Sunday, March 07, 2010

 

Sepia a la Plancha



I am always looking for new ways to make sepia (cuttlefish). This recipe is about as easy as it gets and it is incredible. I order this as a tapa in bars all the time and I never get tired of eating it. It is also great on a sandwich. My hand mixer is just too moody to use so I had to mix the garlic, olive oil, and parsley with a mortar and pestle (I'm living like and animal for not having a good hand mixer). The trick with things like sepia and squid is that you either cook them very little or for a long time, otherwise they get rubbery. This one came out perfectly tender after cooking it for only about a minute and a half each side. The sauce just needs to heat and not cook or it will burn. Serve with some good bread and white wine--and olives, don't forget the olives.*

Î just bought some amazing olives at the Rocafort Saturday country market which are the best I have had so far in Spain and that is saying a lot.

¡Buen provecho!

Labels: Food, Spain Food

2:35 PM

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Thursday, December 10, 2009

 

Chicken Cacciatore

Don’t ask me why I made this staple of old school American-Italian cooking. I had some chicken leg quarters and I was looking to make something different, or just something that I haven’t made in a long time. I also had a small amount of dried garbanzos I wanted to clean out of my cupboard. I began with my tomato sauce recipe (something everyone should know how to make). Next I cooked the garbanzos in my pressure cooker along with a bit of chorizo, onion, garlic, bay leaf, and salt.

I salted the chicken pieces which I had cut into legs and thighs. I dredged the pieces in flour and fried them in olive oil until slightly brown. You don’t have to cook the chicken fully because you will cook it again with the sauce. I arranged the chicken pieces in my clay baking dish. I made the sauce from the tomato sauce and the beans and poured this over the chicken. Then I baked the dish for about an hour covering it for the last 30 minutes to keep it moist.

Labels: Food

10:13 AM

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

 

The Canon of American Food (continued)

4) Chili

Against my better judgment I suppose that I absolutely must put chili on my list of American food. At least it gives me another reason to post this great picture from The Simpsons that I painstakingly lifted from their chili cook-off episode. I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the stuff which is a bit ironic since I Iove beans and anything spicy. I don’t dislike chili, it’s just something I could easily live without. I have only made it a couple of times and I’ve never felt compelled to master this dish. To me chili is about as interesting as a peanut butter sandwich. I’ll leave its praise, intricacies, and higher qualities for the aficionados.

Labels: canon of American food, Food

9:11 AM

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Sunday, August 09, 2009

 

The Canon of American Food (part 2)

3) Meatloaf

Meatloaf can be crap and it can be sublime—we’ll try to shoot for the latter. One problem when looking for a great recipe is that there is a big, fat sweaty guy called Meatloaf who comes up whenever you do a search on Google or Youtube. Why did his mother have to call him Meatloaf? I hope he didn’t get that way by eating meatloaf. If he did he must have ate a lot of it. I’m not proposing that people eat meatloaf every night but it should be in your kitchen’s rotation of favorite dishes. If it isn’t then you aren’t making it right. This series is really difficult to write when I am hungry and right now I sure could go for a cold, meatloaf sandwich with potato salad. If I had the ingredients for it I’d make it right now.

I’m not going to bother with a recipe for this one. There are lots of good ones out there. I chose this one because it is fairly simple yet had a couple of interesting touches.


My humble addition to the meatload legacy (I misspelled meatloaf but I like "meatload" better in describing what I made).

Labels: canon of American food, Food

7:33 PM

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Saturday, August 08, 2009

 

The Canon of American Food (part 1)

The big difference that I see between Spanish and American societies is that we are constantly reaching for the next rung on the socio-economic ladder. We are taught to be unsatisfied with what we have. We should have more and better things: a bigger house, a nicer car, better schools for our children, and countless other figments of our consumer imaginations. This isn’t to say that the Spanish are not seeking upward mobility, but they seem content to take in the view from whatever may be their current vantage point. Americans often feel that life will somehow be infinitely better if they can only replace a few durable goods or alter a few hereditary traits. Perhaps we are just showing the symptoms of an accelerated culture, a society Spain will soon become as their own economic future brightens. It may be that American society was more like Spain before we became the world’s leading economic power.

Nowhere is our disaffection with our own lives more evident than in the way we feel about our bodies. If you have ever been to more than one garage sale you know that one constant bit of merchandise will be discarded bit of trendy exercise equipment. What most of these failed body builders don’t seem to realize is that their lack of fitness isn’t because of something they aren’t doing—exercising or dieting—it’s because of what they are doing—basically living completely unhealthy lives. One of the best pieces of exercise equipment ever made are good walking shoes yet walking seems to be an activity that we leave behind in middle class American life. It is almost as if there is a stigma attached to walking; it’s like hanging clothes on a line to dry—it’s just not done these days unless you can’t afford an alternative. Walking is for poor people.

Drive everywhere, park as close to the entrance as possible, pull into the drive-thru, and at the end of the day you reach the safety of your attached three-car garage. It’s as if we define success by how few steps we have to take in our daily lives. It almost seems as if the biggest reason to get rich is that being wealthy means you can take lots of shortcuts in life and get everything done faster. In many cases doing something in a hurry is completely contrary to assuring any sort of quality.

Think of food as an example. What is worse than fast food or industrially prepared food? America’s move into prosperity went hand-in-hand with an acceptance on our part of a diet that is just awful. Frozen, freeze-dried, canned, boxed, prepared, and drive-thru are not good things when it comes to your sustenance. If you don’t have the proper amount of time to prepare food the way it was meant to be then perhaps you should reconsider the rest of your daily schedule—you probably need to cut out a few inessentials in the pages of your day planner. Instead of trying to make enough money so that you can eat in great restaurants for every meal it would be a lot easier to learn how to cook a few things.

Somewhere in the rising tide of American prosperity we seem to have lost anything remotely resembling a national cuisine. With the country’s newfound wealth in the post WWII era we abandoned our kitchens. I wasn’t alive back then but it seems like cooking became something old fashioned and a task not worthy of the middle class. Cooking was from for grandmothers with one foot still planted in the old countries. Whatever culinary traditions we had back then were quickly buried in the rush towards what people thought was modern society. The next generation of American food was ushered in on a TV dinner tray. What did we give up in order to have a frozen Salisbury steak in less than 20 minutes?

We were a country of immigrants with a vast amount of culinary wealth to draw upon. We haven’t lost any of this diversity in food but we have failed to develop a tradition of American cooking, whatever that might be. We have taught our children the American history we feel is necessary to become a responsible citizen but we haven’t inculcated them in just how they should go about their daily lives. If we were to develop some sort of national cuisine I feel that this would improve the bonds between us as American.

I see this as an incalculably large factor in the national character in many countries, especially in the Mediterranean basin. Food plays such an important part in the daily lives of Greeks, Italians, French, and Spanish, to name just four nations. Not only have their long culinary histories played an integral part in shaping their national identities, but the food they eat gives people an identity. This may be true in America among part of the populace, people who cling to their ethnic roots, and there are regions in the country that have very traditional dishes and cuisines, but it isn’t a part of our national character which I think is unfortunate.

