for gazpacho is le gazpacho? Wow, I could almost feel the air from your punch against my nose. Nice try.

It has been hot here lately with temperatures in the upper 30’s (I knew the metric system would piss you off, too. Keep swinging like that and you’re going to tire yourself out before the end of this essay). It’s hot but not Florida hot. It hasn’t been humid at all but 39 degrees is definitely hot enough to push you towards lighter, cooler foods. Not me, of course, I’m too much of a glutton to ever actually crave lighter foods. I once ate an entire bucket of fried chicken while in a Turkish bath. I just figured that since I was in Spain and it is summer I may as well make a batch of gath pacho.

All of the produce markets are up to their eyebrows in good tomatoes right now so I got four big, juicy rambo tomatoes. I don’t know why they call them rambo but I suspect it is because they like Sylvester Stallone. You need a cucumber and here they come in little pint-size versions that are about half the size of an American cucumber. The recipe calls for a bit of bread so I bought some of this five seed whole wheat stuff they sell at the supermarket. I rarely eat the bakery baguette variety of bread. It can be interesting when it is fresh from the oven but decidedly uninteresting shortly after this initial freshness has passed. This recipe calls for the bread to be soaked in water which would leave the baguette bread completely lifeless so I opted for the five seed hippy bread.

Gazpacho

- 4 tomatoes (peeled and chopped)
- 1 onion (chopped)
- 1 cucumber (peeled and chopped)
- 1 garlic clove (diced)
- 1 red pepper (seeded and chopped)
- Bread (I used three slices of the 5 seed stuff. Soak it in water briefly and then squeeze out the water)

I had a zucchini lying around (or aubergines as the Brits call them. That’s a good punch you’re packing there—for a little girl!) so I peeled it and cooked it in boiling water for a few minutes.

Salt, pepper, a dash of cumin, a tablespoon or two of olive oil, and a few dashes of red wine vinegar (No, not balsamic).

I just threw all of this together in a pot with a bit of water and then liquefied it with my 750cc, 105 horsepower hand mixer. No kidding, this thing is powerful. Most recipes call for you to strain the soup in a food mill after mixing but mine was completely liquefied. I chilled all of the ingredients before so it was ready to eat as soon as I finished mixing.

I prefer to drink gazpacho out of a glass instead of treating it like a soup and trying to use a spoon. So you kids out there fighting over whether gazpacho is a beverage or a soup just break it up. It’s both.

There are hundreds of variations on this dish but I think this is one of the more traditional recipes.

Labels: Food, Spain Food

8:44 AM

(8665345920003107059)

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

 

By the time you read this, I may already be dead


No, I’m not planning on committing suicide; at least not in any kind of direct, uncowardly (according to MS Word this isn’t even a word), or manly fashion. I’m just thinking that with the prodigious amount of pork products I have been ingesting since I arrived here in Valencia, combined with the added stress of tonight’s huge-alacious (Yes, Spell-check, I know that isn’t a fucking word) football match against Chelsea in the quarters of the Champions League, I may just keel over right in the Plaza del Valencia CF where I plan on watching the match. I’m going to take another long bike ride in the morning to clear out the old system, but I’m just playing catch-up in the race against arterial plaque. I’m eating so much pig that when I burp it sounds just a little bit like an oink.

Why are we talking about my personal health? I don’t even care about my personal health, especially now during the quarter finals with Valencia in the heat of it. Do you have any idea of just what is at stake here? Do you read the newspapers? Well how about the half a dozen daily football rags that litter the tops of every self-respecting bar in Spain during the temporada? Do you remember when the Titanic sank? That wasn’t shit compared to this, OK? The Titanic was just a bunch of rich jerks and illegal immigrants who couldn’t swim while this is Valencia CF up against Chelsea to see who advances in Europe’s football league. Understand? Great, I’m glad we could put things into perspective for you.

It’s kind of like the Battle of Thermopylae in which a tiny Greek army (Valencia CF) goes up against the countless legions of Persian mercenaries (Chelsea). Valencia is mostly made up of Spanish players—with a few exceptions—while Chelsea is led by the goal-scoring machine, Didier Drogba, from the Ivory Coast and the German midfielder, Michael Ballack. But I don’t like this analogy because the Greeks eventually got stomped in that one. Instead of rewriting the Wikipedia entry so that Valencia CF defeats Xerxes’ horde at Thermopylae I’ll abandon the historical analogies. Besides, everyone knows that the ancient Greek historians were even less accurate than Wikipedia.

I have to get out of the house and do something to take my mind off of the game tonight.

Tortilla de Calabacín

A good way to take your mind off an upcoming football match is in the kitchen. As much as I love tortillas de patatas I thought that I’d expand my horizons with another flavor of this Spanish staple.

