Cocido Madrileño

Cocido means boiled. 

It sounds simple, and it is. Hunks of meat, a bunch of chickpeas, some vegetables, water, time. Everywhere where there are pots and pans and beans and bones there is some sort of cocido.

However, half the point of cocido, or puchero, or potaje, berza, olla, fabada, caldo or escudella, whatever you want to call it, is to make it into an exercise of nostalgia. You make the type they make where you are from. And if you don't have someone back in the old village who kills a pig and can send you a few chorizos, you will at least find a market stall with a charcutería from your region, because the butcher is sure to have someone back home sending him the good stuff.

And then you will make it and eat it and argue with your friends the relative merits of the cocido montañés over the cocido maragato, as the case may be. And you may have to loosen a button or two, and a grand time will be had by all.

I, of course, come from Madrid, which also happens to have the best cocido of them all. Naturally. So I skip the arguing part.

Cocido in Madrid means chickpeas, not beans.  It has beef, and ham, and chorizo and morcilla and tocino and chicken. And potatoes and cabbage. And tomato sauce. We serve the broth first, with noodles, which is basically the only difference with most of the others.

As I say, half the point is in the experience. In going to market on a Saturday morning, queuing, maybe even fighting a little, getting some advice, wheedling a couple of extra marrow bones from the butcher, stopping for a caña on the way back. Obviously I can't do that in Aberdeen. Even if  there was a market, I wouldn't find all the ingredients I need. 

Except that I've discovered that if you take the broad, sweeping view, and attack the thing in a can-do spirit, you can make a wonderful exile's cocido. My version is unorthodox, but it's easier. Also, because it's not really cocido madrileño it can stand in for most of the regional versions. It is as heretic to call this a cocido as it would be to call it a puchero, so go ahead and make it and call it whatever you want.

What I do is boil the meat and chickpeas, sautee the sausages, and serve the cabbage as a salad. Different textures and colours , and it's pretty quick, you'll see.

First off, shopping. Potatoes, chickpeas and cabbage are all easy. The shin of beef, also. Here it's cut like osso buco but that's ok. There is no jamón serrano, but there are beautiful smoked ham hocks. There are no boiling hens, and for my streamlined method I can't use normal chicken, so I do without. Likewise the tocino is off the books. There is enough pork fat anyway. For morcilla I refuse to substitute haggis, because, you know. Enough already. 

The chorizo found here is not very good. Instead, I buy the very excellent local pork sausages, and hit them with garlic and pimentón. It is awesome.

Now, for the method. Quantities are for 4/6.

Put  500 gr of  chickpeas, unsoaked, in a 6 litre pressure cooker. Add a smoked ham hock, two pieces of osso bucco or a single 1 kg piece of beef shin (or oxtails, or tongue. Whatever you have). A bay leaf, carrot and whole onion and celery stick are nice.

When it comes up to pressure, give it 40 minutes and let it drop naturally.

This takes about an hour altogether.

In the meantime you can shred a head of white cabbage and dress it simply with a bit of raw garlic, cumin, olive oil, vinegar and salt.

All this can be done ahead, first thing in the morning, or even the day before.

When it's almost time to eat, cut up the sausages into chunks the size of a walnut. Sautee them over high heat in your largest frying pan. When they're crusty and golden, add a spoonful of pimentón and a couple of crushed garlic cloves. Swirl it around, and put it on a platter so as not to burn the garlic or the pimentón.

Now, when you open the pot you'll see that you have tender meat and a lovely golden broth. First, fish out the vegetables and throw them away. 

Now, take out the meat and put it on a platter in large chunks. The marrow bones are the best bit and you should probably stake them out. Cook's treat.

Strain the broth. You can heat it up in a separate pan and boil some tiny noodles in it. Or simply serve it in mugs or consommé cups. This is, without a doubt, the single most delicious soup you will ever have. Just saying.

When that is over, have the meat, chickpeas and fake chorizo, with the fresh and zingy cabbage slaw.

If you have very hungry people to feed, or more than you expected, or you are counting on having leftovers, you could consider boiling some potatoes while you make the salad. 

This is not essential but highly recommended, since it gives you a higher chance at achieving the highest purpose of cocido: having ropa vieja the next day, and arroz del señorito after that (I promise to post about the leftovers).

Illustration is a sketch copied from a photo in Jerusalem. 

Merluza en salsa verde: hake in parsley sauce.

Merluza en salsa verde is hake in green sauce, but Spanish green sauce is nothing like Italian green sauce. Same words, wildly different concept. Theirs is punchy and zingy and bright, ours is sedate and quiet to the point of dullness. You can add clams and shrimp as much as you like, it´s not an exciting dish.