“What is do Americans eat?” is a question I am constantly asked—a simple enough question but one that is difficult for Americans to answer; not so for the Spanish, the French, Italians, or Greeks. Their national cuisines are shared by all with no regard for class or social status. Food is their common denominator, their lingua franca, and as important to their feelings of national identity as our stories of the founding fathers. They are defined by what they eat. Their meals frame the structures or their days. The importance of food in their lives would be difficult to overstate. Food can be simple an inexpensive but they see to it that meals are a daily celebration. I see this as one of the biggest differences between out cultures. I also think that the care and respect given to food in these cultures has enriched the lives of the people in ways that it is difficult for Americans to understand.

If you are looking for an example of a lifestyle to emulate you could do a lot worse than the Spanish. I think that one of the biggest factors in how they have perfected middle class existence is the way in which they treat food in their society. Food dictates the rhythm of daily life in Spain from the time they wake up I the morning until they go to bed at night—or early in the morning as the case may be. Meals are an all-inclusive ritual practiced daily by all Spaniards with little regard for class or income. A lot of Americans still view wine as some sort of luxury (unless they oppose it outright on religious grounds). This just isn’t the case in most European countries. In Spain wine is seen more as a birthright than a luxury. There is much more wine to be found at extremely modest prices in Spain than in America. The average Spanish person wouldn’t dream of paying what most Americans spend on a bottle or glass of wine in a restaurant.

Maybe I haven’t been in Spain long enough to know better but it seems like shopping for food is something that can actually be enjoyed here. Instead of just another household chore to suffer through, people here seem to view grocery shopping as a challenge in which they must pit their wits against merchants in order to get the best ingredients at the most favorable price. Where Americans are used to going to a single supermarket for all of their foodstuffs, the Spanish are more likely to shop in big, open-air markets, corner green grocers, neighborhood bakeries, as well as the bigger supermarkets. I don’t think I am unusual in that I tend to shop only for one meal at a time. Either I have something in mind to cook before I leave the hose or I leave the menu open and take a look at what things look good on that particular day.

“What am I going to eat?” is a question we all ask ourselves every single day. As Americans I think that we need to define just what it is we eat. After all, we have some of the best agricultural land in the world and a bountiful supply of some of the best raw ingredients for cooking. We can begin by making a list of the top American dishes which will provide an easy answer when we are questioned by foreigners about our diet. I will only include dishes that can be prepared with ingredients found all over the country and that reflect the natural bounty found in America. These are every day dishes that are inexpensive, delicious, and uniquely our own.

1) Fried Chicken

I always used to say that if I ever lived within a couple of miles of a Popeye’s Fried Chicken I would weigh about 400 pounds (I tip the scales at 350). The same thing goes for Ezelles Chicken in Seattle. That place was always such a pain in the ass to get to that even a lard-ass like me could rarely be bothered to venture up the hill to get some of that glorious, mouth-water, super-savory chicken. I can’t even finish writing this now as just the thought of fried chicken is making me deliriously hungry. Spain isn’t the best place to find fried chicken, I’m afraid.

Ingredients
• 1 broiler/fryer chicken, cut into 8 pieces
• 2 cups low fat buttermilk
• 2 tablespoons kosher salt
• 2 tablespoons Hungarian paprika
• 2 teaspoons garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• Flour, for dredging
• Vegetable shortening, for frying

Place chicken pieces into a plastic container and cover with buttermilk. Cover and refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours.
Melt enough shortening (over low heat) to come just 1/8-inch up the side of a 12-inch cast iron skillet or heavy fry pan. Once shortening liquefies raise heat to 325 degrees F. Do not allow oil to go over 325 degrees F.
Drain chicken in a colander. Combine salt, paprika, garlic powder, and cayenne pepper. Liberally season chicken with this mixture. Dredge chicken in flour and shake off excess.
Place chicken skin side down into the pan. Put thighs in the center, and breast and legs around the edge of the pan. The oil should come half way up the pan. Cook chicken until golden brown on each side, approximately 10 to 12 minutes per side. More importantly, the internal temperature should be right around 180 degrees. (Be careful to monitor shortening temperature every few minutes.)
Drain chicken on a rack over a sheet pan. Don't drain by setting chicken directly on paper towels or brown paper bags.

2) Cajun Red Beans and Rice

I love beans of all kinds. They have been the main staple in my diet over the course of my entire life. They are laughably inexpensive yet full of protein and vitamins. I loved that story from Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat where Danny and the gang steal food for the woman’s children who had previously survived on a diet on beans and tortillas. As soon as they started eating the exotic fare the bums had rustled up for them they began getting ill. I could easily live on beans and tortillas.

I probably feel the same way about cooking beans as Miles Davis did about playing a jazz improvisation: you never do it the same way twice (I think that I just said that I was the Miles Davis of beans?). I use a pressure cooker when I make them now that I have discovered this marvelous invention. Instead of taking several hours I can now make a pot of pintos in 18 minutes.

Ingredients:

4 cups red beans
3 quarts water
1 cup chopped onions
1 cup chopped celery
4 bay leaves
1 cup chopped sweet green pepper
4 tablespoons chopped garlic
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 teaspoons dried thyme - crushed
1 pound andouille sausage - cut into 1/4 in.pieces
1 good ham bone and small chunks of ham
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon pepper
Tabasco
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 stick margarine

Soak beans overnight and rinse.
In a 10 quart pot combine beans, water, ham bone with ham, onion, celery, and bay leaves.
Bring to a boil; reduce heat.
Cover and cook over low heat, for about 1 & 1/2 hours or until beans are tender.
Stir and mash some of the beans against side of pan.
Cut sausage into bite-size chunks and brown in a frying pan. Add garlic, green pepper and a bit more onion to this. Add this to the beans.
Add parsley, thyme, salt, Tabasco, margarine, and pepper.
Cook uncovered, over low heat until creamy, about 30 minutes.
Remove bay leaves.
Serve over white rice (thank god for rice cookers).

To be continued…

Labels: canon of American food, Food, Valencia Spain

10:15 AM

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Thursday, August 06, 2009

 

If you are going to bother to wear a hat, don't mess around.


Old Mexico

What could be better than being at home on a Wednesday evening cooking Mexican food and blasting Vicente Fernández? I was going to put in a link to his Wikipedia article but at this point if you read the crap I write and you don’t know who he is then you just aren’t paying attention. Maybe you have been too busy text messaging about this week’s episode of So You Think You Can Dance to remember who Vicente Fernández is? If this is your case then you are hopeless and I give up. Just don’t blame me when you go to Mexico and people treat you like the ignorant American slob that you are. It’s called cultural literacy and without at least an inkling of knowledge of Vicente Fernández they probably shouldn’t even let you pass through Mexican customs.

OK, I’ll be the first to admit that the food I am making isn’t authentic Mexican cuisine. I am just making a big pot of pinto beans with hot peppers and pork. I am also trying to make up for a recent error I had in the kitchen when I attempted to make a dish with achiote.* I was instructed to grind the seeds in an electric coffee/spice grinder but since I left mine in Seattle I thought that I would just use my trusty mortar and pestle. Unfortunately, the seeds of the achiote are as hard as rocks so I had a very hard time with the dish I made last week. I went to the grocery store where I bought the seeds and asked if they had achiote in powder form. The woman who owns the shop told me that you don’t need to grind the seeds. You can fry them in oil and then just use the rendered oil to cook whatever you had in mind.