6 eggs (beaten)
1 Zucchini
1 Onion
Olive oil
Sal and Pepper

Slice the zucchini as thinly as possible. I had to put a good edge on my cleaver to accomplish this. Dice the onion finely. Sauté the onion in a lot more olive oil than you need because when the onion becomes translucent you will add the zucchini. Mix to coat the zucchini with the oil. Cover the dish and let it cook without browning the vegetables. When they are well cooked, add the beaten egg and stir gently to mix the egg and vegetables. Cover and cook on low heat. Use a spatula to check the consistency of the bottom and when it is fairly solid, cover the pan with a plate and flip it on to the plate and then return the uncooked side of the tortilla to the pan and finish cooking.

Labels: Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

9:05 AM

(6990173720994998115)

Monday, April 02, 2007

 

Another Spanish specialty

Almost every meal I make happens spontaneously, kind of like a car accident but usually a lot harder to clean up after. I rarely say to myself, “I think I’ll make chicken cacciatore tonight,” and then go out and make it happen. I usually start out by thinking to myself, “I can probably get enough nutrients from the beer I drink and the free peanuts that come with it and skip cooking,” before I devolve into whatever meal planning I eventually stumble into at some point in the evening. This could mean some dried figs and a glass of milk or a full-blown cooking orgy—depending on a host of variable factors that even I don’t fully understand.

This meal began with a cup of coffee. I went to my usual hangout for a cup of café Americano. I like to sit outside and read their copies of the fine Spanish magazine called Magazine. I read this week’s edition from cover to cover, finished my coffee, and headed home. I stopped short after a few steps after remembering that my favorite butcher shop, located right next door to the café, is open on Saturday evenings. I needed something for Sunday’s meal. I did an about-face and walked into the shop.

My butcher was taking care of a woman customer who was buying a truly prodigious amount of meat—my kind of gal. My butcher loves to talk and he was going a-mile-a-minute when I walked in and closed the door behind me. The woman was from Ecuador and he told her that his wife was from Colombia. They went back and forth over her meat order as he talked about his visit to Colombia and what shitty drivers they are there and how the cocaine dealers run the country and how the food is really good but they don’t have very good pork there like in Spain.. I don’t think that he even came up for air as he kept up an admirable stream-of-consciousness monologue about meat and poultry, the political situation in Colombia, all the while pumping her full of questions about her native land.

She ordered a half of a gallina and I told him that I’d like the other half in an effort to spare him the trouble of putting away the other half, but he was too involved in the story he was telling to pay me any mind. The woman looked at me sympathetically because it was obvious that he wasn’t listening. He was telling her about the time he was in her country. He said that he was in some city named after a saint but he couldn’t remember which saint. He began to rattle off a list of names in an effort to jog his memory of the patron of the Ecuadorian city he had visited, “Antonio? Juan? Jose? Jaime? Cristobal? No, era Cristobal.” She looked at me and I at her. I think we both realized that this guy was slightly nuts. I gave her a frightened face and she almost cracked up laughing.

I always welcome the wait when I am in his shop and I will often let someone go ahead of me so that I have more time to decide. I also learn from the way other people order. The Ecuadorian woman finished her order and I was ready. I got some dried sausages and the other half of the monster chicken that she had ordered in front of me. I’d worry about what I would make with it later.

That’s usually the way it works here. You buy whatever looks good that day in the market and figure out how to cook it when you get home. Today I had a gallina, or hen, or chicken on steroids. I wasn’t really sure what it was but it looked good and my butcher assured me that it was great in stews and soups. I trusted him as I always do.

When I got home I came across a recipe for Pollo en Pepitoria at www.notesfrompain.com. I couldn’t very well copy their recipe verbatim without feeling like a plagiarist so I looked up about ten variations of this traditional Catalan dish and morphed them all into the one I eventually used.

To accompany this dish I made lentils which are a staple of my diet. I pre-soaked the lentils earlier in the day in cold water. I diced an onion, some garlic, green pepper, and some long red pepper thing in olive oil. After cooking them for a few minutes I added the lentils along with some chicken stock. I seasoned the dish with salt, pepper, cumin, and a bit of oregano. They were ready in a few minutes and turned out very well. I can cook beans in my sleep as I’ve done it for so long.

I also wanted rice to go with this dish and I bought some sort of brown variety at the local market. I have pretty much lived on rice for most of my life but I have never, not once, cooked it myself. I have made risotto and other types of dishes that require rice, but I have never just cooked a pot of plain rice. I have relied on a rice cooker as does every self-respecting Asian. I have had nothing but perfect rice ever since my family bought its first rice cooker when we lived in Hawaii when I was 15. Now I was forced to cook rice without a rice cooker. I’d rather walk a tightrope without a net.

