Jet lag and how to feed it: a beautiful sandwich.

Hardcore fans of Laurie Colwin will recognize that as the title of one of her essays. I´m going through a particulary strong LC phase right now, reading all her fiction. Her food writing I know by heart, almost.

Last week J came back from a congress in Vienna. I didn´t pick him up at the airport, tut tut, but I did compensate by having a good meal waiting for him. Sure, a Vienna-Madrid flight is hardly a Lindbergh-esque exploit, but I find that any sort of waiting around airports takes its toll these days, and well deserves a treat.

Now, Laurie says that someone just off a plane should be given soup and a sandwich. But J was arriving at 5, and that´s mots emphatically not soup-time in Spain. All hours are good for a sandwich and some cake, though, so I made a cute little Victoria sponge, complete with strawberries and jam, and prepared all the ingredients for this awsome sandwich, which has now entered my files as the

"Welcome back from Vienna awsome sandwich":

Crusty bread, baguette or good oldfashioned "barra"
Balsamic sausages
Onion jam
A perfect avocado
A tomato

The assembly is as simple cutting a good sized portion of bread, taking out some of the white crumb, smearing one side with onion jam, topping with slices of the avocado and tomato (and salting them a little)- and then finishing off the job with the sausages cut into thick wedges.

This sandwich has everything: the crunch from the bread, the fatty cloudy factor from the avocado, satisfying and savoury protein from the sausages, oomph from the onion jam and freshness from the tomato. Per-fect, good at any time, and just the thing to get you ready for a slice of cake, a shower and a long walk admiring spring in the Retiro.

Food illustrations for Telva

The May issue of Telva Telva magazine is out. It comes with a little book of recipes for rookie gourmets, illustrated by yours truly.

Everyone in Spain go buy it inmediately! I haven´t had time to go into to it fully, yet, but apart from its extraordinary beauty, it looks like there are good recipes inside, and lots of tips.

I´ll report back as soon as I´ve tried and tested the intriguing concept of the bisque made from tinned mussels (always been one for striking the iron while it´s hot, you see).

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.

French(ish) onion soup, no tears, some lies, some remedies.

If it´s cold and blustery and you have lots of onions to use, and the only other things in the house are a rather old hunk of Manchego cheese and a slightly passé mollete(bread), what do you do? French onion soup. Of course.
The problem is that a proper onion soup takes forever, what with the slicing and the browning and the many hours that go into good beef stock.
Then I remembered a Nigel Slater recipe I´d read in his Kitchen Diaries: onion soup without tears. Nigel chirpily halves some onions, dots them with butter, roasts them to goldeness and in they go into the pot. A gloriously dark comforting soup is achieved in less than no time, and with vegetable stock. Wow.
Can such things be? I don´t think so, my friend.
Well, maybe I´m just incompetent. Or maybe Nigel was bending the truth a little. Or lying in his teeth, even.
Whichever it was, my onions, after double the time N said, and even though I´d shaken them about a few times, were black on one side, white on the other. Cooked through, sure, and the house smelt like a French bistro (which it still does, by the way) but they didn´t look even remotely like the sort of brown limp mess you expect to begin a soup with.
Since my stock options were half a litre of great home made chicken stock, and a litre of Aneto low salt chicken stock, which is a tad on the bland side, and interestingly pale, I´d clearly need something else in the way of kick and colour.

Gallina Blanca has the nerve to sell an ersatz beef stock that contains 0,1% beef extract, water, 0,1% beef, caramel and flavourings, and yet tastes slightly beefy. So Bovril and caramel seemed like a good idea, as long as I upped the percentages.
I cut up the big onion wedges with a pair of scissors, which certainly beats the tearful chopping. Then I started with the cheater´s ingredients.
First, the wine. If the wine is dark, all the better. Red is a possibility, but I opted for Pedro Ximénez, because I wanted to finish off a bottle and because I decided I´d give the whole thing a Spanish twist.
A glug of sherry brandy seemed like an excellent idea, and while the alcohol burnt off, J and I had a tug of war with the caramel bottle. By the time we had it open, it was time for the stocks, a good spoonful of dark caramel and a teaspoonful of Bovril.
Twenty minutes of brisk simmering and, magic, the thing really resembled a good old onion soup.
The mollete was toasted, the manchego was grated, the bowls went under the grill and the whole thing was perfectly beautiful.
The next time I´ll cook my onions on the stove, or I might even, if really really lazy, use a couple of tins of Hida cooked onions. With that, and the doctoring of the stock, we´re talking some seriously decadent practically instant comfort food.
Now that´s a real soup without tears, and it works, too.

Cooking lessons for the holidays

It´s a holiday in Spain. A very long weekend to spend frying torrijas and squinting at processions through clouds of incense. Or flopped on the beach. Or being lazy in Madrid and enjoying the empty city.

We´re having a tad more activity than that, however. My sister María has decided to learn to cook, and so we´re having a Karate Kid Holy Week, with myself in the role of Mr. Miyagi and she as Daniel San.