I have been shopping in this little store since I move to Ruzafa almost two year ago—how time flies. The owner is really cute and helpful. She’s from the Dominican Republic. When I first went there I was just a gringo who spoke a little Spanish, now I am trading recipes and teaching her about Mexican cooking. It is cool for me to actually experience how my language skills have improved—it helps to slightly offset all of the times when I am completely frustrated with my progress or what I feel is my lack of it. As of late I have been trying to make some new headway in Spanish. For a while I was seriously neglecting my reading which I feel is the best way to forge ahead.

I recently bought some flour tortillas in her shop that were cheap, fresh, and very good which has inspired me to make more Mexican food. Without tortillas that is kind of a difficult task. You can buy good tortillas in the major chain grocery stores here but they are expensive as all get out and I just can’t justify their purchase. Mexican food is peasant food, after all, and I mean that in the best way. When Spanish people ask me what I miss most about my country I tell them that I miss Mexican food. I lack a lot of the basic ingredients here to make some of my favorite dishes, things like pozole and mole. I can make authentic Mexican food if I have all of the basic ingredients. I can’t get chipotle peppers, maíz blanco, corn tortillas, jalapeños, and several other essentials, at least not all the time. It’s not like making Spanish food is such a hardship, but some day I will visit Mexico again and I want to keep my stomach trained for the food.

*A rust colored seed that is harvested from the annatto shrub to produce the Achiote spice. Native to Latin America, Spain, and East India, the Achiote seed is protected by a pod containing 40 to 60 red seeds. The triangular-shaped Achiote seeds are surrounded by a red pulp that is separated from the seeds and pod when they are harvested. The pulp is processed to produce a commercial dying agent while the seeds are dried and made into a rust colored paste that is often used for coloring foods such as rice, smoked fish, butter, or cheese. Cheshire, Edam, Leicester, and Muenster cheeses are commonly colored with the rusty-toned paste to enhance the appearance of the cheese. Also used as a spice for flavoring foods, Annatto seeds provide a sweet and somewhat peppery taste when added to various food dishes.

To prepare the Achiote, place the seeds into the liquid ingredients being prepared or add the seeds to hot water to obtain the color and flavor desired before using the mixture to color rice or as a stock to add flavors to other foods. In addition to foods, this seed and pulp are used to color candies, cosmetics and textiles. Achiote or Achote is the common name for the spice made from this seed in Mexico and Latin America, while in the Philippines the Annatto seed is known as Atsuwete or Acheute and it is also commonly known as Anatta, Annato or Annatto. To store, keep the seeds in an airtight container away from heat. Thanks to recipetips.com

Labels: Food

8:59 AM

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

 

Mar y Montaña



This is a very easy recipe that also happens to be delicious—always a good combination. A cuttlefish is truly a revolting little creature both in and out of the water. I have always loved squid, especially the batter-fried variety I could never resist in Greece.

I got this recipe here:

El Cocinero Fiel

He is about the best video blogger on Spanish food. I have cooked at least a dozen of his dishes so far and they have all been well worth it.

Labels: cooking video, Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

12:52 PM

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Friday, May 01, 2009

 

Seafood Rice



As I have said many times, Valencianos really only call something a paella if it is a true paella valenciana (with chicken and rabbit). Anything else to them is just rice. I just made this because I have only tried to make it once before. To be honest, I much prefer a real paella. I just like to film the dishes I make to sort of remind myself of what I have in my repertoire. ¡Buen provecho!

Labels: cooking video, Food

11:48 AM

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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

 

Arroz a Banda



Arroz a banda is not paella, although it is made in a paella pan (also called a paella). It is a Valencian rice dish made with some sort of mutant shrimp called cigalas here in Spain. I don’t know what we call them in English. I have never made this dish before so I was delighted when my country mouse friends invited me to their home out in the hills near Catadau (about 40 kilometers south of Valencia). Alain is French and a damn good cook. His recipe for lapin à la moutarde (rabbit in mustard) is one of the best things I’ve had since arriving. I took advantage of my most recent meal with my friends to record this video. The dish is fairly simple and the result was truly amazing. I can’t wait to make this at home although I don’t have the cool gas paella cooker he has. When he makes paella Valenciana (with chicken and rabbit as opposed to seafood) he uses a wood fire. For this dish he says that the smoke flavor can interfere with the fish flavors.

Rice
Fish Stock
Shrimp (or whatever the hell they are)
Red Pepper
Onion
Garlic
Can of diced tomatoes
Saffron, Olive Oil, Salt

Brown shrimp in pan with oil. Remove shrimp. Sauté pepper and onions, then add garlic. Pour in canned tomatoes. Add rice and mix with sautéed vegetables. Add fish stock and bring to simmer. Add a few shrimp heads. When rice is cooked add the rest of the shrimp on top of the dish. Cover with newspaper for about five minutes after turning off the stove to dry out the rice a bit. Serve. ¡Buen provecho!

Labels: cooking video, Food, Valencia Spain

8:19 PM

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Variety Stores

Monday was some sort of religious holiday here in Valencia. Even to be culturally aware I can’t be bothered to pay any attention to religion so excuse me for not knowing or giving a shit about what the holiday was all about. The important thing to me is that a lot of my normal stores were closed. The good news is that there are a lot of other outlets in the neighborhood which also didn’t get the email about the Catholic holiday so they were open. I totally screwed up and didn’t buy much in the way of food before the long religious holiday began so by Monday I was down to a half a jar of Dijon mustard and a can of anchovies…and I was really hungry.

On my first stop I hit a Chinese grocery store. I am pretty familiar with these places as I did a lot of shopping at a huge pan-Asian store in Seattle. The little store in my neighborhood on Calle Puerto Rico has a decent selection of ingredients necessary for making a good Chinese-style meal. I say Chinese-style because I don’t really know how to make a proper Chinese dish, only American versions of them. I felt like I was coming down with a cold or something so my first priority was to get something really spicy. I bought an industrial-strength size bottle of sriracha sauce from Thailand—a good start for spicy food. Something I miss about Seattle are the ubiquitous Vietnamese restaurants where you can get a bowl of pho for a couple bucks. Pho was always my first line of defense against colds and flu. If I felt a bug coming on I would get a huge bowl of pho and then pollute it with so much sriracha sauce that no organism could possible live in the same vessel as this contaminated bowl of soup. No organism except me. I have the good fortune of having a porcelain toilet bowl instead of a stomach which means I can eat the hottest food known to man. Not only can I eat it but I crave it.

The guy at the Chinese grocery store was asking me if I had ever bought the stuff that I was buying. He was trying to warn me that it was spicy. Spanish people, for the most part, don’t eat much in the way of spicy stuff. I suppose that he has had his share of angry customers who complain after getting their guts burned out. I happen to enjoy getting my guts burned out and told him so. I also picked up a bunch of different kinds of rice noodles and a bag of black rice. Black rice is really good if you have never tried it before. It has a very nutty flavor.

