Sauce Foriana

The cupboards, though a shadow of their former selves, still yield up treasures. A tin of sardines, half a head of garlic, ok then, let´s see what´s left in the pasta drawer: nothing. Only, no, wait, there´s a package of japanese soba noodles. I wonder, will the buckwheat go well with the sardines? Probably. I go to the freezer to get some ice for a glass of water while I cook, and that´s when I see the little packets of nuts. What to do? A sauce foriana of sorts, with less garlic and pumpkin seeds as well as pinenuts, because that´s what I have. Except that my blender is in a box somewhere, so instead of a paste, I make a chopped up mix of nuts and garlic, and very delicious it is, too. Perfect with the robust sardines, and a great match for the noodles. Next time I´ll probably choose normal pasta, or perhaps whole wheat, but for tonight I couldn´t be happier with my meal.

You can find the recipe for sauce foriana here. It´s one of those oh-oh-oh why haven´t I been making this every week of my life things. It´s supposed to be tossed with pasta, but have a jar in the fridge and you´ll find yourself putting it iinto all sorts of things, like steamed broccoli, focaccia or creamy soups.

Empty upboard soup

Moving is no fun when you´re as disorganized as I am. It´s tough to face the fact that for years you have been keeping dozens of dried felt tip pens, that the stacks of drawings lurking in corners reach your knees, and that at some point there will have to be a cull of stuffed toys.
Then there´s the kitchen. I don´t buy any food, and I am determined to get to the bottom of the cupboards. They´re still stuffed with all sorts of useless things like bags of spelt and weird beans, which makes it all the more frustrating when you try to cook something.
Luckily, empty is never quite empty. On Friday night I was able to make a more than presentable soup out of some not very promising ingredients: a forgotten, dried up knob of ginger, a shallot I had overlooked, some rather frostbitten potstickers lurking in the freezer, a sachet of miso soup, and to pull it all together soy sauce, Tabasco and a dash of sherry.
Much, much better than the sum of its parts, as soup always is.

Boxes

Ask me: "Have you been enjoying the lovely spring weather, the flowering trees and sidewalk cafés?"
I´ll have to answer that, no, I haven´t, because we´ve been packing up a lot of stuff, and if there´s one thing I hate is having to choose among my things. And having chosen, watch the most favorite drive off in a van.
The food is still great, though. Chicharro teriyaki, five minute risottos, fudgy sauce for ice cream and lots of these mojitos. Try them; they´re easy to make, store well and go down a storm.

Pressure cooker polenta

Polenta, polenta, polenta. It used to be that I didn´t see the point of polenta, not at all. All that effort for something so bland, why?

But somehow reading about polenta always made me hungry, and I always have a bag of cornmeal to make the underside of my bread crunchy, so it was only a matter of time before I made it. I just didn´t want to stir for hours, so I turned to my gadgetry.

The Thermomix makes a good polenta, no question. Just use the proportion of any recipe you like, put the butterfly thingy in and set it for 45 minutes. But be warned that cleaning it out is a right bore.

The rice cooker is also great, and easy to clean. Put 1 meassure of cornmeal and 4 of water and you´re good to go.

The pressure cooker is, naturally, the fastest.

All three methods make falling off a log look very complicated, so take your pick. For me, because I´m still in the honeymoon phase and because I´m apt to improvise dinner, the best is the pressure cooker, but all three work perfectly.

Once the polenta is done you can bask in the warm glow of one of the most comfortable comfort foods there are, but before sitting down to eat, remember to pour out what´s left in the pot into a shallow tin or tray so that it can cool and set, and have that the following day in it´s crisp incarnation. It freezes perfectly, and is great food to have on hand for feeding a toddler.

Pressure cooker polenta

(serves 4, with leftovers)

Bring 2 litres of salted water to a boil in the open pressure cooker. Sprinkle 400 gr. of the cornmeal and stir well. Cover, bring up to pressure and cook for 15 minutes. Bring the pressure down quickly, and have a look. It´s a slightly grainy porridge, soft and wonderful, but if you like to have it creamier still add some water and leave it a while longer in the open cooker, stirring well.

Spoon in some butter and black pepper and serve it as a pillow to tomato sauce, or garlicky greens, or a poached egg, or what you will.

Ice cream

Sometimes only ice cream will do. You can either rush out and buy a tub of whatever´s your poison, or you can stock it for emergencies, but that way you usually eat the whole thing and then feel slightly sick and mildly guilty.

I prefer a bit of DIY, a spot of therapeutic chopping, a minute or two of mindsettling pottering about, so here´s how. Take two scoops of plain vanilla ice cream and let them soften a little in a pretty bowl. Meanwhile chop some very good 70% chocolate into very small pieces, and a couple of biscuits (plain Digestives, or whatever´s around) into chunkier ones. Put these in the bowl, mix them around, and there you have it, a perfect indulgence, just the right size, creamy and crunchy and exactly what you need.

Pressure cooker rice pudding

Here´s a good reason to love the pressure cooker; it´s honest, real cooking. There´s nothing gimicky about it. The spectacularly cut-down times only come after you have done all the real work of a recipe, slicing, dicing, browning and sauteeing. So it´s not really less work than the tradtional methods, where you leave things to simmer away on their own for hours. But it does make it possible to make spur of the moment stews and soups and bean salads that you would otherwise have to plan for. And they come out tasting as good or better than the usual.