It´s old fashioned , but the ingredients are too expensive for it to have peasant cachet. We are deep in bourgeois cuisine, and to make things worse, the sauce is thickened by flour. Beyond the pale, really.

Comfort food doesn´t not come more comforting than this, though. White fish, poached in a parsley sauce, over white rice, is perfect for frazzled minds or recovering stomachs. It´s very easy to make, and quick, and so soothing and calming that it might very well put you on the way to recovery so fast that you´ll be wanting that brash Italian salsa verde next.

The classic fish to use is hake, but any white fillet you can find will do, and if it´s more sustainable, so much the better. I have qualms when I buy hake, but here it´s a cheap, unwanted fish, which is weird and I just can´t pass it up.

So anyway: coat the bottom of a skillet with oil, add some chopped garlic and when it dances, chopped parsley. You can add a bit of butter and some shallot and it will be inauthentic but wonderful.

Now a spoonful of flour. Once it dissappears, begin adding stock little by little. It should be fish stock, but vegetable or light chicken or even water is fine. It will thicken, you will stir, add more stock, thicken again, and so on until it will not thicken more, and you will have a thin but recognizably saucy sauce. Now let it cook for a couple of minutes, add your fish, cover and wait until it´s cooked through.

If you have clams then add them with the fish, but remember they hold a lot of liquid so do a thicker sauce.

Serve over rice, plain steamed white rice. Nothing else. An orange afterwards, at most, and maybe some mint tea. This is a quiet, serene meal.

The ultimate chorizo sandwich

A chorizo sandwich, as sold in every bar and corner shop across Spain, is nothing more than chorizo slices, sandwiched between bread. The quality of the chorizo and the bread, and the generosity of the perpetrator are the only factors that change.

So it´s not a very good sandwich, really. One dimensional, at best. Inedible, at worst.

Unless you take a little bit of care, and then it is pretty darn tasty.

You need a baguette, a ciabatta or a small loaf of good bread.

You need some proper ibérico chorizo, sliced thin. And it has to be eating chorizo, not cooking chorizo.

Then, taking inspiration from the Majorcan way with sobrasada, you need hot mango sauce, or, failing that, apricot jam mixed with chili sauce.

Heat the oven to 180ºC. Spread the cut baguette with the sauce, layer a fair amount of chorizo slices (be generous. think about your arteries some other day). Close it, wrap it in foil, squash it a little and put it in the oven.

Take it out when the outside is very crunchy, 15 or 20minues. The orange fat will have oozed from the sausage, mingled with the hot, sweet sauce, and soaked the bread.

So far, so heavenly.

But to take it up a notch, serve alongside "ensalada de matanza". This means "pig-killing salad" and is a Spanish slaw, served in Escolástica´s village at matanza time.

Slice some cabbage as thin as you can, and dress very simply with olive oil, salt, Sherry vinegar, a dash of powdered cumin and crushed raw garlic. Not too much of any.

This will provide crunch and freshness, and make the chorizo sandwich into a balanced meal. Or almost.

Spanish Rice, pressure cooked

Mystery solved. Laura of Hip pressure cooking asked me for a recipe for Spanish rice, and I was flummoxed. There´s no such thing as Spanish rice in Spain, I said, and gave her a recipe for arroz caldoso, which is Spanish, and rice, and very good.

Then, a couple of weeks ago I started to cook a rice that I call Emma´s rice, and then I understood. Emma is from Ecuador, so to me this is a recipe from far, far away, but in the USA Ecuador and Spain are just as Spanish. So we have a winner; a simple, winsome rice-and-chicken dish, easy to make and, in the pressure cooker, lightning quick.

And very much by the way, I have finally succumbed and opened a Twitter account, since two children, a job, a husband and two blogs weren´t enough of a drain on my time. You can find me as @Marujapolar.

Spanish rice

Chop onion, red pepper, garlic small and sautee them until the onion is transparent.
Next, turn some chicken pieces, the size of a walnut, in this mix. You can brown them if you like but I don´t bother. Pour a glug of Sherry or white wine and let it bubble away.
When this is ready, add two cups of washed and drained long grain rice and let it soak up this goodness.
Now you can put in a few saffron threads and some turmeric, or nothing at all if you don´t want a yellow colour.
Add two cups of broth, close the lid.
Give it three minutes under pressure and let it come down for seven more.
Open the lid, fluff the rice, throw in some frozen peas that you´ve microwaved for a minute, and voilá, Spanish rice.

Serve with hot sauce and plantain chips, or plain corn chips and salsa.

