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, July 23, 2009

 

Summer Menu

If you had to plan an ideal menu of Spanish and Mediterranean cuisine it would probably come close to what we had this past weekend at the country home of a couple who recently left my hectic neighborhood of Ruzafa for the peaceful hills of an agricultural community south of Valencia. It’s a startling contrast whenever I spend time at their place where I will spend days without hearing a car horn or a jack hammer—two instruments that are major contributors to the soundtrack of life in the city. We have always eaten well when we spend time together but these last few days were exceptional. I haven’t visited them in months and it was like we were making up for lost time in the kitchen and on the patio grill.

I had bought a huge supply of tomatoes which are on sale all over Valencia in the usual summer gold rush manner. I hauled almost four kilos of them along with me for the weekend. Upon arriving I almost immediately started making gazpacho. This is a dish that belongs in your refrigerator all through the summer months. It is also easy to make and open to a lot of personal interpretation and adaptation. It’s impossible to mess up and the only cooking required is when you drop the tomatoes in hot water to remove the skins. The important thing to remember about gazpacho is that after it has been left in the fridge to chill you will want to take it out and adjust the seasoning. My huge batch went from bland and uninspired to delicious after I added quite a bit more olive oil, garlic, and salt after leaving it overnight to chill.

One of the things that I most missed about Mediterranean cooking when I left Greece many years ago and returned to the United States were grilled sardines. I don’t think we have the tradition of eating these little fish except in canned form. It just so happened that my friends had just visited their local fish merchant and picked up about three kilos of very fresh sardines. Although the people along the Mediterranean think rather highly of sardines they aren’t willing to pay much for them. They cost about 2€ a kilo. The modest price of this variety of fish means that they sell quickly which insures that the quantity you buy is always fresh. Anyone who has done a bit of angling knows that fresh fish are harder to scale than older stocks; a small price to pay when preparing sardines—and cleaning three kilos of sardines is quite a bloodbath. I rarely ever cook sardines at home, mainly because I don’t have a grill and also I don’t want to drive my neighbors away with the smell they make while cooking. Grilled sardines are one of the few reasons I ever bother to go to a restaurant in Valencia. Of course the odor isn’t a problem when you have a grill on the patio of a country home.

We cleaned the fish and then sprinkled them with very coarse salt before placing them on a double-sided grilling rack over a hot charcoal fire. High quality charcoal is something my friend takes very seriously so he buys it in huge 40 kilo bags from an Argentine who supplies a lot of backyard barbequers in his area. When the sardines come off the grill you simply splash on a bit of olive oil and you are ready to serve. I don’t even bother with lemon. These sardines are about 20 centimeters (8 inches) in length so they have a healthy backbone. With smaller sardines I just eat them bones and all but on these the meat separates easily. After a swelteringly hot day the heat had waned considerably and we were able to eat outside on the patio. Other factors in our favor were the Mediterranean summer dining rules which allow you to begin an evening meal at 1 am. This was going to be a tough meal to top and it was only Friday.

I’m the kind of guy who brings along his own chicken when you invite him over for the weekend. Friday afternoon I had cut it into pieces and seasoned it with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, paprika, and garlic. I drizzled olive oil over all of it and put it in a covered glass dish in the refrigerator. On paper this doesn’t sound like the most imaginative dish I the world but it is amazing the results you get with a good charcoal fire. We had this chicken for lunch the next day and it was slow grilled to absolute perfection. The gazpacho came out well, if I do say so myself. A slice of bread and a glass or two of wine (who’s counting?) and we had another great meal.

There is a wonderful community swimming pool just a few blocks down the street so I headed down there a bit after lunch. As much cycling and running as I have been doing lately haven’t really prepared me to take my position on the podium of World’s Underwater Swimming Champion, a post I held for many years—at least in my own eyes. I could barely make one lap of the pool (25 meters? perhaps less) underwater without drowning. I used to be able to make it twice this distance. I am just out of practice as I haven’t been snorkeling since I moved to Spain and it’s been a long time since I really worked to improve my underwater swimming skills. If I ever want to be a Navy SEAL I had better get cracking.

None of us were even thinking about diner that evening until late into the night. Of course, there was enough gazpacho to withstand a month-long siege but we didn’t have anything else planned. I made an appetizer with some of the leftover sardines. I just mounted them on a thin slice of bread in the Spanish manner of montaditos. Along with a glass of white wine we were off to a good start to another fine meal.

My host whipped up a dish that should be in everyone’s repertoire: pasta aglio olio: pasta in a sauce of olive oil and garlic. This Italian standard has been mastered by every resident of that peninsula and has made into way into the diet of just about everyone else living on the Mediterranean. It is as simple as it is delicious. Boil pasta (tagliatelle in this case), heat a good amount of olive oil, add minced garlic, and toss the pasta in the oil. I make it with red pepper flakes as well. We served this with fresh basil and Parmesan cheese. People tell me that this is a late night dish in Italy, usually served after you have been out all night dancing or whatever. We call it “drunk food” in American where we are a little less moderate in our intake of beer, wine, liquor, shots, tequila, more beer, another round of shots, etc.