The next stop was a little corner grocery store run by some Pakistani guys. These places are great for buying spices. They have a wonderful variety of hard-to-find stuff. They also have big bags of stuff that I use a lot, stuff like cumin and coriander seed. The little bottles you get at the supermarket don’t go very far in my kitchen. They also have amazing red chili, both in flakes and in powder form. Once again, they have big bags that are made to last. The chili powder is the best I have ever had and much spicier than what I normally get in the U.S. It is also about ten times cheaper here.

I recently came across a recipe for tortillitas, an eggless tortilla that is popular in Andalucía. For this recipe you need garbanzo bean flour which isn’t to be found in the Spanish grocery stores here in Valencia. This is also known as gram flour or besan as they call it in India and Pakistan and I found it at my next stop: a halal butcher shop. There are a lot of Muslim immigrants in my neighborhood and so there are quite a few of these halal butcher shops that cater to them. These places, whether they are run by Pakistanis or Moroccans, also have some interesting food items for sale besides the chicken, beef, and lamb. Next on my “to buy” list is a Moroccan tagine baking dish.

There is quite a lot of variety in my neighborhood when it comes to cooking. I have been making Indian-style dishes as well as Chinese-influenced stuff. This isn’t to say that I have given up on Spanish food. I have another cooking video to upload on how to make Arroz a la banda, a Valencia staple of rice with shrimp.

Labels: Food, Valencia Spain

3:29 PM

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Thursday, March 05, 2009

 

Mixed Metaphors, a Festival Begins, and a Recipe

I am working on another writing project. Just think of these few paragraphs as a flare gun so that people can see that I haven’t sunk to the bottom of the sea—not that anyone is actually looking for me. And this definitely isn’t an SOS although some people would probably argue that every word I have ever written is a desperate cry for help. So perhaps this essay is less like a flare gun and more like one of those proof-of-life signs that kidnappers provide to insure that their hostage is alive and well.

Valencia is in its pre-Fallas mode when there is a lot going on to prepare for the huge blowout festival to come. Lights are being strung up everywhere, especially on Calle Sueca which looks like the wet dream of Clark Griswold from the Christmas Vacation movie. I even saw my first buñuelo stand being erected last night. These are little street-side booths that sell deep-fried donuts along with hot chocolate. They have all kinds of crazy neon lights and some of them are absolutely beautiful. They are only here for a couple weeks during Fallas and then they disappear for the rest of the year. I wonder where they go.

The daily mascletà ritual begins on the afternoon of March 1st. This is the percussion fireworks display held at the Plaza del Ayuntamiento at 2pm. No matter what I am doing I try to make it down to the square for this. I call it the cheapest of cheap thrills. Actually, it’s better than cheap; it’s free. I love how much energy in pumps into Valencia. Every day tens of thousands of people show up to have their hearing damaged just a little. Ten minutes later it is over and everyone runs off to do whatever it is they are going to do.

Fallas officially begins on the 15th of March but there is a plenty happening before that. The bull festival begins on the 9th which helps to usher in the Spanish season of the Corrida de Toros. All of the little terrorist kids are chucking firecrackers all day long. Luckily, the little animals don’t play near my building so I am spared most of the noise.

The weather has been crap for the most part. It’s been kind of cold all winter which you might expect unless you lived here last winter when we had clear skies and temperatures around 20 degrees even in January. I have only missed about three days this year because of rain but my bike rides have been rather cold on most days. In Seattle it is pretty much a given that you stay in the gym for your workout during much of the winter so I shouldn’t complain. I just think that complaining makes me more Spanish.

Someone sent me some paprika from Hungary so I made chicken paprikash last night. I used to know someone who made this dish and it was always one of my favorites although I never learned how to make it from her. What a pity, Kimberly. My first attempt was pretty good but I didn’t thicken the stock with the flour which I will do the next time I make it. You can also serve this with potatoes or noodles instead of the dumplings.

I also learned that to make an adjective in Hungarian you add the letter S to the end of a noun but it is pronounced "sh." So "paprika" becomes "paprikash." I love little stuff like that and the dish itself is one of the best things you are ever going to put in your mouth.

Chicken Paprikash

Chicken broth
Chicken cut in pieces
Butter
Olive oil
Chopped onion
2 heaping tsp. paprika
1 Cup sour cream
2 tbsp. flour

Brown chicken in butter and olive oil; remove and set aside. Add onion to butter and cook until tender. Return chicken to skillet and add broth. Add paprika and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and simmer 20-30 minutes.
Blend flour with a little water then blend into chicken. In a separate bowl mix the sour cream with the broth from the pot. At the very end add the sour cream to the pot and immediately turn off the heat or the sour cream will curdle. Serve with dumplings.

Dumplings

3 Beaten eggs
1/2 tsp. salt
¼ Cup evaporated milk
1 1/2 Cups flour
To prepare dumplings: Combine eggs, milk and salt. Stir into flour. Drop by teaspoons into boiling salted water. Cook 5 minutes after they float. Don’t over-cook the dumplings or they turn into little bricks.

Labels: Food, Valencia Spain

9:15 AM

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Monday, February 02, 2009

 

Super Easy Pizza Sauce

1 Onion
3 Cloves Garlic
½ Cup Red Wine
1 16 oz. Can Whole Tomatoes (entero) (I mush the tomatoes with my hands)
1 16 oz. Can Tomato Puree (triturado)
1 Small Can Tomato Paste (doble concentrado)
Olive oil, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, oregano, 2 bay leaves, pinch of sugar

Sauté onions and garlic until translucent, then add spices. Add wine and allow for most of the wine to evaporate. Add the other ingredients and simmer for about two hours. The sauce should be fairly thick and it will thicken even more after you let it cool.

I learned this simple recipe years ago and I still find it makes an excellent pizza sauce. Most pizza joints have terrible sauce that tastes like it came right out of a can, which it probably did. If you are going to do something, do it right. That's what I was always told. If I am going to pay someone to make a pizza for me I expect them to make it at least as well as I would at home if I had the time.

We are all forced to take shortcuts in life, but sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself just what you are doing with the time you are saving. There are things more important than food—I suppose. I just think that most of those more important things can wait until after you've had a good meal.

I have to say, this sauce is absolute perfection. No kidding. I can't see why I would change a thing about this recipe. It's not just a pizza sauce. I bought some ready-made meatballs from Mercadona. I used to think that they had too much filler in them but I have grown quite fond of them. I placed them in my clay baking dish and put them in the oven along with a tray of potatoes. I perforated the potatoes with a fork, lathered them with olive oil, and salted liberally. If you are going to turn on your oven you may as well cook a couple of things at once. When the meatballs were done I tossed them in some of the sauce. Then I put the meatballs and sauce on a baguette with some fresh mozzarella cheese and threw that in the oven. A meatball sub and a baked potato—I guess I'm still an American after all.

P.S. The cold baked potatoes are great on a salad which is why I will cook a bunch at a time.