Quick squid: chipiron plancha

I´ve read many times the rule about squid: cook it fast for a minute, or slow for an hour, unless you want to eat rubber rings.
I usually go for the slow, since it seems easier to control; you let the thing simmer and can try and see if it´s ok. The flash method seemed a bit scary.

However, once you try it you see it really is the easiest thing, and so good. We had a couple of small squid and a bunch of samphire, a salty, crunchy seaweed, with very cold beer before dinner and it was just the thing.

Ingredients

Squid, as much as you like but at least one per person
salt, pepper, parsley, lemon juice, olive oil

Marinade the cleaned squid with the salt, pepper, parsley, juice and oil.

Heat a non-stick pan as high as you can and when it´s hot throw the squid on it. It will curl and contract quickly. The second it´s opaque, take it out. It´s almost impossible to undercook.
Your kitchen probably won´t have the power to turn it crunchy golden like the planchas of tapas bars, but it´s still going to be very good. If you´re doing a lot then do it in batches, so you can control the thing.

Boiling octopus

I´ve written about pulpo a feira before, and octopus salad. Always, I began with the instruction "buy some boiled octopus".

But then I moved to the northernmost reaches of civilization, to a place where octopii are rare, and when found, small and raw. If you´re lucky, they will be clean. If you´re not, you´re in for an interesting ten minutes gouging yucky stuff from the insides of the head. You´ll never believe how much stuff can fit in there.

So anyway, here are instructions for boiling an octopus. Once it´s done, you only have to proceed to the other recipes.

It´s very easy, as long as you follow two rules:

I have only done this with the small octopii (?) I find here in the North Sea, but in Spain you´d bring home a great whaking beast, so it´s best to make this for a party.

First, freeze the octopus. Ask the fishmonger if it has been frozen before, and if it has then you´re free to go. Freezing breaks up the whatever technical term it is so that it is tender.

Put it in the fridge to defrost overnight (or, you know, waive all health and safety advice and leave it on the counter for a shorter while. it´s what I do)

Bring a big pan of water to the boil (no need to salt). Add a bay leaf and a a few peppercorns.

When it´s boiling, drive a hook through the octopus´s head and plunge it into the boiling water. Count to three, and take it out.

Wait for the water to come back to the boil and repeat the process three times.

This ensures that the skin won´t break up and it will look prettier.

Put it back in the water, cover and leave to simmer for about 90 minutes, by which time it should be tender.

Or, if you are using a pressure cooker, leave for 30 minutes and let the pressure come down on its own.

A brilliant shortcut for lentil soup

I suppose the last person (possibly the first, too) to be excited by a pot of lentils was Esau. So I won´t say that this is exciting news, but, well it´s certainly changed the way I cook lentils, and that´s something.
It´s a trick I read about in the River Family Cookbook, and it couldn´t be simpler; add red lentils to your pot of brown lentil soup. Genius. Why?
Because the red lentils dissintegrate during cooking, which thickens the soup without your having to bring out the blender.
This works with any lentil soup recipe you might use. My usual method is to heat some oil in the pressure cooker and while it heats to chop a stick of celery, an onion, a clove of garlic and a carrot in the food processor. When this has softened slightly I add a cup of brown lentils and a cup of red lentils, a peeled potato, water to cover by about an inch, and a small bay leaf. I cover, bring up to pressure and leave it for ten minutes (some sources say less time but I hate a crunchy lentil).
You can start with bacon before the vegatables go in, or add chorizo or any sausage, but I like my lentils plain.
Once they´re cooked, add salt or stock powder, a dash of sherry, a knob of butter and a squeeze of lemon. Wonderful stuff.

Rice cooker flan

Since I am, oficially, and until the match is over, trembling like a jelly, or shaking like a flan, here is one, to follow with the wholesome easy pudding theme.
Mind you, when I say a flan, I mean a shortcut flan, of course, not your blissful platonic ideal of a flan, of the sort that quivers gently in a bain marie for an hour after being infused for half. No, my flan is whizzed cold, goes into little ramekins that are covered any old how and put, unceremoniously, in the steamer basket of a rice cooker, which makes it fit neatly into many a midweek dinner preparation.

The recipe:

Take a meassuring jug, pour 333 ml. of milk, add two eggs, a few drops of vanilla extract and two spoonfuls of sugar. Blend it briefly, or just beat it with a fork until it´s all well mixed.
Now you can make caramel and coat four ramekins, which is easy but might be more fiddly than you want. It will still be great without it.
Pour the milk and egg mixture. This quantity makes four stingily filled ramekins, or three full ones. Put them in the steamer basket and cover them with one large piece of foil or clingfilm, tucked under them, or individually, whatever you´re in the mood for.
Put the rice and water in the big bowl, set the steamer rack on top, plug the thing and when you hear the clack sound that indicates the rice is going into "warm" mode, take a look at the custards. If they look like they´re not totally set, leave them a few minutes, but they´re probably done.
Put them in cold water to cool, which they´ll have done by the time you´ve finished your meal.
We had these yesterday with some Scottish strawberries and they were awsome.