I actually had to Google how to cook rice. I was fairly overwhelmed by all of the variations and after reading through about ten recipes I became extremely intimidated. “It’s fucking rice,” I thought to myself, “How hard can it be?” I’m so used to dumping rice into a rice cooker, adding double the amount of water, pressing a button, and having perfect rice a few minutes later. Note to self: find a fucking rice cooker here in Spain.

The rice turned out OK. I’ve definitely had better—like every other time that I have made rice using a rice cooker. It wasn’t anything a lot of butter couldn’t fix. Now all that I had to do was to make the main dish.

Pollo en Pepitoria

Chicken cut into pieces
1 onion finely chopped
2 garlic cloves finely chopped
Flour
Olive oil
12 toasted almonds (ground)
2 hard boiled eggs
1 cup white wine
1 cup chicken stock (or water)
3 Bay leaves
Salt + Pepper
Saffron pinch

Wash the chicken pieces, allow to dry, season with salt and pepper, and then cover with flour. Heat about ¼ cup of olive oil in a deep skillet and when it begins to smoke, brown the chicken pieces a few at a time. Remove the chicken when browned. Pour off some of the oil and sauté the onion, and garlic in the same pan. Add white wine, stock, bay leaves, and saffron. When the pan comes to a boil, add the chicken pieces. Allow this to simmer at low temperature until the chicken is tender. Crumple the hard-boiled egg yokes into the pan along with the ground almonds and saffron. Just before serving add the chopped hard-boiled egg whites to the pan.

This is a pretty simple recipe; it just has a few steps to it. When I make this again I will probably skip the boiled eggs and just add a couple of beaten egg yolks to the sauce along with the almonds.

Labels: Food, Valencia Spain

10:18 AM

(7538696884070135276)

Saturday, January 27, 2007

 

Baked Rice Valenciano
Or
Expat Dies in Grease Fire



This is called Arroz al horno in Spanish and Arros al forn in Valencià (The left leaning accent is correct in the language of Valencia, or Valencià as they call it.). I have been warned that this dish, although rather simple, can be difficult to pull off. I am writing this in real-time so we’ll see how I do.

4 cups rice
8 cups chicken stock
1 potato
2 cloves of garlic
1 bulb of garlic
3 roma tomatoes
Morcilla sausage
A bit of bacon or pancetta
1 ½ cups of cooked garbanzo beans
Saffron
Salt
Olive oil

I cheated by cooking some potatoes in the pressure cooker. I will probably make a tortilla in the next couple of days and I like to use pre-cooked spuds so it takes less time and uses less oil. Yes, I try to cut down on oil once in a while.

Cut the potato in slices and sauté in olive oil with the pancetta and the sausage. Sauté the garlic bulb briefly in the pan. Remove all these ingredients and set aside.

Shit! I burned myself with a grease spatter. I need a time-out to go get a little brandy for the pain.

Sauté the chopped garlic gloves in the same oil and put the rice in the pan and coat with oil.

My brother is calling my on the Skype. I pour myself another brandy and turn off all of the burners. We do a three-way conference call with one of my brother’s old army buddies who visited me in Seattle last year. We trade stories unfit even for the internet. My apartment reeks of pork products. I think I am assimilating.

In a large baking dish (Here they use a large, round clay dish) place all of the ingredients. The tomatoes should be cut in half and spaced around the pan. The stock should be hot when you mix it. Place the garlic bulb in the middle and bake in a pre-heated oven at 350° for about 20 minutes.

While this is in the oven I clean the kitchen which has been thoroughly destroyed by the initial cooking procedures. The place still reeks of pork so I open the balcony door even though it is about 5° C outside. I also came up short in the stock to rice ratio and now I have to add stock to the baking rice dish. They told me this was going to be tricky. I pour myself a glass of wine as a precaution against a possible failure.

The cooking instructions I found were rather vague. My initial motivation for attempting to prepare this dish came from a Valenciano cookbook in a language I don’t speak. I love the pictures. The Spanish recipe I found later was almost as imprecise. Most of the time when I made rice back in the States I used a rice cooker like any self-respecting Asian person would do, but here they insist on the old-school method. I just hate the thought of all of that wonderful sausage going to waste because I fucked up the liquid-to-rice ratio.

No more brandy. The good news is that I have enough cheap Spanish wine on hand to float a small boat. I bought a bottle of wine at the store today that cost about 3€ and I felt like I was being extravagant. I think that it is the height of gauche when James Bond or some other douche bag makes a big show of ordering an expensive bottle of wine. What nouveau riche trash! As if the height of sophistication is fetishistic wine knowledge. Just drink your swill and shut your cake hole.