Labels: Food

3:10 PM

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Sunday, January 18, 2009

 

Lentil Soup



This is about as unsophisticated as cooking gets. It's basically the same recipe that you use for cocido but instead of garbanzos I use lentils. I give away a lot of what I cook to friends which explains the Salvation Army soup kitchen-size pot. I figure that I will use the same amount of energy to cook a huge batch or a smaller one. I don't freeze stuff that I cook, I'd rather just give it away.

Labels: cooking video, Food

11:25 PM

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Sunday, January 11, 2009

 

No Reservations

I have recently become obsessed with an American television series called No Reservations hosted by the author Anthony Bourdain who wrote, among other things, the bestseller Kitchen Confidential. From the few episodes I have seen thus far, he basically just travels around the world, eats, and drinks—not a bad gig if you can get someone to pay you for it. So far I have watched the shows about places that have meant a lot to me over the course of my life: Paris, Greece, Peru, Mexico, Italy, and Spain. It's not a cooking show in the traditional sense where you are shown how to make a certain dish. No Reservations is a celebration of food and drink from around the world. What sets it apart from other cooking/travel shows is the writing and the insights of the author/host. More than just about any other travel writer I have read (let alone cooking show dorks) Anthony Bourdain really gets the places he visits—or at least he really tries to really get them.

One thing he said during an episode about the U.S.-Mexico border stands out in my mind: “When I started to look at Texas with the same respect I show other lands I started to find much to love.” Bourdain does have a great respect for the countries he visits, but he seems to have an even greater respect for the culinary traditions of the people and the places that he visits while making his show. He often gets into the thinking of great chefs by exploring their cooking roots, this means going back home, whether that is on a Greek island or in a Mexican village. Out of all of the places he visits on his show, the one place to where I most want to return is Mexico. I love the food there more than anywhere else I have every been. I can't wait to go back and learn more about Mexican cooking, especially with my new and improved Spanish. I think I will have to try the recipe for mole I learned on a trip to San Miguel de Allende I made back in 2002. I have never tried it since I was there. I think that I can find all of the ingredients here in Spain. Finding people to ate this with me is another problem. I miss people who like spicy food. I desperately want to smoke a cigar with someone who smokes cigars. Oh brother, where art thou?

His observations on that standard of European society, the café, reflect my own thoughts almost exactly. Another observation he made about life in Spain really hit home with me. He was commenting—among other things—on the Spanish way of life, of having a coffee or a glass or wine or a tapa in a little corner bar. He wondered why he didn't have these things every day. In a nutshell this is why I came here. I wanted these things every day and that has made all the difference.

One thing that is particularly annoying about the show—and it has nothing to do with the show itself—is that American television requires that there be a parental warning after each break in the show. It's positively embarrassing that our government feels that we are so delicate that we need to be protects from every coarse word, every casual remark about abusing alcohol or drugs, every off-color comment about sex that you hear on the show. It's as if we lost and the Mormons have taken over the entire country. I've never understood people who are offended by profanity. It's just words, people. Just because we don't let people say the word “shit” or “fuck” on America television doesn't mean we will have a world without poop or sex. By the way, those two words are bantered about on Spanish television in an extremely casual nature, as if they were both just two more things that make up what is called human existence. What people in America should be more concerned with is our casual acceptance of depictions of extreme violence on TV—something that I believe lowers our collective sense of outrage when we hear about violence in real life.

What do the folks who require this childish censorship think would be the worst-case scenario if we allowed profanity and nudity on TV? We are already one of the most violence and crime-ridden cultures on earth, maybe a little sex and dirty talk would do us some good? When I watch an American movie or TV show that portrays violence in America I am invariably asked if this is how it really is in my country. I am ashamed to say that it is like these movie portrayals, at least sometimes in some places. We need to work on that. We need to stop glamorizing violence, stop making it sexy and cool. It's incredibly uncool and unsexy.

Labels: Food

9:47 PM

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

 

El Cocinero Fiel

By far the best cooking videos I have found in any langauge (at least those languages I can stumble through) come from a guy calling himself El Cocinero Fiel. I will have my hands full making all of these recipes. Today I am making gnocchi. It's not Spanish but I have a ton of potatoes lying around.

Labels: Food, Spain Food

12:02 PM

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Wednesday, November 05, 2008

 

Fabada asturiana

Celebrating Food

Sometimes I think that I probably spend too much time writing and thinking about food, not to mention the time I spend actually cooking and eating. I could understand how other people probably think that I am a bit obsessed about the subject. I guess that you could say that cooking is sort of a hobby for me, but it's not like building model railroads or collecting stamps. You have to eat everyday. Unless you live at home and your mom cooks for you then you are going to have to make a lot of that food yourself. You can either eat well or not.

Sometimes eating can be a chore but it should often be a celebration. From what I have learned of Spanish, French, Italian, and Greek cultures, they choose to celebrate food much more than we do in America. I don't mean this as a criticism of Americans, it's just that these cultures put a higher value on food than Americans or the British do. I would say that Americans and British people put a higher value on comedy than these Mediterranean cultures I mentioned. They could definitely learn from us on this particular subject. At least for me, laughter is as essential as eating, but for now I am talking about cooking and the role food plays and should play in our lives.

Spanish food is fairly simple, for the most part. Most people here aren't particularly sophisticated about the food they eat or how they cook it. I think that the French are much more savvy about cooking techniques and food preparation than the Spanish. This doesn't mean that the people in Spain don't have a reverence for food. A casual walk through the lovely Mercado de Ruzafa will demonstrate just how highly Valencianos value what they put on their tables. It's not just a matter of the quality of the food people buy, it is the very way that they choose their food. Supermarkets are popular in Spain but most people buy a good portion of their staples at their local market.

In the market people have a closer bond with the food they purchase. In the stalls of the market you deal directly with people who know their products intimately. There is a degree of customer service in the market that you would only expect in a fine jewelry store or a pampering health spa. I go regularly to the same stalls at my market and have developed a pretty firm relationship with all of the merchants. I have a level of rapport with my butcher that Dick Cheney probably has with his heart surgeon. Considering how much pork I buy from my butcher, I should probably ask for the phone number of Dick's surgeon.

You can enjoy food without parting with a lot of money. It is up to all of us to savor the simplest things: a ripe tomato, a perfectly hard boiled egg, a glass of modest wine, a mug of great beer, a loaf of freshly baked bread, or an olive. I think that one of the things I admire so much about the Spanish is that they really make an effort to stop their lives every day to sit down to the table for their afternoon meal. It isn't even called lunch here; lunch is just a little snack they have before noon. The afternoon meal begins at around 2 pm and is their most important of the day. Even after all this time here I still have trouble adopting this daily ritual, and I really like to eat. It's just difficult for me to stop whatever it is I am doing and sit down at the table. This simple act is what elevates the status of food for the Spanish. It doesn't really matter what it is they are eating, the respect they give the meal is what is important.

You can show a lot of respect for just about any sort of food or drink just by presenting it well. I
For example, it's rare to see people here eating potato chips out of the bag. They decant the chips into a bowl before serving. That doesn't sound like much but it all adds up. A meal without a glass of wine is almost unthinkable in these Mediterranean countries. I think that the wine is almost as valuable for its symbolism as it is for the taste it contributes. Wine is like a secular prayer that we enjoy at the table. Since we don't really have an English equivalent (how odd), I will say it in French and Spanish (blogger won't accept Greek). Bon appetit! ¡Buen provecho!