(You can also make this in a normal steamer, in which case you can up the quantities to 3 eggs and 500 ml milk, and stack the ramekins. My rice cooker only fits four.)

Psychic Octopus, a feira

It has to be octopus, right? I´ve never cooked a real whole octopus in my life, and I´m not suggesting that you do. If you´re in Spain, or Greece, or somewhere civilized like that, then you can just amble down to the market and buy a couple of tentacles, boiled by your fishmonger. You can then slice at home, to be laid on slices of plain boiled potatoes, sprinkled with pimentón and coarse salt, and drizzled with olive oil. That´s it. Pulpo a la gallega, couldn´t be simpler.If you don´t, and I for one would have to look high and low to find some pulpo right now, then you can boil the potatoes and put some slices of ham on top, before doing the paprika/salt/oil thing.I´m sure Paul would prefer that version.

Not your basic elemental Pepito

After months of bot being allowed to eat rare red meat, I´m craving a burger bigtime. But I think burgers are best left to professionals, and are best had in greasy, smoky places, and I´m not about to take my precious new baby there, yet, lest he come back smeared with ketchup. A good home alternative? A Pepito.

Ask for a pepito anywhere in Spain and you will be given a steak sandwich.
If you´re lucky, it will be a thin, juicy paillard type thing, and the oil and meat juices will soak into good, crunchy bread. If you´re not , which is more often the case, you will receive a slab of grey cardboard hunkering between two slabs of nothing bread.
This is sad. This is not the sort of sandwich one wants as the namesake for a son and heir. It is a sad testament to the terrible lack of imagination most of Spain gives it sandwiches.
To my mind, a proper pepito should have something sharp, like mustard or horseradish. Something crunchy, like cornichons. Greens, like ruccola. Butter, if J isn´t looking. And some slippery onions, either just made, or in the lovely form of onion jam.
As for the meat, I favour a thick steak, salted, then marinated overnight in whatever´s around. This time it was olive oil, two smashed cloves of garlic, a sprinkling of thyme, a splash of sherry and some fish sauce, but anything goes.
Sear it so it´s black outside and pink within, let it rest while you assemble the sandwiches on a good fresh baguette, and open a couple of beers. Slice the meat thin, and sneak a few slices as you put it inside the bread.
You´ll have to agree that this is a beautiful thing, and I for one would be more than glad to share a name with it.

Empanada gallega

Empanada gallega is a pie from Galicia. It has a top and bottom crust and traditionally it´s a vehicle for leftovers; any bits of meat or small pile of seafood can become a gorgeous pie with some dough and a lot of slippery slow-cooked onions.

Being one of those traditional homely dishes, there are as many versions as there are grandmothers. The dough can be yeasted, use baking powder, or nothing. You can use the oil of the sofrito in it, or not. Liquids for the dough can be orange juice, white wine, beer, or milk. Strong words are sometimes exchanged on the subject of putting tomatoes inside. And so on.

As for the filling, anything goes, but make sure you use more onions than seem reasonable. It´s all about the onions, really. And my mother´s trick: a couple of hefty spoonfuls of sugar. Classic combinations are tomato sauce and tuna or sardines(from a can); peppers and onions with pork (pimentón optional); onions, salt cod and raisins; squid in its own ink sauce; peppers and onions with any shellfish or any of the more esoteric tins manufactured in Galicia.

I have been trying several versions, based on the instructions of several of my empanada instructors, and at last have decided on this. It´s an adaptation for the Thermomix, but is easily done by hand, and responds well to tweaking to suit what there is in the pantry. Although it seems to be a big production at fiest sight, like most things it comes down to experience: once you´ve made it a few times you realize that it´s easy, and impressive.

The filling:

The first thing you have to do is sautee a lot of onions and peppers, slowly. This takes the longest, but isn´t hard, as you know. However, if you´re in a hurry and need to get the pie off the ground quickly, a tin of Hida fried onions and a bottle of piquillo peppers, or a tin of Hida pisto will be great. I won´t tell anyone, just take out the trash before the guests arrive.

Mix this with the tinned seafood or meat and let it cool a little.