So the baked rice didn’t come out to great. I should have lined the top of the dish with the potatoes to shield the other ingredients from the heat. I also had the over up too high but that I blame on the Celsius conversion and the fact that the oven temperature setting isn’t very precise. It wasn’t a total failure and I was able to eat it. It usually takes a few tries to nail down a new recipe. I’ll have to find a restaurant that features this dish to get more of an idea of how it is supposed to turn out.

Labels: Food, Valencia Spain

7:43 AM

(2012892762653104375)

Thursday, January 04, 2007

 

The Final Product


What’s better than drinking red wine, eating fantastic olives, and cooking great food? While I’m waiting for you to answer I’ll have another sip of wine and another of these wonderful cracked olives. I have cooked a lot of dishes with calamari and there is a simple rule: either cook it fast (like deep frying), or cook it slow (like simmering it for 30 minutes), otherwise it turns to rubber. I am doing the slow cooking method tonight with a saffron calamari risotto.

I got the idea for this from my fishmonger (Yeah, I have a fish monger!) at the Mercado de Algirós today when I bought my squid. It wasn’t too busy there today and the woman really took a lot of time to explain to me the various types of squid available to us lucky Valencianos. She talked me into buying the less expensive calamari since I was planning on using it in a sauce. She said that this squid goes great in a sauce with tomatoes and rice. The half kilo of squid came to 4 €; that’s a lot of calamari.

I was about to write down the recipe for this dish until I realized that being the iconoclastic chef that I am, this is probably not even risotto. I’m sure that I am offending Italian as well as Spanish culture with the dish I concocted tonight, but damn, it is good.

P.S. Next to my wine glass you can see the book I am reading, the poems of the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. More on him later but I’ll leave you with a little bit of one of his works called, Flies Enter a Closed Mouth.

En qué medita el tortuga?
Dónde se retira la sombra?
Qué canto repite la lluvia?
Dónde van a morir los pájaros?
Y por qué son verdes las hojas?

...

Es tan poco lo que sabemos
Y tanto lo que presumimos
Y tan lentamente aprendemos,
que preguntamos, y morimos.

What does the tortoise think?
Where do shadows go?
What song does the rain have in its head?
Where do birds go to die?
And why are leaves green?

We know so little
And presume so much
And learn so slowly
And we ask, and we die.
(translated by me)

Labels: Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

7:37 PM

(6315371848231317190)

 

The Spanish Table


I have learned that whenever I use my oven I need to bake as many potatoes as can fit around whatever else I am cooking in there. I use the baked potatoes for my cheating version of a Spanish potato tortilla. This dish usually calls for you to sauté the thinly sliced potatoes in olive oil until they are completely cooked which takes about 40 minutes and requires about a cup of olive oil. Using my pre-baked potatoes I can slice them thinly and sauté them for just a few minutes before I add the eggs. I also use cheese in my tortillas which isn’t very Spanish. They make a tortilla francesa with cheese but that is something separate. I’m not too big on tradition and I prefer my tortilla de patata with cheese.

This dish is still tricky for me to cook although every tortilla I have made so far in Spain has been respectable. The trick is turning this rather unwieldy dish over so that the other side cooks. I cook it on one side with the pan tightly covered so the top of the tortilla solidifies. I think that using cheese makes it even more liquid on the top side. Flipping it before the bottom side burns is difficult because the top part can be very runny. You are also not supposed to brown the potatoes but I prefer them lightly browned so that’s how I make it. I eat the tortilla as a bocadito between two slices of fresh aldeano or peasant bread and lathered with a little of my Mediterranean oil.

I made a trip over to the Mercado de Algirós to buy olives. That’s all I was planning to buy but I couldn’t help picking up a few dried sardines. The guy at the stall told me how to prepare them and warned me that they are fairly salty, which means that they are loaded with salt. I also bought some calamari and the woman gave me a refresher course on how to clean them. I had done this before often enough when I lived in Greece but that was a long time ago. Since then, when I buy fresh squid I get it cleaned for me.

I bought a half kilo of partidas, or cracked olives (xafés in Valenciano). These are my favorite olives that I have found here in Valencia. I just found that my huge new olive container isn’t quite big enough for my entire assortment. I’ll have to eat them faster. Whatever the hell I decide to do with the squid, the olives will be a good accompaniment. That’s true with olives regarding almost all of the food here in the Mediterranean basin.

I like the idea of eating sardines almost as much as I like eating them. They remind me of when I lived on the Mediterranean before. I will probably just filet them and marinate them in olive oil. Just thinking about this food makes me want to go for a bike ride to clean out my arteries before I clog them up again.