Labels: Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

6:59 PM

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Zuppa di Cozze

Labels: cooking video, Food, video

1:23 PM

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Saturday, November 01, 2008

 

Fabada Asturiana

Just to hear if I sound any less retarded in Spanish than I do in English. I made this video in español. Fabada Asturiana is a simple dish that is incredibly rich in favor. Perfect for the crappy weather we are having right now. The province of Asturia has pretty crappy weather almost all the time so that's why they invented this bean and sausage stew. The video is mercifully short as it walks you through everything you need to know about how to make this dish. The problem for those living outside of Spain will be in obtaining the ingredients. The fabada beans are long white beans that are quite expensive even here in Spain. Along with the beans I was given some smoked Asturian morcilla, or blood sausage which really added a lot of flavor to the dish. Once again, saffron is an incredible luxury that I take for granted here and is prohibitively expensive in many parts of the world.

I have been making beans ever since I left home at age 17. I practically lived on beans, rice, and potatoes back when I was a broke student. I still cook some sort of beans on an almost weekly basis. I never get tired of them. This dish ranks as my favorite of all my bean recipes.

Labels: cooking video, Food, Spain Food, video

2:23 PM

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A French Classic: Coq au Vin

This classic French dish of chicken cooked in wine is just about the best thing I've ever cooked. When I decided to make another attempt at cooking coq au vin I distilled about twenty different recipes into what I have presented in the video. I honestly have to say that I wouldn't change anything. I will use an older stewing bird next time I make this as they are more appropriate for this kind of dish where the chicken is cooked slowly. Other than that, I think this came out about as well as I have ever tasted coq au vin. I went to summer school in Dijon way back when I was in college and I remember loving the two emblematic dishes from Bourgogne: coq au vin and beef Bourguignon. They are both made in a similar fashion so I suppose that I'll have to try making beef Bourguignon some time soon.

As the name states, this dish should be made with an older bird, over ten months while most fryer chickens are 7 to 13 weeks and roaster chickens are about five months old when they are called to duty. This is something most Americans don't think much about but in France they have taken poultry to heights we can barely imagine. It is their national symbol, after all, and adorns their most coveted emblem: the national football jersey. Spain has a lot of nice birds as well. My local market has abot five stalls that deal solely with birds of all types. I bought the regular chicken before I even knew what I was going to make but the next time I will use an older bird.

I realize that this recipe has nothing to do with Spain but France is our neighbor. I have been searching for a challenging Spanish chicken dish but this just popped into my head and I decided to try it. My cooking strategy is to first search out recipes for whatever it is I want to make. Most recipes are garbage and I discard most at a quick glance. I take a few things from different recipes. Then I look on youtube for cooking videos of the dish. Actually watching someone make a dish is a huge help in understanding what is going on. A lot of things become apparent that you may not have understood from the recipe. I ended up plagiarizing a show called Good Eats for my recipe although I made a few adjustments. You can't copyright a recipe.

Coq au Vin

Chicken cut in parts
Un-smoked bacon*
Pearl onions
Mushrooms
Bottle of wine
3-4 cups chicken stock
2 carrots
1 onion
2 stalks of celery (I didn't use celery because it is hard to get here)
1 cup flour
Butter
Olive oil
Salt, black peppercorns, thyme, rosemary, bay leaf

*if you can't find un-smoked bacon you can boil the bacon or pancetta in water for a minute to get rid of the smoke flavor. If you don't the dish will taste like bacon and not much else.

Mix salt and pepper to the flour and dust the chicken pieces thoroughly. Cook the bacon in a little water until the water evaporates. This will allow the bacon to render without burning it. Remove the bacon. Add a bit of olive oil and butter to the bacon fat. Brown the chicken pieces in the oil. Don't move the pieces once you have placed them in the oil. You want them to stiuck to the pan. Remove the browned chicken and put it in a pot with the carrots, onion, bay leaf, rosemary, thyme, and peppercorns. Sauté the peeled pearl onions in the pan with the chicken fat and all the other good stuff, you may need to add a bit of oil and butter. Remove and then cook the mushrooms in the same pan. Remove the mushrooms and then deglaze the pan with cognac (or wine). Add this deglaze mixture to the pot with the chicken. Add the bottle of red wine and the chicken stock to the pot. At this point you can let the chicken marinate overnight but I just started cooking it. You can bake it in the oven or I found that cooking it on the stove was perfectly fine. When the chicken is completely cooked and is starting to fall off the bone, remove it from the pot and keep it warm. Reduce the sauce in the pot buy 1/3. After it has reduced strain the sauce and put it back on the stove. Add the cooked mushrooms and pearl onions. After these ingredients are well blended into the sauce, add the chicken. It is now ready to serve.

*You may want to further thicken the sauce by adding a roux or a beurre manié.

This dish may look like a lot of trouble but I think that it is fairly simple in its execution. I can assure you that it is worth time, money, and effort. When we sat down to eat this meal I never wanted it to end. You were almost overwhelmed by the wonderful aroma as soon as the elevator door opened on my floor. Coq au vin should be served with a hearty starch dish. I made a Spanish potato recipe called patatas a lo pobre. !Buen provecho¡ Bon appetit.

Labels: cooking video, Food, Spain Food, video

8:39 AM

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Friday, October 24, 2008

 

Paella Valenciana Video



I think my video-making has greatly improved compared to the last attempt.

Labels: cooking video, Food, Spain Food, video

7:19 PM

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Monday, October 13, 2008

 

My Definitive Recipe for Arroz al Horno

*unless I make improvements

Baked rice is probably my favorite Valencian recipe, if not my favorite Spanish dish, if not one of my all-time favorite meals. It is also the second most iconic dish in the category of Valencian food, first being paella, of course. 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. People used to cook this in their big neighborhood ovens back when that wasn't a common item in everyone's home.

I have made this dish more than just about any other dish in my repertoire—almost every Sunday during the winter months. I have developed my own tricks for it and my Arroz al Horno is pretty good, just ask anyone who has tried it, and all my friends have tried it. I think that this says more about just how good this dish is when prepared competently than anything about my own cooking ability. It is an easy dish to make if you have someone—let's say your Spanish grandmother—walk you through it once or twice. For all of you out there, allow me to be the Spanish grandmother we never had.

My 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 recipes. I cover almost the entire top of the baking dish with potatoes. 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)
2-3 Chorizo sausages
2-3 Morcilla sausages (I sometimes substitute blanquet sausages)
Pork ribs cut into cubes
4 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 (or don't peel them) I boil them until they are just a bit tender. Most Valencian recipes call for you to slice the potatoes and cook them in a generous amount of olive oil. I think the potatoes come out better if you parboil them first and then slice them

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.

Slice the chorizo into bite-size bits and cook them. Add the chorizo to the baking dish and wipe the fat from the pan with a paper towel.

Cook the lightly salted ribs in olive oil until they are browned but not over-cooked. Remove and put the meat in the baking dish.