I´m very impressed with pork shank soup done under an hour, mashed potatoes in ten minutes, and beef stew in half an hour. And note that these are the real times, not just the minutes they spend under pressure, and I factor in the depressure time too. The recipe I´ll give you, though, if for one of my all time favourite puddings, done in record time and much better than the way I used to make it. Please welcome the 

20 minute rice pudding

(adapted from Lindsey Bareham and Diane Page)

Put a walnut sized knob of butter in the open cooker, and turn 60 gr. pudding rice in it until it´s translucent. Add 600 ml. milk and three tablespoonfuls of sugar and bring to the boil with whatever flavouring you like; lemon peel, vanilla, cinnamon. Bear in mind that because no steam escapes flavour is intensified, so use less than you would normally.

Lock, and leave 12 minutes under pressure. Let it come down naturally and put it in a basin to chill. Just made it looks a bit soupy, but after a few hours it´s the creamiest, most delicious pudding, and the rice mantains its bite. Wonderful.

This image is one I´ve used before, in the days before I met my rice cooker and fell in love with it, but that was a long long time ago, and it´s a pretty drawing, no?

Almendrina (lazy almond peach tart)

One of my father´s more winning characteristics is that, working as he does in the food business, he often turns up with boxes of good stuff under his arm. And since these things are presents from the people who make them, they usually come in industrial sizes. My mother takes exception to them, saying they clutter the pantry, so I´m always kindly ready to lighten the load when I find a box of 24 jars of anchovies from Santoña, or several kilos of the best tiny brown lentils, or a huge can of duck confit.
This morning, rummaging around in the clutter of odds and ends in the terrace shelves I found two kilo tins of Almendrina. This is a sweet almond paste with a gorgeous old-style design, and I´d always been curious but never to the extent of taking one of those massive tins home.
Having one already there, though, I had to open it and start playing around. Apparently you can use it to make an almond drink, and as a sweetener in all sorts of things (try it instead of sugar with rice pudding) but here´s what I did:

Almond and peach tart for very lazy people with a couple of good tins to hand

This is a killer pudding, sweet and rich but not cloying. The almond paste isn´t too almondy, but provides a creamy undertone, almost like creme patissiere. I´ll try it with fresh stone fruit when it´s in season.

Ready made puff pastry
Peaches in syrup
Almendrina
Slivered almonds

Preheat the oven to 200ºC
Roll out the pastry. Smear some of the almond paste until just shy of the edges. Place the sliced peaches prettily or as you will. Pinch the edges of the pastry so that they´ll hold the juices when they start to run. Scatter slivered almonds on top, and bake until golden.

Spring is here

And aren´t we glad, after a rainy, cold, long winter.

One of the last things I did before Pepe was born was this banner for The Perfect Pantry, one of my favourite blogs. As always, it was a pleasure to work with Lydia, and I´m very proud to see my work on her blog as part of a springlike overhaul.

Carrots

I meant to do a post about Lenten chickpeas and spinach soups, but you know what? The lovely Deb was just before me, with this version of the Spanish classic. You can try my slapdash method or her more beautiful one, but do try it because it´s sooo good.

As for me, I´ll just reflect on shapes and sizes. Isn´t it odd that things taste different if they´re cut different? I hate carrots cut in coins. They remind me of the flabby, overcooked, tasteless stuff I refused as a child. If I´m having them sauteed or roasted or plain steamed, or they are to go into a stew, it has to be thick batons. I grate them for salads, or make long slivers with the peeler, and these are the shapes I like in a stirfry. For soups I favour the small cube, or the very small cube for my baby. And if I´m in a tearing hurry, I grate it with a microplane so it cooks in her soup truly fast. Long sticks are my favourite snack (never mind that they´re healthy, I just love them).

Here´s a quick side dish preparation for carrots:

Take a couple of carrots cut in thick batons, and put them in a small non stick frying pan with water to come half way up (this is very little water) and a small piece of butter, the size of a hazelnut, no more. Salt, fire it up and get on with the rest of dinner. When it comes to boil, cover it and let them steam. In a few minutes they´ll be quite soft, and the liquid should have evaporated, but if it hasn´t, take the cover off and let it bubble up.

Sometimes I add french green beans too, straight from the freezer, and they cook at the same time.

Lobstersquad made it to a Forbes list (and a pressure cooker risotto)

Here are two things I never expected to happen: one, the most amazing, is to find my name on a Forbes list. Not the one headed by Oprah, but deeply exciting all the same; I can now paraphrase all those Oscar winners and say how honoured I am to be named alongside such talent, etc, etc.

The second thing is that yesterday´s pressure cooker rice was excellent. Call it risotto or call it arroz caldoso, it was just unbeleivable, as in, hard to beleive: creamy, perfectly cooked rice, full of flavour, in less than fifteen minutes from the minute I turned on the hob to sitting down? I was deeply sceptical, but figured it worth a try, and so it was. Risotto, long banished from my kitchen except as an occasional treat, comes back as a weeknight dinner staple.

The rice cooker reigns supreme for white rice and for truly hands off restful cooking, but for quick and incredibly delicious results, this is the one. Here is what I did yesterday with what I had, but of course onions can take the place of leeks, chorizo for bacon if you´re so inclined, any other vetetable for the peas, and aromatics can vary: saffron, herbs, etc.

Pressure cooker arroz caldoso, or risotto
adapted from Lorna Sass

Sautee two chopped leeks and bacon until the bacon releases its fat and the leeks begin to look floppy. Deglaze with some white wine, let it bubble up and add 1 1/2 cups short grain rice. Stir, add 3 1/2 cups of stock and cover the pressure cooker. Let it come uo to high pressure and count five minutes (five!!! seriously, aren´t you in love already?).
Now release the pressure and have a look. You might want a bit more broth, or you might want to let some of it evaporate. I thought it was just fine with those meassures. Add butter and parmesan and there you are, risotto for three hungry people or four staid ones.