Labels: Food, Valencia Spain

1:30 PM

(689399551595108673)

Friday, December 29, 2006

 

Making the Rounds

A: Grocery Shopping

After less than two months I feel that I am really starting to settle in to life in Spain. Local politics, football, and entertainment are all becoming less mysterious. I eat Spanish food. I drink Spanish wine, and in moderation, oddly enough—it’s the way here. I shop like they do: almost every day and in several different stores. Daily shopping is a ritual in Spain, as it is in many European countries. The architecture has been tailored to cater to the needs of the little two-wheeled shopping baskets that the Spanish drag around on their daily pilgrimage. Places that are still waiting for wheelchair access already have the steeper little ramps that accommodate these carts.


For the odds and ends you go to the chain grocery stores, which in my case is the Mercadona across the street from my building, and when I say “across the street” I mean that it is about twenty steps away (see the photo on left). There is another large, chain grocery store on the next block. I haven’t been in that one yet because it is too far away. OK, I’ll get off my lazy ass and go check it out right now.

It’s called Caprabo and I don’t like it very much and not just because there is an easy anagram in there for crap. It is in the middle of the next block which is just too far for me, and get this, you can’t enter through the Pol y Peyrolón side, which is my street. You have to walk around the block to the Avenida Cardenal Benlloch to enter. At my Mercadona you can enter through both sides. What the hell? Am I supposed to go on some kind of walk-about every time I need a bottle of wine?

What cracks me up about these chain outlets is that they all have garage parking for their customers. I don’t see how anyone in Valencia, and certainly not in my neighborhood, could live more than about three blocks away from the store that they would ever need to drive.

My Mercadona has a butcher and fresh seafood counter. There is also a lot of prepackaged meat and seafood. I like that you can buy a whole rabbit or a pig’s head. I have spent most of my adult life living near the sea; I have spent a lot of time swimming, snorkeling, and scuba diving; yet there are a lot of terrifying creatures for sale in the seafood markets of Valencia that quite possibly could have changed my whole opinion about the deep. They have shrimp here as big as Jack Russell terriers and would scare the living shit out of me if I ever were to come face-to-face with one underwater (Do shrimp have faces?).

Because Spanish people like to eat Spanish food you can get prepared items like tortillas (the Spanish variety made with eggs) and a lot of the other items that you will see at a typical tapas bar. I like the little croquetas that you deep fry. These are little breaded balls of pork, chicken, or cheese. They have frozen packets of vegetables for making paella. They have prepackaged fresh vegetable medleys for making soups. All of the fruits and vegetables here are packaged and priced, not bulk like in American markets. I don’t buy fruits and vegetables here, however.

The Mercadona (or at whatever chain store where you choose to shop) is a good place to buy rice, oil, dried beans, spices, beer, wine, detergent, paper products, milk, and cheese. These places have the lowest prices on all of these items.


For vegetables and fruit you go to a verduraría, or green grocer. For bread there are several bakeries in my neighborhood. I tend to frequent the places where people made an effort to be nice to me—and this is really most places. I am slowly making my way through all of the different bread choices at my bakery. I buy pastries there just to be polite.

There are several meat markets in my neighborhood. I bought a beautiful whole chicken that I baked last night. From the looks of its wonderful yellow skin, I would bet that my chicken was walking around as free as a bird no later than yesterday.

For olives I have to walk a few blocks over to the Mercat d’Algirós; you can’t get good olives at the grocery store. I am partial to the cracked olives and the big gordales variety. It’s well worth the short walk and I love any excuse to go to the market located on the little Plaza San Felipe Neri. I will stop for a coffee at the sunny little café across the street before I wade into the crowded market. The woman at the olive stall will let me sample as many olives as I want—more than I want usually. I always buy quite a lot of olives and it never seems to be enough. I have to go to the Mercat d’Algirós again this morning.

I think that I have mentioned this place before but I have another stop on my rounds for provisions. There is a Pakistani grocery store that I think is networked into the whole Pakistani mafia here. The Pakistanis seem to have cornered the internet/phone service kiosks that are in every neighborhood, much like the Chinese have a monopoly on those crazy mini Wal-Mart stores. I go to the Pakistani grocery for dried beans and exotic spices. I bought some hot chili powder and after I opened it the first time it made the entire apartment smell like a spicy curry dish. I had to buy an airtight plastic container for the remainder.

I guess that it goes without saying that I have been cooking a lot. I won’t bore you with listing everything I have cooked this week but I’ll describe my breakfast this morning. I made a tortilla yesterday which is the Spanish variety made with potatoes and eggs. I made a sandwich (bocadito) of this on fresh French bread and drizzled with my infused oil. I will leave you with this easy recipe.


Mediterranean Oil

2 cups olive oil (mine tastes really green and almost sweet)
2 tbl sp minced garlic
2 tbl sp grated parmesan cheese
¼ tsp red pepper flakes
Pinch of oregano
Salt and pepper
A couple of sprigs of fresh rosemary (It grows everywhere here, just like in Seattle.)