The dough (enough for a pie for 4/6. If you want a big one that takes up the whole oven tray, make two batches in the Th or a double batch by hand)

You need 80 grams of oil and 3 tablespoons of another fat. The oil can be from the tins of fish you´re using, or it can be fresh olive oil. The fat can be butter, lard, or bacon fat. Mix these with 80 ml of white wine, and heat them a little so the fat melts. In the Th. this is 50ºC 1 minute speed 1.

Now add approximately 450 grams of all purpose flour. You may also want to use yeast, in which case 1 sachet is what you want, plus a good spoonful of salt. I don´t bother with the yeast any more, and it cuts down on waiting time not to.

Either mix in speed 6 for 20 seconds until it forms a ball and then give it 2 minutes of kneading speed in the Th, or do it by hand. You want a dough that is smooth and soft and warm, very nice to the touch. As ever with dough, you might have to add a bit more liquid or more flour to get where you want.

Give it a rest while you preheat the oven to 200ºC. This usually coincides with the onions finishing cooking.

While they cool a little, divide the dough in two. Make a big rectangle, stretching the dough as thin as you can, and spread the filling evenly. Roll out the other half of the dough, cover the bottom crust with it, and them crimp the filling shut. Use the stray cuts to make decorations, make a few cuts to let the steam escape, and brush with beaten egg.

(Here´s a post with step by step photos. That pie is nothing like mine, but illustrates well the point I make about there being no two alike.)

Bake for about half an hour, until golden all over.

Do not, EVER, serve this piping hot. Warm is best, cold second best. Leftovers possibly best of all, and if you take it to a picnic you will receive ovations.

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)

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.

Corazón de melón

Here´s another recipe from the blogging of yore (read the original post here).
The heat has finally arrived. I´m taking pains to close my shutters at noon, to top up the bottles of cold water in the fridge, and to plan my walks carefully, so I´m in the shade as much as possible.
Not that it matters, because when it´s hot it´s hot, and that´s that. But melons have arrived, and they´re always a compensation, wether eaten in chunks or served up, retro-style, with cured ham. Or in the chilled-soup version.
A chilled soup is a good thing to have around on 35ºC plus days like these. Especially if you have guests and want to look like you´ve made an effort, when all you have on the table is cheese and bread.
The only important proviso is that you make it with a juicy melon, the kind we call "toad skin". Galias or cantaloupes are not really going to be any use, because what you want is a fruity pulp on which to float your jamón slivers, nothing more.
So anyway, here´s your recipe, perfectly suited for a blistering day, or for that frustrating moment when you realize that the melon you lugged from the market is only so-so.

Cut the melon, blitz in a processor with a pinch of salt, a good sprinkling of lemon juice, and a grind of pepper. Serve in pretty bowls, and dot liberally with shards of serrano ham (the better the better, of course, but it won´t do to waste your prime ibérico on this).
That´s it.

Marmitako, reloaded

Ok, I´m not proud to admit this, but the Blogs of Note mention has gone to my head. I want to post all the time, anything, and keep those stats up.
However, I´m crazily busy. And there´s also the little thing of my fidelity. I don´t want to sound boring, but I tend to make my favourite things over and over, so it´s not like I can post new recipes every day for very long.
I´ve therefore decided to be a little sneaky, and re-post some of the old recipes from the dark ages of this blog, two years ago. But in order not to bore my faithful readers (hi, mum!), the drawings will be new, and everyone´s happy with that, I hope.
This is for marmitako, a beautiful bonito and potato stew from the Basque Country, up north. Now that white tuna´s in season, and hopefully not too expensive, you just have to make it.

Marmitako

1 kg potatoes
1 kg bonito (albacore), cleaned and cut into bite sized chunks
2 tomatoes, grated
2 onions, choppoed
1 red pepper (green is more orthodox, but I like red), choped
1 garlic clove, chopped
Fish stock (1 litre)
olive oil, salt, pepper

Cover the bottom of a heavy pan with olive oil. Sautee the onion and garlic. When they´re slightly transparent, add the pepper, and a couple of minutes later, the tomato, the salt and some sugar (just a little, while nobody´s looking, and maybe a splash of wine).
Leave it to become a pulpy mess, around 15 minutes. Be patient, because it will be much more delicious, and you´ll be peeling the potatoes , anyway.
Cut them into chunks, but don´t cut the whole way. Make a small indentation, and turn the knife so that the potato is torn, not cut. This will make the starch seep into the broth and thicken it.
Put the potatoes into the sofrito, and add the stock. If it doesn´t cover, add water.
Let the potatoes cook. It will take around 20 minutes.
When they´re done, put the salted tuna chunks inside. Cover, and wait 5 minutes. If they´re not too big, they should be cooked to perfection.