Finely dice and onion and a garlic clove for the rice sofrito. Sauté the rice in the rib fat with olive oil, tomato, and garlic as you would with risotto. Stir constantly. When it has cooked a bit and coated thoroughly with the sofrito, add it to the baking dish.

Trim the tomatoes. I use an apple corer to completely remove the middle. Slice the tomatoes in half along their width. Season the cut ends with salt and a bit of oregano.

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 and morcilla 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 except the tomatoes. 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. Remove the dish when the stock has evaporated.

Labels: cooking video, Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

12:03 PM

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Friday, September 19, 2008

 

Cooking at Home



This was my first paella with my new 46 centimeter paella pan. I don't know what it is about this pan but it makes my penis feel a LOT bigger. I can't believe that I used to cook with a 40 centimeter pan. I mean, what was I? Some sort of twinkie? Notice that I am wearing an Iraqi soccer jersey splattered with paella stock. It's not blood, I swear. I figure, what better way to show my support for the Iraqi people than turn into some sort of Iraqi football hooligan?



I am not any sort of a dessert guy but I couldn't pass up these great peaches I came across in the market yesterday. I'm not even a big fan of peaches but these were absolutely magnificent. I cobbled together a peach cobbler from a couple of different recipes I came across. If this doesn't kill me I think I may be immortal. It has a ton of butter, sugar, brown sugar, flour, 2 eggs, and a bunch of crushed cookies. Someone please come by and help me eat this otherwise the firemen will have to come by with chain saws to cut a path big enough for me to get out of the apartment. It is way too sweet to top with ice cream so I used Greek yogurt. Damn, this was good.

Labels: Food, Spain Food

11:04 PM

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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

 

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An Ode to Tomatoes

You can have your fancy auto-mo-biles and your shiny jewelry, this time of the year I am happy with little more than tomatoes. Valencia has their own variety that are about as good as tomatoes get. July and August are the best months for these Valencia tomatoes and I buy them compulsively from just about every vegetable stand that I pass during the day—and I pass quite a few. It's too hot to cook (although I still cook a lot) so something as simple as a sliced tomato is about all you need. Maybe a pinch of salt, a couple drops of oil if you must, a leaf or two of basil if you have it, and vinegar once in a while just for a change.

These aren't the hothouse variety of tomatoes that you find all year long in most U.S. super markets, or the uninspired tomatoes you find here in the winter. These are right off the vine and still ripening as you bring them home from the market. I had a hothouse tomato lying around a couple of weeks ago, a remnant from those harsher times when the good ones are still in the ground. I had it sitting in my kitchen for a few weeks and it just sat their patiently, not changing color and not getting a bit riper with age. I finally put it out of its misery by chopping it up and throwing it into a soup.

These summer Valenciano tomatoes are very impatient. You only have a window of about three days to eat them before they ripen into mush. They are so good that I don't like to use them for anything but serving uncooked and unprepared. It's almost a waste to make gazpacho out of such beautiful pieces of fruit. I eat them alone or in a Greek salad with cucumber, onion, and green peppers. I serve tomatoes as the base with pasta salads. Basically, I use any excuse that I can find.

My favorites are called raf tomatoes and they are odd-shaped things with the meat separated into different lobes. I have my own little trick for serving them. I use an apple corer to remove the stem base and I push the corer all the way through the tomato. This whole center of the raf is kind of difficult to deal with so using an apple corer works really well. Next I cut it in half from the top. After this you can sit the half on its side and slice the lobes individually.

Labels: Food, Spain Food

10:59 AM

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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

11:58 AM

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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

3:20 PM

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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

1:52 PM

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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

3:29 PM

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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

12:24 PM

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

 

Good Food Nation

Much more so than Americans, Europeans are often well defined by the food they eat. This is especially true here in Valencia which has a cuisine rich with many dishes unique to this community as well as those adopted from the rest of the Spanish culinary repertoire. I have found that the food here helps to define the people in a manner which is almost as important as their language and history. Those aspects of culture are all interrelated and it is difficult to separate them or say where one begins and the other ends. A Spanish person’s sense of identity is closely related to the food they eat.

One of the questions that I have the hardest time answering is when Spanish people ask me what sort of food we eat in America. I wasn’t raised with a very well-defined menu. Like most Americans I think I have developed a sort of hodge-podge approach to food. I take bits and pieces from the national cuisines of countries far removed from each other. I cook lots of Mexican stuff, albeit with an American flavor; I have borrowed heavily from Asian rice and noodle dishes; Italian and French influences can be found in the meals that I prepare; but very little of what I cook could be defined as purely American. You could probably call my cooking American Ethnic.

This isn’t to say that we don’t have our own American cuisine; it’s just that I don’t really specialize in that sort of cooking. I think that it would be very beneficial to the American character if we were to lay out a uniquely American cuisine, once and for all, and inculcate our citizens in this menu. It should be taught in schools, these 50 or so menu items that all Americans would recognize as our national cuisine. Mothers could teach these dishes to their sons and fathers could teach their daughters.

Thanksgiving is the only culinary American holiday, rich with traditions shared by almost everyone in the country. People who haven’t cooked anything all year long will enter the kitchen on this day and attempt dishes of considerable complexity. If we could only get our fellow countrymen and women to adopt a few more feast days we would be well on our way in developing an American cooking tradition that would be a source of pride for all of us. Just imagine if another four times a year we all put forth the sort of effort that goes into pulling off a Thanksgiving Day feast.

I have decided to treat some Spanish people to a real American meal, the first for all of them as far as I know. None have been to the U.S. but they all admit to loving McDonald’s. Spanish people are not afraid to criticize your cooking, even when they are guests in your house. That is sort of a Spanish tradition and tends to keep people on their toes—it also makes people better cooks.

Parmesan Pork Chops

• 1 1/2 cups breadcrumbs
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 tablespoon sage (I pick this out in the country on my bike rides)
• 1 teaspoon lemon rind, grated
• 2 large eggs
• 1/4 cup flour, seasoned with salt and pepper
• Pork chops, about 1 inch thick (I suggest finding a good butcher shop to buy your chops and have them cut to order. My butcher in the Ruzafa market is as good as it gets. Here in Spain if you buy the whole unit of whatever it is you are buying it comes out cheaper. I was making this dish for four people but ended up buying enough pork chops to feed my entire extended family. I can’t help myself.)
• 1/8-1/4 cup butter
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 425F degrees.
2. Mix in bowl, bread crumbs, grated parmesan cheese, sage, grated lemon peel.
3. On a plate put flour seasoned with salt and pepper, coat chops with flour.
4. Dip in whisked egg.
5. Dip in bread crumb mixture.
6. Melt butter and olive oil in an oven-proof skillet.
7. Brown chops till golden.
8. Transfer to oven and bake till meat thermometer says 150 degrees, about 20 minutes.

Country Biscuits

• 2 cups flour (I used half whole wheat and half white flour)
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces (or use salted and leave out the salt)
• 3/4 cup milk

1. Combine flour, baking powder& salt.
2. Cut the butter into the flour using 2 knives or a pastry blender, keep cutting until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs.
3. With a fork stir in the milk, very gently, until a soft dough forms.
4. Don't over mix.
5. Place the dough on a baking sheet (jelly roll pan) and with floured hands press it into a 9" x 9" square.
6. Use a spatula or the dull side of a knife and cut the dough into 12 biscuits without actually cutting them apart.
7. Bake in 400F oven for about 15-20 minutes or until they are golden.
8. Transfer to a wire rack to cool for about 10 minutes.