As he made the pasta he also started a huge pot of fish stock to be used with Sunday’s traditional Valencian rice dish. The stock contained two heads of rape (monkfish?), some galenas, a truly terrifying version of shrimp, and langostinos. A good stock is crucial for a successful Arroz a Banda that we would be making for tomorrow’s afternoon meal.

I feel stuffed just writing all of this down and I still have another big meal left to describe. I have previously posted a video for Arroz a Banda so I will spare us all this meal. I would like to say that he changed his recipe a bit this time around and added cuttlefish to the dish. I think that it is safe for me to say that I ate rather well last weekend.


Gazpacho

Labels: cooking video, Spain Food, Valencia Spain

1:05 PM

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Monday, July 06, 2009

 

Summer Lunch Menú del Día

Of course by “lunch” here in Spain we don’t mean lunch but the big midday meal they eat no earlier than 2 o’clock and as late as five or six on the hottest days of summer. And “lunch” is also being redundant as Menu del Día always refers to the midday meal. In most small Spanish restaurants they have what is called a Menu del Día which is a fixed price lunch where you have several choices between the three courses you are served, along with beer or wine and coffee. I have some very good friends visiting today so I am planning our Menu del Día.

As much as I like booze I don’t like to drink alcohol during the day. If I’m forced to drink anything I prefer it to be something light—maybe a glass of white wine sangría which will go well with this menu.

Papas Aliñas (Andalucía Potato Salad)

This has instantly become my favorite dish: potatoes marinated in olive oil and vinegar. This recipe comes from Andalucía as you may recognize by the way it is written. Up north we call potatoes “patatas” but in Andalucía—as well as everywhere in the Americas—Spanish speakers call them “papas.” You start by boiling small new potatoes in salted water until they are very tender. Before they cool completely peel of the skin with your fingers. While the potatoes are still warm pour on a bit of olive oil and then refrigerate. Hard boil a few eggs and refrigerate. Slice an onion thinly, marinate in wine vinegar and chill. Mix these three ingredients while adding more oil and vinegar. Add fresh, chopped parsley. What you are left with is a very satisfying potato salad.

Insalata Caprese (Tomato, Mozzarella, and Basil Salad)

I like to stack the these three ingredients on top of each other like pancakes and then serve with a balsamic vinaigrette thickened with corn syrup. I don’t remember where I learned how to do it this way but it sort of dresses up this simple classic. Nota very Spanish dish but at least its Mediterranean. Any excuse to use all of the great tomatoes I have is welcomed.

Pollo al Ajillo (Garlic Chicken)

Heat olive oil and add a couple of crushed, unpeeled cloves of garlic. When the garlic has browned add skinless chicken and cook on both sides but not too thoroughly. Remove chicken and reduce the heat. Add 3-4 cloves of finely chopped or pressed garlic to the oil and place the chicken pieces back in the pan. Make sure there is not too much oil in the pan (a couple of table spoons is about right). Add a cup of red wine to the pan and simmer. I like to serve this dish at about room temperature in the summer.

Labels: Spain Food, Valencia Spain

7:25 AM

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Friday, July 03, 2009

 

Youtube: The Spanish Grandmother I Never Had

I didn’t have a grandmother around to teach me how to cook. Growing up we were taught in my family to be very self-reliant. Need some washing done? Here’s the machine, here’s the soap, get cracking. Hungry? You know where the kitchen is. I moved into my own apartment when I was 17 and that pretty much sealed my independence. Most of my early culinary education came through the exigencies of my meager budget in college. I ate lots of bean and potatoes. These are still my two favorite food staples. Along the way I have picked up a few recipes here and there, usually a reflection of where I have lived and traveled: South America, Greece, all over the States, a lot of vacations in Mexico, and now Spain. My kitchen is like the food court at the U.N.

Most of what I learned about cooking has been through trial and error—just about the worst educational tool in my opinion. I’ve had few actual teachers. The internet has changed that problem. Now whenever I am attempting a dish for the first time I will find several recipes at different web sites and then I will scour Youtube to actually see the dish being prepared. With this method I have been exposed to some of the best cooking teachers you will ever likely find anywhere. The best cooking videos out there will walk you through a dish so well that even on your first attempt you will be able to proceed with utter confidence. Adiós trial and error. Don’t let the kitchen door hit you on the ass on your way out.

Just the other day a friend of mine returned from an extended trip to Andalucía. He was raving about a dish he found there called Pollo al Ajillo (garlic chicken). Perhaps it was his mouth-watering description or maybe I was just hungry at the time but I vowed then and there that this would be the very next thing I cooked at home. We had other topics to discuss that evening besides Pollo al Ajillo so I never got the specifics of how to prepare the dish. No problem, I have my Youtube grandmother at home to walk me through it.