If the broth is very liquid, crush a few of the potatoes in a bowl, and put them back.

This,with a green salad and some crusty bread, will serve four hungry people who´ve been out fishing all day. Or six poor citybound souls, if one of them has brought pudding.

Ajoblanco: the other Spanish chilled soup

Ajoblanco literally means "white garlic", but I´ve seen it translated as "white gazpacho" (which it isn´t) and "almond gazpacho" (which it is, kind of). It sounds more chic that way, I guess, and that´s fine by me, because this is one very chic chilled soup, having almonds as a main ingredient, and being served with fruit floating inside. I also happen to think that the colour of ajoblanco is particulary beautiful, being of a very luminous warm white, nothing like the creamy white of a vichyssoise, or the eggshell of horchata.

Gazpacho will always remain the favourite, because you really can´t beat a bowl of gazpacho on a hot day. But ajoblanco makes for a welcome change, being light and refreshing and, well, not gazpacho, which you might appreciate if you´ve been having it for lunch every single day of every summer.

This here recipe is my adaptation of the one in 1080 recetas. Basically, it´s just the same, but with half the oil. The one in Moro has lots more almonds and way less bread, which I daresay is lovely and luxurious, but since at home we´ve always made the 1080 one, and it´s so good, I haven´t bothered to try the Moro way.

The traditional way is to serve this with grapes floating inside, and maybe a drizzle of precious fruity olive oil. I was all out of grapes, or apples or melon (traditional subsitutes too), so we stoned a few cherries, and it was not only a delicious alternative, but very pretty. The fruit juice made pink swirls in the soup. I think I may have stumbled on a new classic.

Ajoblanco con cerezas

150 gr. raw almonds, without skins. You can buy them ready ground, too.
Garlic (one or two cloves, your call. I suggest you start easy and add more as you go)
100 ml. good olive oil
2 tablespoons Sherry vinegar
200 gr. bread, crusts off, stale if you have it but don´t go crazy if you don´t
salt to taste,
cold water
and grapes, cubes of Granny Smith apples, melon or stoned cherries to serve.

Soak the bread in water if it´s stale, and if not then don´t bother.
Throw the almonds into a food processor and grind them as finely as possible. Now add the garlic, bread (squeezed out if it was soaked), salt, olive oil and a bit of water and pulse til you have a paste.
Add iced water and pulse again, and then just add water until you have the consistency you like. I think ajoblanco should be thin and drinkable, like gazpacho, but there is a school of thought that favours the spoonable, slightly thicker stuff.
Add the vinegar, adjust the salt, and chill it thoroughly.

When it´s time to eat, check again for salt and vinegar, since the cold might have numbed their taste. Serve in soup bowls, scatter a few seeded grapes or stoned cherries, and leave the olive oil on the table for the drizzlers.

The image is courtesy of Agitado no batido , advertisers extraordinaire and its legal owners.

Memento mussel soup

The joys of spring, as seen last week:

Buying asparagus from a farmstand covered in blue tarpaulin, by the side of a field. Is there anything a city slicker loves more than some residue of mud on their vegetables?

Podding peas and eating the tiny ones straight away. Sweet.

Marinading strawberries in balsamic vinegar and brown sugar, a la Nigella. The only way to make silly huge fresones edible, really.

Splashing home under an umbrella, and stepping in puddles.Lovely lovely.
If you live in a desert and there´s a drought, you won´t complain about rain, but it might pose a bit of a catering problem. You can´t give dinner guests a trim dinner of steamed asparagus with poached eggs and strawberry cake; they´ll freeze. But you can´t really trot out lentils and apple pie.

The answer? Memento mussel soup. Memento being a restaurant where they serve a beautiful starter of mussels with chistorra (a light cooking chorizo from Navarra). It always has us clamouring for more bread to dip in the rust-red strong sauce, and seemed like a perfect springboard for a good soup.
My version is soupier (duh) and lighter, and has gone straight away into the folder of "things I´ll be making again and again".
It´s good, and it´s easy, and it´s quick, provided you buy cleaned mussels or enlist help.
I served it with a home made focaccia, which was pretty amazing, but any crusty bread for making boats will be great. Provide plenty of napkins and maybe finger bowls.