Labels: Food, Valencia Spain

11:30 AM

(5375272592505225362)

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

 

Els Nostres Menjars (continued)

When Valencianos speak about “their” food, they are speaking in a very literal sense. Everything (almost everything) they eat they either farm,, fish, raise, hunt, or forage themselves. Of course, this is easier to do when you live in one of the most bountiful regions in the world. It would be difficult for me to imagine any other area that has such a wide variety of food coupled with an excellent climate.

Valencia is known as the breadbasket of Spain. Just take a walk through one of the markets in town and this will be pretty obvious. There is a smaller version of the Mercado Central near where I live in the tiny Plaza San Felipe Neri called Mercat Alguiros. I am gradually working up the nerve to shop here more often. Not only am I battling a bit of a language barrier but also a lot of little old Spanish ladies who don’t have time for some thumb-sucking, bed-wetting American who can’t decide on what kind of olives he wants. My favorite strategy is to wait in line and listen to the person in front of me. When my time comes I just parrot what they ordered. The first time I did this I ended up buying a kilo of pork—a lot for one person and probably more than my heart can handle since I don’t have a bicycle right now to help keep all the valves open and running.

And speaking of breadbaskets, you are rarely of of sight of bakeries in Valencia. My favorite bread is a loaf called and aldeano (village) that I buy from the bakery below my apartment. If that place is closed (and it almost always is closed) I walk over to the corner and get a regular loaf (barra). I found a place in the neighborhood that is open on Sundays so now my biggest challenge is not eating bread. This is difficult to do when you are also ingesting upwards of two quarts of olive oil every day.

In other parts of Spain I remember the bread being almost universally bad; this was also the case in Greece. Bread in these places was hit or miss with a lot of misses. Getting bad bread in Valencia is even rarer than drinking a bad glass of wine. I have yet to complain about the wine and I almost always praise the bread.

I remember back in leaner times when I would go without all but the most basic of spices. With a medicine-size bottle of cumin costing almost five dollars, sometimes the chili would have to be a little bland. Even though I arrived here on a very strict budget, my kitchen is already up-and-running with every spice that I can think of, and many more I didn’t even know existed until I learned their names in Spanish. All of those same small bottles now cost less than one dollar each.

In all of the places that sell kitchen supplies there are condiment containers with the names written on them. I bought a thing for azúcar or a sugar bowl. Like most of the others for sale, it is a modest little affair that holds about a half a cup. I guess you don’t need a lot of sugar close at hand when you drink such tiny little cups of coffee. Salt is a completely different story. Most of the countertop containers for keeping salt handy when you cook hold about two cups of this condiment, called the flavor of flavors over here. Forget about salt shakers, they are too wimpy for kitchen use.

At the little Indian bodega in my neighborhood I can buy a huge thing of chili powder for 1€, whole coriander seeds, turmeric, and curry powder. I buy stuff here that I may never use just because I can and it makes me feel more like a well-rounded cook for doing it.

In his book Dictionnaire amoureux de la cuisine, Alain Ducasse calls olive oil the most beautiful of his culinary tools. Olive oils are like wines in their complexity and how they give testament to the soil and the regions that produce them. Once again, this kitchen condiment is like a Spanish birthright. It is inexpensive and plentiful. I bought a one liter bottle of extra virgin olive oil for 2.65€. I don’t know whether olive oil is inexpensive in Spain because they use so much of it or they use so much of it because it is inexpensive, but they use a lot of it. You will be hard-pressed to find a dish in which it isn’t used with extreme liberty. In even the most prosaic circumstances, the Spanish will use to verb Untar (to anoint) when describing how they use this essential ingredient.

Labels: Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

3:07 PM

(6484574165230276327)

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

 

Els Nostres Menjars, Our Cuisine



As if I’m not already up to my eyelids (Párpados) in one language, I just got a couple of beautiful books in Valenciano shoved in front of me. Els Nostres Menjares (our cuisine), by Martí Domínguez is one of the most definitive books on the cooking of this region of Spain. I have touched briefly on the subject of Valenciano, the language spoken here in the state of Valencia, and I’m sure this will be a recurring theme as I learn more about the dialect. It is impossible to ignore because most public signs are posted in Valenciano. I am still not able to differentiate between Valenciano and Catalán. One thing at a time, or at least no more than two things at a time.

I have also mentioned that everyone here speaks Spanish as well as Valenciano. Spanish is taught in schools along with the local dialect. Spaniards are rather proud of the fact that their inhabitants speak languages other than Spanish. In fact, Spanish here is almost always referred to as Castellano, or Castilian, to differentiate it from Catalán, Valenciano, Gallegos, and Euskadi (the Basque language).