My first attempt at Pollo al Ajillo was very acceptable. My Youtube tutor for this Spanish classic was very thorough and clear on every step in the process. I actually started to make one of my crappy videos to document it but my battery died in my camera. I have at least a half a dozen rechargeable batteries and it turned out that they were all dead. I guess I didn’t learn that whole “Be Prepared” thing from my years as a Boy Scout. I learned a lot of other cool things in Boy Scouts so I’m not going to beat myself up over not having any charged batteries lying around the house.

I talked to my friend later about my cooking venture and he suggested another way to make it by flouring the chicken before you fry it in the oil with garlic. Fortunately, I had the good sense not to cook all of the chicken yesterday in my first go at this dish—not because I was showing restraint but because my skillet isn’t big enough to hold an entire chicken. I will try it again today but this time with breaded chicken pieces.

I suppose it takes a certain amount of skill in the kitchen to be able to judge whether or not the instructional cooking video you are watching is worth its salt. If I am making a classic Spanish dish the first thing I seek out is authenticity. I don’t think that I am being a food snob when I say that keeping to the Spanish traditional way of making a dish is important to me—at least it is important when first learning something new. After you have mastered the original recipe then you can feel free to improvise but you need to build the foundation first. So don’t serve me scrambled eggs with potatoes and tell me it’s a tortilla de patatas.

I suppose that Youtube isn’t as good as having a Spanish grandmother to walk me through all of these great recipes, but it’s probably the next best thing. Unfortunately, Youtube doesn’t have a little dog to play with as do most Spanish grannies.

Labels: Spain Food, Valencia Spain

11:18 AM

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Monday, May 25, 2009

 

Valencia, Where You Really Are What You Eat

I have mentioned before that I live next door to the Ruzafa Market, one of the city’s biggest. I awake six days a week to the comings and goings there as trucks begin arriving before the sun rises and things don’t calm down until about 3 pm. It would be impossible for me to ignore food from the vantage point I have a couple of floors above all of this commotion. The whole of life on this Iberian peninsula is somewhat analogous to living next to this vast marketplace for vegetables, meat, seafood, and everything else you need to make just about any sort of Spanish meal you could imagine. Everyone must eat so to say that food is important to Spaniards doesn’t begin to define their attitude about cooking. It would be like saying that water is important to fish. There is a very strong bond that the Spanish have with cooking and it is something that I adopted very early in my residency here in Valencia.

One of the biggest tourist attractions here is the Central Market downtown. It is a big attraction not because there aren’t other noteworthy sites around town but because the Mercado Central is truly something to behold. Its magnificence speaks volumes about the relationship Valencianos have with food. Some cities have a big mosque or a lavish cathedral; Valencia has the Central Market. Its worshippers are devout and extremely loyal bordering at times on the fanatical—if you don’t believe me just try to get between some Valencian granny and her seafood purchase. I’m not saying that violence is common in the markets here but you just need to learn to avoid certain situations, usually those involving an octogenarian, her shopping pushcart, and your rightful place in line. Not only do you have to keep your eye on the golden girls but quite often they have a Yorkshire terrier tied up at one of the exits which are ready to rip your throat out at their command. Survival in this environment requires working knowledge of the law of the jungle mixed with the samurai code.

Something that is difficult for Americans to understand, or at least something that is completely different from our own way of life, is just how much food defines Valencianos, even more so than people from other parts of Spain. I have talking about this with a lot of people lately and at first everyone tells me that in Andalucía food is ridiculously important in day-to-day life, or that in Asturias they have a traditional cuisine second to none, and what about Granada which practically invented tapas? In reply I simply say “paella.” The response I get is either silence or, “Oh yeah, paella. Got me there.”

We Americans have our national flag and Valencianos have paella. Last year when Valencia Club de Fútbol was in the final of the Copa del Rey their fans laid siege to the area around the stadium in Madrid by making paellas during the tailgating parties, or whatever the hell you call them in Spanish. Paella became the battle standard of the contingent from Valencia. I don’t think any other region of Spain has a dish that is quite as iconoclastic as paella Valenciana. As far as the local identity is concerned, food plays almost as big a role as the language, whether that is Spanish or Valenciano.

Once you realize this you may forgive the people here for guarding their recipes for jealously. Change one single ingredient in paella or baked rice and you’ll never hear the end of it from your local friends. You can improvise all you want, just don’t call it by the name they use for that dish. This doesn’t mean that I don’t tease my Valencian friends half to death whenever I cook something. I like to invent enormously elaborate names for the dishes I cook if they detour from the local recipes that are written in stone. “I call this ‘dish rice made in a style remarkably similar to paella but I wouldn’t dare call it paella for fear that some old Valencian grandmother would drop dead if she even got a hint that some immigrant was calling a dish paella when he profaned this venerable recipe by adding a bit of sausage.’” I usually keep going on and on until someone tells me to shut up, and that the point is taken.

Improvisation and variation in cooking are fine but you need to know the basics which provide you with the true north on your gourmet compass. I take great pains when I first learn to make one of the local dishes so that I am as close to the traditional recipe as possible. You will find a certain amount of variation from one person’s version to the next but they are usually fairly similar. When I set out to make a local dish I compare several recipes and boil my version down from all of them assuring that what I make is pure, 100% Valencia.