Memento mussel soup

2kgs mussels, cleaned and debearded
100 gr. or so of chistorra, or any other cooking chorizo
a bunch of spring onions, or three shallots
2 cloves of garlic, minced
4 smallish tomatoes, grated (or a 1/2 kg. tin, which will give you more liquid, and lucky you)
salt, pepper, dried oregano to taste
1 tablespoonful flour
300 ml or so of liquid (white wine, beer or both)
olive oil
Creme fraiche, or any thick cream

Begin by sauteeing the chistorra in olive oil in a big pan that will hold all the mussels later, until it´s released its fat and it´s beginning to crisp up. Add the spring onions. After a couple of minutes, add the tomatoes and garlic. None of this has to cook down a lot, but give it a couple of minutes, too. Now add the flour and stir til it dissappears, and stir it around for a bit more so it won´t taste raw.
Pour in the liquid and stir until it´s thickened and the alcohol has evaporated. Throw in the mussels, cover, and, taking the pan in your mittened hands that are also clamping down the lid, give it a good shake.
Do this again a couple of times (males of the species are good for this job. recruit one). Check after three minutes. If there are a lot of unopened shells, leave it another minute.

Now serve in big deep bowls, as many mussels as you can, plenty of the soup and a blob of sour cream (with chopped parsley or chives if you have them, for prettiness). Put a big salad bowl for the shells on the table, alongside some hot sauce. As people eat, their bowls will be ready for more, so top them up.

Serves 4 as dinner, with fresh bread, or 8 more timid souls as a starter.

Best ever stuffed peppers

Oh the guilt. Albatross round my neck, dammit! This won´t do. I feel guilty enough about enough things, to have to add a blog to the list. So finally I drag myself to the computer and here I am. I feel I´m fobbing you off with a photo of my cooking notebooks, but that pepper is the illustration I did ten years ago when writing doen this recipe, so at least I´ve done some archival effort.

We had a visit from Pille and K. of Nami-nami.
Not that that´s an excuse. I´m just mentioning it. We had the best four days of food related talk, and of eating and tasting and cooking and sightseeing, and it was wonderful and fun. But the retribution wasn´t long in coming, and I had to work, and so I hung up the apron and lived on toast for the rest of the week. Do you beleive that? No? Well, it´s almost true. I also had a lot of pollen chocolate, and yogurt with sea buckthorn muesli. Perks of having friends in the Baltic, you see.

Anyway, I´m going to post a recipe for the peppers Pille and Kristjan had at my parents´. These peppers are the most wonderful thing ever, and if I haven´t blogged about them before, it´s because I´ve never cooked them before, and it feels a little bit like cheating.
The thing is, these are the special, for-guests-only, best-in-the-world stuffed peppers, and they are only made at home, by Escolástica, when the occasion merits. It´s never entered my mind that I, your humble self, can ever come close to the effect.
However you, labouring under no such a heavy weight of tradition, can have the recipe and go ahead and made these beauties, thereby making friends and influencing people. Here they are.

You need as many red peppers as will comfortably fit the tray in your oven. Here in Spain it´s very usual to find red peppers the size of rubgy balls, and those aren´t very good, since you can only fit four, and one of the beauties of this dish is the ease of portion control. You don´t want the petite Dutch cricket ball type, either. Try to find ones that are the size of a tea mug. Am I making sense? I feel not. Anyway. The perfect type of pepper will have ten or eleven snugly nestling side by side in a standard oven tray.

Ground meat, 600 gr. We like a mixture of beef and pork.
One green pepper, one onion, one 1/2 tin of tomatoes, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 bay leaf.
Two cups of rice. At home they use parboiled, and much as it pains me to say it, it´s wonderful in this dish. It´s the only time I don´t mind parboiled rice, but of course sticklers go with any long grain variety that gives you confidence.

Heat the oven to 170ºC

Take your biggest frying pan and fry the mince for a few minutes, until it´s no longer pink. Set aside.

Now make a sofrito, which, as you know, consists of chopping finely your onion, sauteeing it in plenty of olive oil, adding the chopped green pepper, waiting a bit for it to wilt, and then throwing in the tomatoes, bay leaf and garlic (I add a good handful of sugar too). When it has reduced to a fragrant dark pulpy mess, it´s done. You should probably make it salty, as the peppers will be unseasoned.
Now add the meat and the rice, and turn to coat well. You want a homogenous mix, and you want to rice to be nicely coated with all the flavorings and oils.

While the sofrito reduces, you can spend the time cleaning the peppers, which you do by carefully cutting round the stem, and keeping that bit; then cleaning the inside of seeds and that white membrane thing. Be careful and don´t break them.

Now fill them with the mixture. Go easy. They should be filled more than half but less than three quarters, as the juice from the peppers will make the rice swell. Put the stem lids back on.