Allow me to translate from the Valenciano introduction to the cookbook of Martí Domínguez. “Cooking is one of the most important physiological functions of man, without nourishment, life cannot continue, and the way in which he does it gives testimony to the individual and to the collective society. It is an important ethnographic standard of each individual community.”

I would say that language is an equally important sociological function of man and as I learn more about Valenciano I will better understand this region. This cookbook is a great anthropological study of the region, not only for the recipes, but also for the full-page color photographs that chronicle the bounty of Valencian food and the traditional cookware used to prepare it.

I brought home a new paella pan that I picked up at one of the stalls outside of the central market. I had used the same kind of pan at my other apartment. The pans are inexpensive and well constructed. They are made of non-stick steel and seem to be made to last forever. I was told that these pans are “modern,” not exactly a bad word but not completely trustworthy either. Traditional Valencianos prefer to use cast iron paelleras which tend to burn the rice on the bottom giving the dish a distinctive flavor.

Another common item in Valencian cooking is the use of earthenware ceramic dishes for baking. These are also on sale at every market and Chinese variety store. In Els Nostres Menjares, just about every dish is displayed in either a cast iron paellera or an earthenware dish. How the food is cooked is as important as the dishes being served and the language used to describe it.

But to call cooking and language merely functions of life does them an injustice; there are more like art forms. Cooking is a sort of combined art and to the people of Valencia, as with almost all Spaniards, the pig is the summa artis, the highest art of flavors. If the Eskimos have 2,000 words for “snow,” then Spaniards have at least that many ways to make a pig fit for consumption. The most creative way of dealing with pork, which combines an endless combination of spices, along with a mixture of the noblest and most modest sections of the animal, is found in sausage, or el embutido.

When I asked my barber, Carlos, why you don’t see a lot of hams hanging in cafes like you do in other parts of Spain, he said it was because they were too smart. He considered the Spanish hams to be an extravagance, and that it was more frugal to stick with only those parts of the animal that can be eaten. Leave the hooves and bones at the butcher shop. It’s not that jamon ibérico cannot be found here, but you see a lot more sausages, such as morcillas (blood sausage), loganiza, and chorizo. Needless to say, there isn’t much going to waste when it comes to a Spanish pig.

When I got to the library this morning the place was almost completely full. I needed a table next to a power outlet and I finally found a place at a table surrounded on three sides by cookbooks. This was quite a coincidence seeing that I had begun this essay earlier today at home. One of the treasures that I came across was A Cooking Lover’s Dictionary by Alain Ducasse translated into Spanish from the French Dictionnaire amoureux de la cuisine. I don’t know if this is available in English but it is a great read and a fine way to spend a good part of an afternoon, especially when you are planning a big meal in the evening featuring a host of Mediterranean staples.

I just noticed that there is even a little sign above this area of the library that says in Valenciano, El Racó de la Cuina. I didn’t even have to use my new Valenciano-Castilian dictionary to tell me that means “The Kitchen Corner,” although in these languages the word for kitchen is also the word for the art of preparing food.

Labels: Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

1:24 PM

(1512810325570281957)

Friday, December 01, 2006

 

Food and Travel for Everyone

According to recent figures, 20% of the Spanish population lies below the poverty level. This is about the same figure as the United States. Spain has come a long way in its effort to eliminate poverty and provide housing for their citizens while the United States is going in the opposite direction.

I mentioned before a cooking show that I have seen several times in which the host chef teaches people how to cook and entire meal and then we watch as they take this knowledge home with them to entertain their friends. We follow as the guests shop for the ingredients either in a big grocery store or their favorite street market. They bring everything they need home to their kitchens and prepare the meal.

I have seen my share of cooking programs in the States and they are almost always some version of yuppie culinary heaven. Martha Stewart provides more of a fantasy than an instructional guide. I think that most American cooking shows are more sophisticated than their Spanish counterparts, but the Spanish programs seem more geared to everyday life, meals that people would actually cook every day of the week.

My favorite part is when the guests begin cooking in their own kitchens. Every kitchen I have seen so far is an extremely modest affair—most aren’t even as nice as where I now live now. In Spain, almost everyone lives in an apartment. In Valencia I have yet to see a private home. I’m sure that there are lots of fantastic apartments in town, but most people live at pretty much the same level.

When the meal is prepared the guests and their guests sit down in their modest dining rooms to eat. This is how most Spanish live, in small apartments with small kitchens and dining room tables that seat four people. I can’t imagine many people could think that the way they live is inadequate from seeing these modest Spanish homes. This program isn’t about turning food into a symbol of status; it is about sharing with friends. During one segment I noticed the clock on the dining room wall. They were eating at the very Spanish hour of 12:30 at night.

