Portugal again

We´re spending a long weekend ambling around the beaches of the costa alentejana, where we were last spring. This time around it´s sunnier and hotter (though as cool as Estonia in August, easily) and we can swim in the cold waves.

We also eat the wonderful food, and that would be a good thing, except that I´ve decided that the Portuguese are either crazy or superheroes. The portions are so huge that we leave the table staggering and dazed. And I´m usually one who can pack away enough to keep a grown man on his feet on a Polar trek.

Ask for grilled fish and you will be brought a slice carved from Moby Dick, with a whole other dish of vegetables on the side, and salad. And all this after you´ve nibbled your way through bread and butter and cheese and olives as you wait (they´re generous, but they sure ain´t fast, you see).

So all I´m saying is: if you have any intention of having enough room to have coffee and a queijada or one of those little cream cakes, which you should, be sure to work up an appetite. 

More drawings here

Takeout fusion

Takeout fusion of the highest order. They used to serve this as an appetizer in No-Do, which was a very happenning restaurant in the mid-90´s.

Prawn crackers, the big, white, crunchy, very artificial looking Chinese snack, with salmorejo for a dip.

It´s as easy as blending some tomatoes and bread with olive oil and vinegar, and either frying up some crackers yourself or, much better, ordering them from a convenient restaurant that delivers. We are very happy to have a new one in the neighbourhood that´s so close and so efficient that food arrives piping hot and crunchy.

People go nuts for this, I warn you.

(And yes, again, the drawing has nothing much to do with it, but I like it, and it is sort of pink, like salmorejo)

Turning Japanese

How much Japanese cooking can a person do, who vows never to stuff, roll, or fry? Quite a lot, actually. Whenever I say I love to make  Japanese food, people eagerly say, "oh, you do sushi and tempura?". I fix them with a stony glare, or a pitying glance, or maybe just brush an infinitesimal speck of dust from my sleeve and say "there´s a lot more to Japanese food than tempura and sushi, you know. And no, I couldn´t do either of those to save my life".

I am broadminded in my definition of Japanese, and anything that has soy sauce and mirin and wasabi and sesame oil is Japanese enough for me. A scattering of sesame seeds over some white rice, eaten with chopsticks, and I´m there.

One of our favourite lazy dinners is a bowl of white rice topped with cut up omelette (made with a dash of sugar), slices of avocado, sesame seeds and a bit of nori. Dip the egg or avocado in soy sauce and there you are. A quick, beautiful, really quite Japanese looking dinner.

I might also marinate some defrosted salmon to go along with that, or throw in some smoked salmon, which always goes so well with avocadoes.

What I had never made is real sushi rice. I found the instructions intimidating. What with the kombu, and the soaking the special wooden instruments, and the soaking then resting the rice, and all that palaver of "gently fold the vinegar into the rice with one hand while you fan it with the other"...I mean to say, what? I need two hands to fold vinegar into rice if it´s not all to end up on the floor, thankyouverymuch. Fanning, indeed. No sir, I thought.

But yesterday the crushing heat of Madrid summer brought the solution. I have an electric fan in the kitchen, and what could be easier than mixing the vinegar-sugar-salt into the rice, inside a normal baking tray, while the electric fan did its sushi job and also made me not faint from the steam?

So there you go. Ignore the punctiliousness and the ritualistic stories and don´t let that Japanese aura of perfection put you off. After all, they invented those little junky packets of ramen, so shortcuts must be quite common in Japan. Just get yourself some mirin and soy and sesame oil and sake and start playing.

Leek and potato salad

Potatoes and leeks go together like Simon and Garfunkel, and it´s just a shame to limit their summer partnership to vichyssoise.
My favourite new thing is to add leeks vinaigrette to potato salad. Isn´t that somewhat brilliant? Raw onions are very popular in Spanish potato salads, but I hate to be reminded of my lunch all day long. Leeks, though, leeks are elegant and unobtrusive, and upgrade your humble potato salad.

So here it is:

Boil your potatoes as you would, and in another pan boil whole leek whites until tender but still with a bite.
Cut the warm leeks in shorter segments, mix them with the warm potatoes and add vinaigrette thinned down with a little water. Chopped boiled eggs and parsley can never go amiss.