I have a couple of gurus, so to speak, when it comes to Valencian cooking. One of them is la cocina de Juanry. I think he is about as authentic as you can get. He’s like the Valencian grandmother I never had although I don’t know how he would feel about this relationship.

Labels: Spain Food, Valencia Spain

12:19 PM

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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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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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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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Sunday, August 17, 2008

 

A lowly stove-top version of paella.

Paella

Almost everyone who knows a single thing about Spain knows that paella is one of the signature dishes of this country. Most foreigners probably even know enough about paella to give a fairly complete recipe: rice, green beans, garrafón (butter beans), chicken, rabbit, a bit of garlic, tomato, and saffron. At least this is the recipe for Paella Valenciana, give or take an ingredient or two. What most people don't know is that for people who live in Valencia, paella is not just what you call the dish, it is the event of sharing a paella with friends or family. I was going to a paella at the country home of friends who just recently moved from my Valencia neighborhood of Ruzafa.

I met another friend of mine, who also lives in Ruzafa, at our favorite bar. Not only is Adrian from Ruzafa but—except for brief excursions like the one today—you couldn't get him to leave this neighborhood of Valencia under the threat of violence. Like me, he feels that Ruzafa is the center of the universe. To leave the center of the known universe (after a beer) we had to take the #1 metro line going south from the Plaza de España station.

In just a few stops the metro rises out of the tunnels and glides out of the city, past agricultural communities with mostly Arabic names which stand as witnesses to Valencia's centuries of Muslim rule. Most words beginning with “Al” stem from Arabic. This prefix represents the definite article in Arabic and besides a lot of local place names, you find many Spanish words derived similarly. Here in the countryside of Valencia, riding through the orange trees which were first brought here by the Moors, you see strange names like Font Almaguer, Alginet, Alfafar, L'Alcúdia, Al Farp, Albal, and today's destination of Catadau.

In the countryside, the language of Valenciano is much more widely spoken. You notice this sharp contrast the moment you leave the city limits of Valencia. We are met at the tiny metro stop by our hosts, a Frenchman and a native Valenciana. This means that two out of the four of us are local. It only seems natural that the language changes from Spanish to Valenciano. Just when I get to the point where I am almost completely comfortable with Spanish, it's time to start learning another language.

I watch a lot of television in Valenciano. There is one show in particular that I try to see as often as possible that is about bicycle touring in the Valencia Community. I can understand the language rather well if I make a big effort but I rarely hear it spoken in the city. Between my knowledge of French and my growing fluency in Spanish, Valenciano shouldn't be too difficult to pick up if I can just find a good grammar book. As I slowly but surely master Spanish, doors are continually opening for me—like this weekend in the countryside. I can only imagine that learning Valenciano will open even more doors—not only in Valencia but in Catalonia to the north and the Balearic Islands where the language is also spoken.

The first thing you need to know about paella is that it is best cooked on an open fire. It is hard to find stove tops big enough to accommodate some paella pans which can be as big as several meters in diameter. The one we will be using on this evenig is perhaps only one meter in diameter which would still present a challenge to most kitchen burners. A wood fire provides an even heat for the entire pan at an intensity capable of keeping the rice at a boil.

If you ask a 100 people from Valencia for advice on how to cook paella, you will receive 1,000 different recipes and you may have to officiate a few fistfights. You won't find a dish more traditional to the culture and history of Valencia and yet everyone has their own set of variations. For true Valencianos, the ingredients won't be too different from those I mentioned; you may see red pepper strips added or snails but the basic ingredients I gave are written in stone...somewhere. Every paellero, or paella cook, will have his or her own tricks to the process.

Our host's trick is to first brown the rabbit and chicken in the hot pan and then remove it. Very unorthodox. Next, he added a can of tomato puree with a bit of garlic. Next come the green beans and the butter beans. When these have all cooked he adds a bit of water and returns the meat to the fire. More water is added and when this comes to a boil the rice is added along with the saffron. He also added a couple of small branches of dried rosemary. Once the ingredients are thoroughly mixed you don't stir the pan. It simply boils down until the rice is cooked. A paella cooked on a wood fire is truly a thing of beauty, not to mention the aroma.

So besides the dish itself, the word “paella” can be used to describe the act of eating paella together with friends. I have been to paellas with 50 people or more, huge affairs staged by the neighborhood committees, called casals. During Fallas in Valencia, these casals will have paella cook-offs right in the street. Wood fires are lit in the road and several paellas will be cooked at once. A true paella is more of an event than a dish or a simple meal.

I would say that four people is the minimum crowd for a true paella. You can order an idividual serving of this rice dish in almost any restaurant in town, but a true paella should be served among friends who share from the same pan. Sharing and large family-size portions are more the rule than the exception in most Spanish cooking. This fits in well with my own philosophy as I rarely cook anything except in huge batches sufficient for feeding ten people at a time.