Green Beans Almandine

• 1 lb. fresh green beans, trimmed
• 1 Tbsp. butter
• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup sliced almonds, toasted if desired
• 1 tsp. lemon juice
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/8 tsp. white pepper

1. Trim beans and rinse. In heavy saucepan, place green beans in cold water to cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until crisp tender. Drain well and set beans aside.
2. Melt butter in saucepan and add garlic and almonds. Cook, stirring constantly, until almonds begin to brown.
3. Add beans along with lemon juice, salt, and pepper and toss gently to coat.

Bon appetit!

Labels: Food, Spain Food

2:20 PM

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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

10:16 AM

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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

9:36 AM

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Friday, October 05, 2007

 

Simple Perfection

An Ode to Eggs, Potatoes, and Olive Oil (and salt, don’t be stingy with the salt.)

“Every family has its own method for making tortillas, their own secret.”
-3,000 Años de la Cocina Española by Rosa Tovar and Monique Fuller

The first thing we Americans learn upon visiting Spain is that a Spanish tortilla is completely different than the Mexican variety. A Spanish tortilla is a sort of omelet made with eggs and some other kind of filler. The Mexican variety of tortillas, either made with corn or flour, are hard to come by in Spain. We are lucky to have Mexico as our neighbor. Their food has permeated our culture on many different levels. Spanish food is less well-known to Americans and the tortilla is a good place to begin.

The Spanish tortilla is probably my favorite dish here in Spain. I get a craving for it on a regular basis. It is a perfect food in my opinion, a wonderful balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. Eggs are a fantastic source of protein, potatoes are as good a place to get carbohydrates as you can find, and olive oil is a fat made in heaven. And don’t forget about the salt. I thought I already told you about this?

Tortillas are sold in almost every bar in Spain. Tortillas are served as a tapa, alone like a slice of pie, or you can get a tortilla sandwich. You can get tortillas made with zucchini, artichokes, spinach, mushrooms, cheese, and just about anything else you can imagine. The most popular and what probably defines the tortilla in Spain is the tortilla de patatas made with potatoes. This is my personal favorite.

After returning from a few weeks in Spain a few years back I saw a sign for “Tortillas Españolas” in a Seattle restaurant I frequented. I was with a friend who had spent a lot of time in Spain so we were both anxious to get a fix of this great combination of simple ingredients. I was served scrambled eggs with potatoes—not the same thing as a tortilla. I didn’t complain because I really like the restaurant but I realized that no one who worked there, from the cooks and dishwashers, to the waiters and bartenders, had ever been to Spain to allow this dish to be called a tortilla.

This was when I started trying to make tortillas at home (notice the use of the verb “to try”). I am a fairly good cook and I can usually nail just about any recipe after a couple of attempts but my forays into tortillas generally ended in something considerably less than a success. I will give a basic recipe so that you can see how easy it looks on paper.

Tortilla de Patatas

6 eggs
3 pounds of potatoes
Olive Oil
Salt

Peel and slice the potatoes very thinly. Sauté the slices in a generous amount of olive oil being careful not to brown them. When the potatoes are cooked, drain off the excess olive oil. Beat the eggs in a bowl and add the cooked potatoes and salt. Transfer this to a sauté pan. Cook on one side being careful not to brown the mixture. Cover the pan with a plate and flip the tortilla and return it to the pan so the other side cooks. Reshape the tortilla with a spatula as the other side cooks. Repeat this again.

This sounds pretty simple and straightforward and it may be for some people. I had my share of disasters. I was becoming a bit discouraged until I watched a Spanish movie I rented about some street kids living in Madrid. One of the kids offers to make a tortilla for everyone. As they begin to eat it everyone spits it out because he didn’t even cook the potatoes ahead of the egg mixture, he just threw everything into a pan. This scene made me think that perhaps I wasn’t a complete klutz in the kitchen and there was more to this deceptively simple dish than what the recipe explains.

I have learned to cook this dish fairly well since I moved to Spain. I bought a special non-stick pan especially for tortillas. I have experimented a great deal with how I cook the potatoes. I used to bake the potatoes ahead of time if I was using the oven for something else. I found that this required that I use a lot less oil than is normally the case—not that I am really out to use less olive oil, I practically drink the stuff right out of the bottle. I thought that this method was a nice shortcut because sautéing the potatoes in oil takes forever. I have returned to the sauté method just because I am trying to be more authentic and they cook it this way for a reason. It tastes better.

Just what “authentic” means when talking about this icon of Spanish cuisine is difficult to define. Absolutely every Spanish person I have interviewed concerning this dish has their own truco, or trick. People’s recipes for tortillas are as individual and defining as fingerprints here in Spain, so be careful not to leave a half-eaten tortilla at a crime scene or they might track it back to you. My own recipe has been distilled from dozens of others and is still in the developmental stage. It may never leave that stage and move on to anything more permanent—it’s like the jazz solos of recipes.

While rummaging through the kitchen at my first apartment in Valencia, I came across an odd plastic thing that looked like a lid for something. My roommate back then told me it was for flipping tortillas. He never used it and instead preferred to use a plate. It was purchased by a former roommate who also never used it. In the spirit of integration, I never used it either but I took it with me when I moved to a new place. I began using it and I found it vastly superior to the plate method of flipping. The plastic flipper has a knob handle on one side which makes it easier to hold than a plate. I anoint it with a bit of olive oil before using (the Spanish use the verb untar, to anoint, whenever they splash olive oil on anything). They make a special pan for making tortillas called a vuelvetortillas, or tortilla flipper, but I don't know anyone who has admitted to using one. It's kind of like cheating in my book. some people cook one side in the pan and then they transfer the dish to the oven to cook the top part. This seems wimpy to me.

I have a few trucos of my own when it comes to making this dish. For example, I prefer a ridiculously high potato-to-egg ratio. I credit this discovery to the woman at the vegetable stand in the Ruzafa Market near my apartment. I told her I was going to make a six egg tortilla and she suggested I purchase two kilograms of potatoes. This seemed like a laughably large quantity of spuds but I loved the way it turned out. Instead of a potato omelet, it is more like potatoes with a thin veneer of egg. And I think that this bears repeating: Don’t be shy with the salt—that’s why they keep it in a big bowl by the stove instead of some wimpy shaker.

Tortillas are great because you can eat them any time of day. I eat them for breakfast sometimes, although you’d never find a Spaniard doing this. While having a beer or a glass of wine, a small portion on a toothpick makes a great tapa. Stuffed in a loaf of bread they make a hearty sandwich. A slice of tortilla makes an elegant side dish for a meal.

Spain seems to have wonderfully fresh eggs; even those you find in the big supermarket chains are quite good. I buy mine from one of the stalls at the market and they are always very fresh. The abundance of nice, fresh eggs probably explains a lot about why this dish is so popular here.

Labels: Food, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

12:02 PM

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