Closed for the week

This is a post intended solely to turn everyone green with envy.
I am packing my brushes, pens, watercolour box, bottles, jars, papers and easel and setting off. I will be in La Granja, a beautiful place in the mountains. I am officially going to be working on a book about the gardens, but it will feel more like a picnic holiday.

The exhibition last month

For those kind souls who asked how it went, here are pictures of the opening, thronged, as you can see. The subject was culinary, as you might expect, and the portraits of famous brand names of the pantry bottled in gallon jars sold like churros. It was all perfectly loverly.

Making home made yogurt

It is well known that I am very lazy and refuse to cook croquetas or tortilla, am more than glad to buy roast chickens, would not dream of making my own jam and feel faint at the mere thought of cleaning anchovies for boquerones en vinagre. So severe is the case that I won´t go near most recipes that call for sepparating eggs or browning meat. I don´t fry, I don´t roll and I don´t stuff, and am constantly plugged to my freezer, Thermomix and rice cooker.

So you see that when I say that making yogurt is well worth your while, it´s true, and not the kind of annoying off-the-cuff remark of someone who can take apart a car and put it back together. The basic elemental yogurt you buy costs ten times more than what you´ll make and tastes nowhere nearly as good. And if you buy good milk, even organic, the economics of the thing really start to make sense. And it´s so so easy. 

Back when Abba were still together, my mother owned a yogurt making machine, and I´d always assumed that it was necessary for making yogurt, as a waffle iron is for making waffles. But like so many of my late seventies beliefs, this isn´t true. All you need is milk and yogurt and a bowl and time and a blanket. 

To further convince you of my laziness I won´t even bother to type the recipe, but instead direct you here. Though I´ll warn you that Heidi makes it sound much more complicated than it is (really, you just boil some milk, wait for it to cool down a bit, mix in yogurt, leave it to set somewhere warm). Just one piece of important advice given by my friend Cristina, dairy expert of Malasaña: to retain the heat the best thing is to put the yogurt bowl inside one of those insulated coolers one takes to the beach. Much better than blankets or shawls, whatever Ms Roden or Ms Colwin may say.

Make your yogurt int he evening in five minutes, shut it inside the cooler and awake next morning to thick, creamy, sweet tasting yogurt you got for pennies.

Strawberry gazpacho

Gazpacho is such a great soup that some people just can´t hold themselves in and wait for tomatoes to be good. The minute the thermometer flirts with 30ºC they´re off, and the resulting gazpachos can be a little bit boring and somewhat pale.
This is a version I was taught last week by Isabela Muro. Throwing strawberries in with tomatoes and olive oil into a blender may seem a little bit wacky, but it works very well. The strawberries give it sweetness and colour, and the whole thing is fruity and light and satisfying. The normal gazpacho is much much better, but this makes for a fun little change, and good sense if you must have gazpacho right now.

All you do is mix 1 kg. strawberries, 1 kg. tomatoes, 300 ml. olive oil, 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 1 garlic clove (seedling out and blanched beforehand). Blitz it in a stong blender, strain it with a chinoise and you´re good to go.

Strawberries

We had a strawberry discussion this weekend, and all agreed that the best we´ve had came from Aranjuez, and were grown in the open air. The great whopping plastic-raised fresón from Huelva is no love of ours. But. Apart from nísperos, it´s all there is, so we eat it very happily in all its possibilities:

plain
with sugar and yogurt
with chunks of pineapple
with whipped cream and meringues
crushed with whipped cream and sandwiched between two sponge cakes
with pancakes and caramelized apples

doubtless we´ll think up a few more before cherries begin to claim all the love.

Marion

It works! It really does. Yesterday´s pancake batter looked a bit dodgy in its plastic container, a bit more alive than yesterday, but the minute it hit the pan it made fluffy, perfect pancakes just the same.
I had two plates of pancakes with caramelized pear and a pot of tea ready in less time than it took J to change Pía and install her in a highchair. Mind you, he´s not fast, and has some issues with the straps in the highchair, but still, this was a lightning fast operation, and possibly the only way to make Mr.No-Breakfast go out into the world with a full stomach in the morming. Now I know.