I doubt there is a better place to share a paella with friends than on a patio in the Valencian countryside, in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean although I will probably keep looking. After a few brutally hot days we were blessed with a perfect evening. I even briefly considered putting on a sweater until I thought about how silly that would be after surviving temperatures reaching almost 40 degrees only two days ago. Instead of a sweater I opted for another glass of red wine.

Labels: Spain Food, Valencia Spain

9:35 AM

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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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Sunday, June 29, 2008

 

Summer Menu Changes

It is officially summer and it is officially very hot, but only if you are standing directly in the sun. My place has air conditioning but like most Spaniards, I don't bother turning it on—not yet, anyway. I sleep well with just a quietly oscillating fan pointed in my general direction; instead of being a shock to the system, a dive in the Mediterranean is a welcome relief from the heat; tomatoes are riper and fatter than ever; cold beer tastes better; bike rides are shorter and sweatier; and the summer menu is now in full swing.

Forget about using the oven. Even cooking on top of the stove is to be avoided at all costs, at least during the day. I don't even turn it on to make coffee in the afternoon, switching instead to a favorite beverage that is the national summertime drink in Greece but unknown here in Spain: the frappé. Spaniards will mix ice with their coffee during the summer months but that is a very imperfect substitute for an ice-cold frappé.

Frappé
In a cocktail shaker add ½ cup of milk to a cup of water. Add ice, Nescafé instant coffee and sugar. Shake vigorously and pour into a tall glass. Drink it with a straw.

A frappé is foamy and sweet and perfect on a summer afternoon. Unfortunately, they don't drink them in Spain so I have to make them myself at home. When I lived in Greece I would have to say that drinking a frappé at some little café on an island was about as close as I have ever come to perfection in this life. Now that the afternoon temperatures are soaring I try to get to that same place whenever I am at home to make a frappé for myself—I don´t believe I heaven but I know how to get there.

I made my first huge batch of gazpacho yesterday. Once I have my first taste of gazpacho in the summer I can't get enough. I will have a glass two or three times a day. I hope it's good for me but when it comes to my vices, I really don't care.

I rarely drink any sort of alcohol before evening, and it's much too hot to drink wine in the afternoon, but it's hard to turn down a glass of sangría. Sangria is something rather unique to Spain. I never came across anything similar in Greece, Italy, or France, but I may be wrong. There are as many different recipes for sangria as there are people making it. The important thing is that it be served cold and that some sort of red wine makes it into your glass accompanied by fruit. The rest is up to personal interpretation.

Sangría
Preferably in a ceramic pitcher, add red wine, a bit of Spanish brandy, lemon and orange juice along with slices of both fruits, any other sliced fruit that sounds good to you, sugar, cinnamon stick, and top off with something like 7UP. Serve very chilled.

I subsist on cold salads this time of year. I made something yesterday with olives, tuna, hard-boiled eggs, onions, red and green peppers, navy beans...I think you get the idea. I basically cleaned out my refrigerator and cupboards, threw it into a bowl, and dished it on to a plate.

Labels: Spain Food

10:36 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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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 27, 2007

 

Note To Self: Stop Eating!

I had my first cocido prepared by a real Spanish person today. Everything was almost ready when I walked in and the first first thing that I noticed was the absolutely huge stock pot on the stove. I immediately had a serious case of stock pot envy which I attempted to translate into Spanish and was then lectured on the finer points of Freud´s views on male and female roles regarding phallic motifs. Whatever dumb joke I has brewing in my head with regards to my stock pot envy was erased by a five minute discussion on psychoanalytic theory.

Something everyone learns when living and eating in Spain are the names for the different meals throughout the day. Desayuno is breakfast and consists of coffee and perhaps a piece of some sort of bread-based product. I´ve never been much of a breakfast person so I just stick with coffee. I drink about twice as much coffee as the average Spanish person and would give my left (insert vulgar body part here) for a 20 ounce cup of American brewed coffee in the morning. I should just break down and buy and American coffee maker but it´s a little late now; I am quite sure that I would now find American coffee to be too weak for my tastes—even in the morning. When I order coffee in a bar or restaurant I order a “cafe americano con leche, which is an espresso with almost double the normal amout of water and milk.

After breakfast comes almuerzo which means “lunch” in Spanish but in Spain it means a mid-morning snack, usually a sandwich and a beer or soft drink. This meal is taken between 10:30 and 12:00, más o menos.

Lunch is called la comida here so don´t let anyone catch you calling it almuerzo, or lunch. This is the biggest meal of the day. This is when normal Valencianos have their big rice dishes such as paella or baked rice. This is also the time when any self-respecting Spanish person would dine on a heavy dish like cocido. Make sure that you always wear loose-fitting pants to this meal.

Then comes the merienda, or the afternoon snack. If you haven´t noticed already, the Spanish eat a lot, or at least they do in theory. We have already had four meals and it is not even six in the afternoon. The merienda isn´t too well defined and only serves as a designator for whatever you shove into your fat pie hole in the time between lunch ( la comida ) and whatever you wolf down during before-dinner drinks. I need to take a meal break in just the amount of time it takes me to describe what these people eat during the course of a day.