Coat them with a slick of olive oil, put them on their sides and bake them for an hour. Turn them over (careful now! go easy and use a couple of very wide spoons), and bake for another hour.
At the end, they will be sticky and glossy, charred in places and smelling so good that you will want to eat them all.
Don´t forget to dip your bread in the oily dark goo at the bottom of the tray.

Finally, the stuffed bird.

I know I said yesterday that I´d keep my posting to one a week. But that´s starting from next week.
You see, my dear friends, even though I´ve had more than enough of tinsel, coloured lights, mindless cheer and silly presents, the fact remains that here the holidays are still alive and kicking. We still have the last hurdle to get through, Reyes.
I´m a well-known Reyes grouch, as can be seen by last year´s post , but I won´t go into that again.
Instead, I´ll give you the recipe I promised for stuffed capon.
It´s not a suitable recipe for right now, but you can file it away, because it´s good. A beautiful plump bird, stuffed to the brim with meat and other goodies, it´s basically a combo of two favorites; meat loaf and roast chicken.
On the night, we serve it with mashed potatoes, red cabbage, apple sauce, sweet chestnuts and glazed onions. No wonder I can´t leave the sofa for days after, uh?
It also makes divine sandwiches, with chutney and mayo.

Ingredients:

The bird can be a small turkey, a big chicken, a capon, a guinea hen, whatever. Just make sure it´s a properly brought up specimen from a good family. And ask for it to be de-boned (also ask for the bones so you can use them another day).

The weight of the bones will give you the quantity of meat for the stuffing. Somewhere around 1,5 kg of pork meat. You can substitute some of that for fresh sausage meat if you prefer.

3 eggs.
3 cookign apples, cut in small chunks.
200 gr. prunes, cut in four
1 cup of almonds, more or less, chopped

Butter for basting (plenty), salt, pepper, nutmeg and brandy.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC

In a big bowl, mix the meat with the almonds, eggs, prunes, apples. If you like, you can throw in some slivers of raw chicken liver, too.
Salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste, and a good glug of brandy.
Squish with your hands until you have an evenly distributed mix.
Proceed to stuff this into the bird, making sure you get meat into every last little nook and cranny.
The bird, which in the beginning looked deflated and very sorry for itself, will begin to look like Popeye on steroids.
Don´t overstuff, though, or it will burst later (not that big a deal).

Now´s the tricky part. Take a tick needle and stout thread, and patch the skin. Apart from the two big cavities, there will be little nicks where the butcher was too zealous. You must sow these carefully, again, to prevent the juices from oozing out.

Slice a couple of onions and lay them on a baking tray. Salt and oil them a little, and manouver the bird on top. By now it will be heavy and unwieldy. Ask for help. Dot it with butter, douse with brandy, and begin to roast.
It will probably need three hours, with occasional topping up of the tray with water and brandy as the sauce dries out, and occasional basting.
If you have a meat thermometer, let it work its magic, but if not, you´ll probably know it´s done when it looks golden, crusty, and has made every last corner of the house smell heavenly.
The gravy can be served as it is, or blended till smooth and light caramel in colour.

Compota navideña: poached fruit for a crazy month

Life in December is too hectic for me. I just want to crawl into the sofa and let it roll by.
My mind is beginning to boggle at the thought of all the dinners and lunches and drinks parties that are coming. And I like food, mind you, but so much of it, in such close succession, and all so rich, I don´t know. And then the awful shopping. No. It´s all too much.
My favourite antidote is this fruit compote. Many people make it as a traditional holiday pudding, but I like to make a batch and eat it for dinner or breakfast, as the case might be. It´s very healthy and soothing, and while not bland, it´s definitely some of the least exciting food available. Which is just what you want after a lunch of jamón, foie, steak tartare and chocolate bombe.

It´s so easy I feel kind of silly writing the recipe, but anyway, here´s my favourite version. Qantities are for one person, as J hates poached fruit.

1/2 a kilo of cooking apples, peeled and cored
100 gr. dried apricots
100 gr. prunes

first, cover the apricots and prunes and let them soak for about an hour.

Then, tip the dried fruit with its water and the apples into a pot, cover it, bringt it to a boil, and let it simmer on a heat diffuser for about half an hour.

After that time it´ll be a sludgy golden mess, studded with the dark prunes. You might have added a cinammon stick at the beginning, but other than that, it will taste fruity and sweet, but not too much. When it cools, it will be sweeter, but never cloying (which means, of course, that you might want to add some sugar at the beginning, if that´s the sort of thing you like).

I love it with yogurt, just like that, or maybe with a bit of brown sugar. It goes very well with oatmeal, can be pressed into service as pudding with some good biscuits or cake (bought, of course!) and will even make an impressive side dish for roast pork or duck.