As I write this a travel show came on the TV. A Spanish guy who speaks almost no English travels to London. Like other Europeans, the Spanish are very concerned with vacations and travel. They see these things as a right, like health care and housing. In the same report on Spanish poverty levels, there was also a statistic lamenting the fact the 40% of Spaniards can only afford one week of vacation a year.

The host of the travel show takes the viewers to all of the usual London attractions and at the same time he seems fairly obsessed with prices. Who isn’t concerned with prices when they travel? As a goof, he goes to the Savoy Hotel for tea at 60 Euros per person. He totally mocks the high life and soon ditches his Saville Row suit for blue jeans. He also makes fun of his tiny hotel room. His advice for visiting London: good shoes and a lot of money.

Once again, like the way food is presented in the cooking show, travel is shown not as some wild extravagance, but as an essential ingredient in life and should be available to everyone. This is a theme I will search out and explore.

Labels: Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

10:34 AM

(2487776578285928429)

Saturday, November 18, 2006

 

Week #1

Another day, another paella; this time I made it with chorizo, a spicy sausage. I wandered into the central market downtown yesterday by accident so I bought some habadas, large green beans that come in pods. The woman in the market stall had a little device that split the pods open to remove the beans. I have made habadas from dried beans but I have never seen them fresh like this. I added the habadas to my paella after I began cooking the rice. I don’t think I will ever get tired of cooking or eating paella, I doubt that I will run out of different ways to prepare it, and any excuse to cook with saffron is a good excuse.

The central market is, without a doubt, the most remarkable collection of food items I have ever seen under one roof. Everything that this part of Spain has to offer for the table is being sold here in one of the hundreds of small stalls. I am too overwhelmed by this place to really begin to write about it. I will need to go there a few dozens times to shop so that I can begin to do it justice in words. Yesterday I started to write down the different varieties of fish for sale. I was too hungry to finish the task and decided that I needed to take pictures so I could remember what each species looked like.

The market—and Spain in general—is like Disneyland when it comes to hams and other types of dried, cured pork products. What I have found curious is that although there are plenty of specialty shops that sell the Jamon Iberico, the whole leg quarter hams, there don’t seem to be many bars and restaurants that offer this delicacy. In other cities in Spain pig legs hangs by the dozens in almost every public eating and drinking establishment. In Madrid I wouldn’t be surprised to see hams hanging in an optometrist’s office. Where is all the damn ham in Valencia? This is just another fact of Valenciana life that I will have to figure out.

Valencianos also don’t seem to be as addicted to tapas like people are in other parts of the country. Many of the bars look like they cater to this Spanish institution but rarely do you see the crowds of people flocking to the bar for tapas as I grew accustomed to in Madrid, Sevilla, and Toledo. There are plenty of tapas places all around town but they just don’t seem to experience the two, huge tidal shifts of clients in the afternoon and early evening.

Prices

After a week in Spain I have come to the conclusion that almost everything here is cheaper than in the States, at least where I lived in the States. I will list the prices for a bunch of things in Euros (about 1.25 to the dollar, so something that costs 10E is $10.25)

Coffee 1.20-1.50 E
Small Beer 1.50E
Bus 1.10E
1 Liter Chicken Stock 1.00E
Loaf of Bakery Bread .49-.85E
1 Kilo Rice .57E
Kleenex .69E
12 Eggs 1.09E
Day Bike Rental 2.00E
Various Dried Salamis 1.65-4.85E
Bottle of Spanish Brandy 5.75E
5 Liter Jug of Wine 3.75E (Priceless!)

If you know how to cook and have access to a kitchen you can eat like a king for very little. Yesterday I bought a quarter kilogram of mushrooms for 1.75E. They are called revellon and they look perfect for risotto. It will be a nice change of pace to have a meal without pork. Oops, I forgot that I bought some loganiza sausages that I wanted to try. The pork-free day will have to be Sunday, or the next day, or the week after. That porkless day may have to wait until I leave Spain.

Alcohol is as prevalent here as pork—this is like some sort of Muslim hell. Wine, beer, and spirits are cheap and ubiquitous. What is as popular here as I’ve seen in other parts of the country is the habit of stopping by the local bar in the afternoon and early evening for a beer. Spaniards usually drink little beers called cañas, draft beers that come in a wine glasses or similarly small vessels. I’m sure that there are plenty of drunks here but you don’t notice much in the way of public intoxication. The drinking age is 18 and is posted in almost every bar, but you rarely see young people under about 25 drinking.

I have always said that it is logistically impossible to get drunk in Europe in a bar or restaurant. The service here is just not set up to facilitate heavy boozing; it isn’t the right pace for it. I can rarely remember having more than one drink in the same place.

Labels: Food

11:00 AM

(116384769783867067)