Tapas aren't a big part of the culture in this corner of Spain but it´s not like Valencianos will say no when someone places a bit of food in front of them along side whatever it is that they have ordered to drink. I was actually quite disappointed when I learned when I first moved here that they don´t really have tapas here. After living here for a year I can rarely even look at food during this time of day that is set aside for tapas in other parts of Spain. Eating four meals previously in the day tends to weaken my appetite.

Late in the afternoon comes la cena, or dinner. I say late in the afternoon but what I really mean is really late at night, at least as far as dinner is concerned, dinner for an American. The Spanish don´t stop calling this part of the day "afternoon," so en la tarde (in the afternoon) can mean twelve o´clock at night. They usually only say buenas noches when they are going to bed. The evening meal is usually of a lighter fare than in the afternoon, at least in their way of thinking. “¿Arroz en la noche?,” Valecianos will recoil in horror when you tell them that you ate rice for dinner, yet they will eat a loaf of bread with their "lighter meal" and think nothing of it. Their views on diet and nutrition are more ruled by tradition than science or logic so I wouldn't bother trying to tell them otherwise.

For today´s afternoon meal I was having cocido. It is called puchero in Valenciano, or pagan as I kid my Valencian friends about their language. Puchero has most of the same ingredients as Cocido Madrileño except they also throw in meat balls which can contain pine nuts as a nod to their Mediterranean roots. Cocido/puchero is more of an event than a menu item. The cooking and eating process is highly regulated according to family and/or regional exigencies. Valencianos like to serve a first course of rice made with the stock of the boiling stew. Other people make noodles using the stock.

Echar una cabezada means “To take a nap.” This phrase comes in very handy after eating more than I can lift in one sitting.

Labels: Spain Food

5:50 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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Friday, December 14, 2007

 

Seafood paella: not my best effort in the kitchen.

Cooking by the Numbers

Some of you probably think that I have nothing better to do than spend the day shopping for the many ingredients used in some of the Spanish dishes I cook. To this all I can say is “touché,” very perceptive of you (Note to self: take on even more hobbies to fill up gaps in my free-time). Shopping can sometimes interfere with my other free-time activities so even I must look for ways to make short cuts. I can still pull off some pretty good meals even when I don’t have time to shop thanks to the packaged arreglos, or arrangements they sell in Spain.

An arreglo de flores is a flower arrangement in Spanish and these arreglos are arrangements of ingredients needed for certain Spanish dishes. To make Cocido Madrileño there are separate arrangements available in supermarkets for vegetables and meat combinations that go into this dish. There are also arrangements available for baked rice, traditional paella with rabbit and chicken, puchero (Valencia’s idea of cocido), as well as frozen arrangements which are handy during the off season for certain vegetables.

The butcher shops and vegetable stalls at the market are only too happy to make you a custom arreglo for whatever it is you are cooking, but there are times when I just don’t feel like going to the market, or I get the urge to make something after the market has already closed (usually by about 2:30 in the afternoon). For my first seafood paella, or paella de mariscos, I chose to use a frozen seafood arrangement I bought at the big supermarket by my apartment. I wasn’t quite sure if I would be able to pull this off properly so I didn’t want to spend a lot of time and money buying the seafood ingredients at the fish market.

This arrangement comes pre-packed and frozen with clams, mussels, whole shrimp, and squid. It’s easy enough to make as you just sauté the green beans in the paella pan, add fish stock along with the contents of the arreglo and bring to a boil. Then you are the rice and peas and simmer until the stock has all been cooked off—call it “seafood paella for dummies.” It wasn’t exactly my most shining moment in the kitchen but it wasn’t bad. I can’t see myself making seafood paella very often because I much prefer the traditional Valencia paella with chicken and rabbit.

Another time-saving trick that every self-respecting Spaniard knows about is the Fabada Asturiana and Cocido Madrileño available in cans made by Litoral.® I’ll bet that there is at least one can of this in every kitchen in Spain for those food emergencies when you are really hungry and don’t have time or the desire to cook. I used to have a can of the Fabada Asturiana on my shelf but I just had it for breakfast (something no Spaniard would attempt).

I have also bought pre-made tortillas that aren’t bad at all and certainly save a lot of time. It takes me at least 45 minutes to make a tortilla de patatas. I enjoy making this dish so much that I rarely lower myself to buy a pre-made model, but it’s nice to know that the store-bought ones are worth eating.

Labels: Spain Food

9:48 AM

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Monday, December 03, 2007

 

I think that I look Spanish in this picture.

I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can!

As I write these words I am listening to the sounds of the Spanish, flamenco-influenced group, Ojos de Brujo which I highly recommend to everyone. I try to listen to as much Spanish music as I possibly can although I have been on a bit of a Beatles bender after listening to a Caetano Veloso CD at a party the other night where he covers the wonderful Paul McCartney song from the Revolver album called For No One. What I’m trying to say without going off on a three page detour about The Beatles is that I am trying to insinuate myself as much as I can into the music of this country.