I´m a very stern pedagogue and have insisted from the first that she learn to hold a big knife properly, keep it sharp, and chop all the onions. So far we´ve done tomato sauce, both normal and Thermomix-cheat; chicken curry; sauteéd greens; beef stew; and a salmon escabeche for tomorrow.
Today we´re onto the rice for the curry, more vegetable stuff and roti. We´ll also cover buttermilk biscuits and possibly some form of cookie or cake as the week progresses, if my pupil´s patience holds.

How does that sound? I think it´s all stuff that isn´t hard to do, or complicated, and the skills involved are pretty similar, so confidence grows.
It´s not the usual Spanish canon, and I bet I will get many a raised eyebrow for not starting out with bechamel sauce for croquetas, with albóndigas (meatballs) or with cocido. I love all these dishes, but I find them too fiddly to be sprung on a novice.
Tomato sauce will always be the true test of a beginner, not the proverbial fried egg. From tomato sauce you can jump to curry, or to baby squid in ink, to pisto or to a quick cheat´s potaje. Fried eggs will only lead you to cholesterol, and besides, I don´t know how to do them, so there.

I´ll be back next week, all rested from not having touched the computer in days. Have fun.

And if anyone has a suggestion for something that´s an absolute must for a beginner, please let me know; I´m all ears.

Tricking out leftover beef stew

The beauty of stew is that it keeps getting better and better until it´s over. But you might get a little bit bored. Or you might need to make it go further for unexpected guests. Or maybe you were planning to have a springy lunch, but the weather suddenly turned from Barefoot in the park to Doctor Zhivago, like this week in Madrid, and you want something hot and warming.
Whatever the case, it´s where your pantry comes into play. Lydia has been showing us the contents of her Perfect Pantry for a while, but now there´s a new feature of sneak peeks into other pantries, and you can have a look at mine. It´s far from perfect, but provided you have the basics, like onions and oil and such, a few odds and ends will make all the difference to leftovers. You´ll be able to cook up huge batches of the easy beef stew, with no fear of boredom.
Just shake off any notions of cooking for real ethnic authenticity and enjoy the ride with any of these clever stew makeovers.
1-Patatas con carne. Put your stew, potatoes cut into chunks, and stock to cover in a pan (of course by stock you know I mean water and a cube. Viva el MSG, I feel ever so vindicated by the New York Times!). When the potatoes are done, it should be a thick warming soup. If you take the time to start with a sofrito and add a dash of pimentón, so much the better.
2- Ragù. Put whatever meat and gravy you have, well shredded, in a pan with a jar of good bottled tomato sauce and some sugar (or ketchup). Leave to bubble down furiously while you cook the pasta. Don´t forget to add a couple of spoonfuls of the pasta cooking water to the sauce.
3- Curry. This can be as basic as frying some spice paste from a jar, adding the meat, and waiting for it to heat trhough; or as elaborate as you care to make it, with a good vegetable base and your own whole spices. I usually sautee onions and garlic and ginger and cumin and chili, add some curry powder, the meat and maybe some coconut milk or yogurt, maybe some tomato sauce, maybe both, and simmer it a bit while the rice cooks. I might throw in some frozen peas, too. They make a pretty contrast with the dark sauce.
4- Chili. Do the onion-garlic-pepper thing, add cumin and whatever source of heat you like, a dash of barbecue sauce, then the stew and a can of beans. Very lovely stuff.
5-Pie. Put the meat in a dish and cover with puff pastry. If you make a bottom layer of shortcrust, then it will be the stuff of legend. Serve with minted peas.
6- Go Middle Eastern by making a spiced sautee of onions and garlic (with cumin and ginger and maybe cinammon, whatever you like), add dried apricots and prunes, leave to soften a bit, then add the meat and simmer for a few minutes. Scatter some toasted almonds on top and serve with cous cous and you´re in business.

Very easy, relatively quick beef stew

I think beef stew, or any other meat stew, is one of the pillars on which one can build their cooking life. I would even put in the list of the basics everyone should know how to make, with tomato sauce, brownies, vinaigrette , biscuits and roast chicken.
If I don´t, it´s because it´s a lot more hassle than it looks, and if the result is going to be very homely, then I don´t want to spend a lot of time on it. Low effort, high impact is my motto.
The problem, for me, is the browning. That instruction, "brown, in batches, until all the pieces are dark", always sends my heart plummeting to my feet. Oh, sure, I know it´s important, I know, it adds colour and depth of flavour to the final dish, and we all want colour and depth of flavour in a stew, do we not? Sure.
But, but. Browning a kilo of meat takes at the very least half an hour. And it´s half an hour spent battling meat that spits, fat that sputters, flour that burns, and a deep prevalent smell of beef that, however appetizing to begin with, permeates every stitch of your clothes, wherever they may be in the house.
This is not cool. This means that I only make my deeply flavoured and highly coloured stew once a year, and that´s not a lot of flavour, divided by 365, not really.
So, last week I tried it without browning it first, and at the end of fifteen minutes of relaxed prep time and three hours simmering in a low oven, what did I get? A dark, robust, hearty and very deeply flavoured stew. Plenty of colour, because all the liquid was red wine, plenty of flavour, because the beef was excellent Guadarrama grass-fed.
From now on, this is the way I ´ll go, because I love stew, and J adores it. You can´t call something that takes three hours in the oven to come to a jellified quiver quick, or that´s better for being left lying around for a day or two. But if you think that the active time is very very short, I think you might. And if you´re nervous about your reputation, call it a daube. But frankly, once you´ve tasted it, I doubt you´ll give a damn.