Besides what I read on the internet, I read only in Spanish. My shelf of books I have read in Spanish is growing. I keep a notebook where I put definitions for the Spanish words I have to look up for every book that I read. I like to go back and reread the book soon after I finish to further beat this new vocabulary into my head. I read the local newspaper here in Valencia called Levante. It is a treat to be able to read Calvin and Hobbes in Spanish. I also like to read the Madrid daily, El País, if there is one lying around on top of the bar.

I have mentioned that I share a place with two Spanish women and we speak only in Spanish. With this sort of living arrangement that I have forced myself into, there isn't any room to hide, linguistically speaking.

The only time that I ever speak anything other than Spanish is when I go to a local pub here in Ruzafa. It is owned by two brothers from London and the clientele includes a few British and American expats. I like to go here because the owners are terrific guys but I also speak more Spanish when I go here than when I go anywhere else by myself here in Valencia. The place has a true community feel to it and everyone knows each other. It is one of the friendliest places I have ever frequented. I almost always end up talking with the Spanish customers for most of my time in this joint.

I went to a birthday party over the weekend where I was the only English speaker. Talk about a night of Spanish overload. On a side note, if you are at a party in any country where Spanish is spoken and a lot of dancing doesn't break out spontaneously, check the address because you are obviously in the wrong place.

I rarely eat anything other than Spanish food. I heard somewhere (probably in a movie) that the Viet Cong could smell the Americans in the jungle because they ate American food while they were in Viet Nam. If anyone is trying to pick up my scent all they are going to get a whiff of is pork products, tortillas de patatas, or whatever other local dish I happen to be obsessing over this week*.

It may seem from all I have said so far that I am rather proud of myself. The truth is that I think my Spanish sucks. I can’t believe that I still struggle sometimes with some of the most basic things in Spanish. Learning the language has been a slow, uphill struggle with no end in sight. The good news is that I love it here and I’m having the best time of my life.



*Esgarraet

This is another typical Valencian dish of dried cod and roasted peppers. Speaking of learning Spanish, I had to buy the dried cod for this dish at the stall where I usually buy my olives. I ordered a fistful of the shredded fish (un puñado de migas de bacalao) and the guy complimented me on my Spanish. I could have kissed him.

Dried Salt Cod
Red Bell Peppers
Garlic
Olive Oil

Depending on the cod you buy, you may have to soak it in water to remove some of the salt. I bought what they call Bacalao Inglés (English cod) which is low in salt and really tender. I only soaked it for a few minutes and it was ready to eat. You may also have to boil it for a bit depending on what you buy.

Next you need to roast the red peppers in the over until they are thoroughly cooked and then remove the skin. On a side note and to steal a joke from The Simpsons, if you aren’t roasting peppers in your oven every time you turn it on, you are wasting more energy than Ricky Martin’s girlfriend. Roasted peppers in olive oil is a staple dish all around the Mediterranean.

The guy in the olive stall told me to then marinate the peppers and cod in separate dishes with plenty of olive oil. You also add very finely minced garlic to both dishes. Both the fish and the peppers should be cut into tiny nibble-size pieces. A bit of bread and some wine and you are on your way.

Labels: Spain Food, Valencia Spain

9:53 AM

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

 

Boredom/Hunger

The words for “boredom” and “hunger” are the same in Spanish. OK, that is not true. It is true that my own body cannot distinguish between boredom and hunger so I usually eat or cook if I am bored. I spend a good portion of every day foraging around my little corner of Spain for good things to eat. I have become quite an expert on the bakeries in my neighborhood of Ruzafa. I can ride past a bakery at full speed on my bicycle, look in the window, and tell you whether or not the bread they sell is worth buying.

I am also on the look out for new cooking utensils. I am not able to do the drive-by appraisals of these stores as I do with the bakeries as the joints that sell kitchen wares don’t have much in plain view from the street. I already have a very well stocked kitchen but there’s always some new gadget that I come across that I can’t seem to be able to live without once I figure out what it is for. I am equal parts “old school” and “gimmicky” when it comes to kitchen gear.

I love my clay baking dish, or olla de barro as they are called in Spanish. I am constantly looking for new things to cook in it. Its main purpose is for the Valencian staple dish of baked rice (arroz al horno or arross al forn in Valenciano). There is more to a clay baking dish than baked rice and I’m out to discover as many recipes as possible, even if I have to make shit up. Whenever I walk into a restaurant and they have food displayed in these clay dishes my little heart skips a beat as I visualize making the same thing at home. I adapted the following recipe from something I saw somewhere.

It was a dish with chicken leg quarters baked with tomatoes; everything else in my recipe I made up. I have to say that it is one of the best things that I have invented and certainly the best thing that I have cooked for the first time.

Chicken and garbanzos

4 chicken leg quarters
16 oz can of whole Italian tomatoes
2 cups cooked garbanzos
3-4 garlic cloves
1 onion
Sal, pepper, saffron

Clean the chicken and season with salt and pepper. I shredded a couple of cloves of garlic and rubbed the paste on the chicken. In the clay baking dish (mine is about 18” in diameter) add the can of tomatoes. Squish the whole tomatoes with your hands so it makes a sort of rough sauce. Add a chopped onion to this mixture along with the saffron. I used a pre-packaged saffron and seasoning mix that they sell here in Spain. Place the chicken pieces on top of the sauce and place in a pre-heated oven (approximately 370° but I still just guess with the centigrade oven I work with). When the top side of the chicken has browned take the dish out of the oven. Add the cooked garbanzos to the dish as you turn over each piece of chicken. When the other side of chicken has browned you can take it out of the oven. I made rice to go along with it although I also bought a good loaf of bread just to cover all of my starch bases.

If I make this again I will use the frozen garbanzos that another Spanish cook recommended to me and add them at the beginning. I realize that for Americans unable to find inexpensive saffron this dish is sort of cheating. Saffron added to raodkill would make a pleasant dish. Or perhaps saffron isn't so expensive in the States these days. As low as the dollar is now, everything from Europe should be dirt cheap. If anyone in the States can comment on the price of saffron there I would be very interested.

Labels: Spain Food

9:12 AM

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Tuesday, November 06, 2007

 

Cocido de Juan

Cocido Madrileño

I have now made it all around the weather dial in this particular corner of the Mediterranean and I know what lies before me in the coming months. I can still ride my bike in shorts and short sleeves during the warmest part of the sunny afternoons, but a jacket is now required in the late afternoon and evening dress codes. My new apartment has heat, unlike last year’s model, although I haven’t needed to turn it on just yet. I do close the windows when the afternoon sun slips around the side of my building. The sun only seems to inhabit a few streets in the south-by-southwest corner of the city. It drops below the buildings somewhere more south than west this time of year and avoids you like someone who owes you money. Each day it leaves work earlier and earlier and wakes up less vigorously. Winter is coming it would seem, although we don’t really get much of one here in Valencia.

The Spanish, who are so quick to undress almost completely during the hot summer months, will just as quickly resort to their winter wardrobes at the first hint of cooler temperatures. While foreign tourists are still at the beaches trying to milk a few more days of tanning, the locals are bundled up in heavy parkas and complaining about the cold. I don’t want to be the one to tell them that the winters here shouldn’t even qualify as winters. They are more like a six week chilly period between fall and spring, more just dates on the calendar than a meteorological event. I pity any Valencianos who are forced to endure a real winter somewhere.

Along with the change in clothing there is also a marked contrast in what people cook during the winter months. Grilling and cool salads are replaced with baked goods and pots requiring several hours on top on the stove. Longer cooking times also seem a lot more appropriate during the colder months. The processes of cooking are as important as the end product when people are trying to keep warm.

Cocido Madrileño is a hearty meat stew with vegetables and garbanzo beans that, while generally attributed to the capital city, is a traditional winter dish throughout Spain. Like almost every other dish here, you will find as many different recipes for it as there are people cooking it. A few things about this dish seem to be standard: the meats and the garbanzos. Everything else is up to personal interpretation. The meat part of the dish includes pork bones, a boiling hen, bacon, chorizo, and morcilla (blood sausage). I can’t believe that I have yet to make a foray into this traditional dish from Madrid since I am such a fan of beans and stews. I think that I have shied away from it because I have had so many conflicting opinions on just how I should go about putting this dish together.

It’s not only the recipes that vary but also just how to go about eating the dish once you have finished cooking. Some versions call for the broth to be set aside and mixed with pasta noodles. Some people cook the vegetables (cabbage, potatoes, carrots, celery) separately along with the chorizo so that they don’t have the life cooked out of them in the stew pot. This will reduce the flavor of the broth so maybe you should add vegetables to both pots. Instead of avoiding this dish because of all of the varying recipes, I will just try to adapt as many different ideas as I can into forging my own variation. It’s not like you can go very wrong with a dish of garbanzos, a couple kilos of various types of meat, and vegetables.

The easiest thing to do, especially for the beginners, is to buy the pre-packaged meat and vegetables called Arreglo de Cocido. The meat package comes with a bit of pork rib, bone, pork tenderloin on the bone, beef, bacon, and chicken. The vegetables come with celery, carrots, beets, leeks, and something called chirivia which I can’t identify or find in a dictionary. I have decided to go for the easy method and just throw all of this into a pot with the garbanzos that I have pre-soaked. The only other ingredient I have added was water, bay leaves, salt, and pepper.

The garbanzo beans take forever to cook, even after I pre-boiled and soaked them. After almost two hours of simmering I added some peeled pieces of potato to the pot and seasoned it with saffron.

I don’t even know what cocido is supposed to taste like since I have never had it before. It is something that you won’t find in most restaurants here; I have never seen it on a menu. It is one of those traditional dishes that are made almost exclusively at home. It isn’t a particularly sophisticated dish but I’m sure there are a lot of subtleties that have escaped me on this first attempt.

Labels: Spain Food

5:46 PM

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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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