Very easy, relatively quick beef stew

Assemble all your ingredients on your work top, and preheat the oven to 150ºC.
Heat up a heavy Le Creuset type cast iron casserole, or something that can later go in the oven. Cover the bottom with a generous layer of olive oil.
While it heats up, chop an onion, finely but without finesse. It will mostly dissappear. Chuck it in the oil, give it a swirl, leave it to sweat.
Wash two sticks of celery, take out some of the long strands, and chop it finely. Add it to the onion.
Peel two fat carrots and slice them into pinky-sized batons (you could make rounds, but I hate carrot rounds, myself).
Smash a clove of garlic, add it.
Give everything a stir with a wooden spoon, and check out if the onion is beginning to be translucent. When it is, add a heaping spoonful of flour and stir until it´s dissappeared.
Now add your meat (1 kg of stewing beef), and move it around until it´s gone from angry ruby red to ugly browny grey. This is a moment where doubt will assail you, but go on, trust me.
Once that´s done, you´re ready to add your liquids. As long as they´re dark, you´re in business. Guinness is good, as is red wine, and if you change the aromatics at the beginning, you can make a good mix with Shaoxing wine and soy sauce and a bit of stock. Tomato paste has a lot of fans, as do anchovies. Go whichever way you like, as long as you´ve got enough to cover the meat. I like to bung in a stock cube and a bay leaf.
Now cover the pot with foil loosely, and press is lightly in the middle so it makes an inverted dome. Cover the pot. This means that all the steam rises and falls back on your stew, rather than escaping the pot.

Put it in the oven, leave it for three hours. It will be even better the day after.

Food blog search

What was I thinking all week? Maybe all the nutrients from the organic veg have addled my brain. I forgot to mention Food blog search. Elise, not content with having the überblog Simply Recipes has now come up with this great idea, a search engine that allows you to look for recipes in food blogs (I´m not sure if search engine is the technical term, but I´m sure you get my drift).
I don´t know about you, but I´d much rather hear what a real life person has to say about a recipe than to battle it out with the bare lines stuff from Epicurious, good though that is.
I´ve had the pleasure of doing the illustration for the header, and also for the nifty search bar that anyone can add to their site.
Have a look, it´s really great.

The organic box veredict, and artichokes vinaigrette.

So, my organic vegetable box arrived on Tuesday, promptly at 8:30 am, just in time to slice a tomato for breakfast pa amb tomaquet.
A tomato, you say? I was surprised, too, but this is Spain, after all; the seasons tend to become fuzzy, especially in a droughty sunny year like this.
The contents were:
6 big tomatoes on their stems
a generous handful of cherry tomatoes
a non-curly head of frisee. I think I might swap this with my mother, and get her garlic shoots instead
tiny pickling onions
a head of broccoli
7 artichokes
four oranges, four pears, six bananas, and the courtesy parsley and bay leaves.

If I have one quibble it´s the plastic everything came wrapped in. If the stuff arrives in a neat little box, why do they need a plastic bag for each offering? Surely the box is enough, except maybe for the garlic shoots, which could have made everything smell, and which were, in fact, unwrapped anyway.

We used the garlic shoots in a risotto on Tuesday evening, with mushrooms (not in the box). Wednesday seemed perfect for steaming the broccoli and serving it alongside some rice noodles with minced pork and a nice and kicking garlic black bean sauce. Today for lunch we´ve had the cherry tomatoes in a salad, the artichokes with vinaigrette, and a fruit salad with a mix of the stuff in the box plus some kiwis I had.

The veredict so far? Very positive. I only signed up for this because they promised very fresh stuff. I don´t mind pesticides so much, really, but the idea of a piece of fruit being picked while very green and then languishing in storage for weeks seems plain daft. The rest, all the sustainability and ecology and good health are all very well in their way, I guess, but mostly a bobo concern that I´ll indulge as long as it doesn´t incomode me in any way. It´s the taste that matters. Yesterday´s broccoli may have been more chock-full of nutrients than others, but what leapt to the mind straight away was the fact that is was tender and almost buttery, and so flavourful that I didn´t add salt (though there was plenty of soy in the noodles, so that may have played a part).

So anyway, here´s my favourite way with artichokes. Rather than coring them ruthlessly and reducing them to just the tender little hearts, I like to strip them of just the very obvious hard outer leaves, and the tops. Boiled briefly, they are then allowed to cool for a little while, before being handed out, with little dipping bowls of vinaigrette. You tear out two or three leaves, dip the bottom, bite it, and toss the hard tops into a pile of debris on the side. In a few moves, you´ll be at the heart, and that you can dip whole and munch happily in its entirety.
I wouldn´t recommend it for a first date, but it makes for a more fun way of eating artichokes, and they don´t go so fast, after all that boring prep work.