Fear of frying:eggs and chips

Sometimes I think frying is the national sport.
People love it. They fry letf, right and centre.
They fry fish, they fry meat, they fry dough. They stuff things and fry them . They layer fried things and bake them. They fry so much, sometimes you come out of restaurants or even people´s houses smelling like they fried you.

It´s supposed to be convenient, and widely assumed that things take seconds to fry. And they do, but only one. When you have to feed 4 or 6 people with things that have to be fried, that´s at least an hour of standing over a hot stove.

But people don´t mind that. I´ve seen this time and again. Someone turns up unexpectedly, and instead of being offered pasta, or soup, or a sandwich, preparations are inmediately started for chips and fried eggs.

Because if ever there was a love affair, it´s that of the Spaniard and his fried egg. They are the true national dish, and never mind paella. I dare you to find a bar that doesn´t have them on every plato combinado, nestling up to croquetas and russian salad.
It makes sense, in a way, since we do produce the best olive oil in the world, and olive oil is the best fat for frying.
Or so they tell me.
I don´t fry, myself. I´m too scared.

For the true fried egg of legend, the perfectly round, lacy crisp golden egg of platonic ideal, you need a pool of boiling oil. And the egg has to be dropped from a height, so it is full submerged and the oil can splash over it inmediately.

See what I mean? Only the brave. I just cannot do that. Things spit and hiss and splutter, and I lose my nerve.
You have to approach the fried egg with confidence. They smell your fear. If you don´t arrive at the stove with a masterful mind, the egg will sense it, and begin to sputter fiercely, and even maybe catch fire.

Not for me.
When I want a crisp potato, crunchy and golden, to break a creamy orange yolk, here´s my answer.

OVEN CHIPS WITH POACHED EGGS

Preheat the oven on its highest setting.

Scrub 2 potatoes and cut them into wedges, without peeling.

Put them in a bowl with a spoonful or so of oil, a good pinch of pimentón (sweet or hot, as you like), plenty of black pepper, and salt.
Toss them so they´re slicked over with the oil, and put them on a baking tray and in the oven.

Wait till they´re cooked and crisp, around 20, but maybe more.
Eat them straight away, blowing on your fingers, breaking the yolks of the poached eggs, and making sure to scrape all the yellow goodness with more potatoes.

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.

Sausages in a balsamic glaze

My so-flattering mention yesterday in Elise´s Simply Recipes blog spotlight had me in a whirl. I almost expected to have to start signing autographs. It´s also provided the push I needed to organize the blog a little. It´s still not very tidy, but at least now you can see on your right a little list of the recipe labels. Clicking on them will at least get you straight to the recipe posts. I hadn´t realised I´d done so many posts that were just plain and simple jabbering.
And now for the real stuff.
A few months ago I wrote with some indignation on the subject of balsamic vinegar .
It´s still something that can make me go off on one. I still foam at the mouth when confronted with plates that have been dribbled on with some vague idea of being artistic or dashing, or of marking up the price of some ensaladilla rusa.However,
I´ve since been given a recipe that has changed the status of the bottle of balsamic in my cupboard. From dusty embarrassement it has gone straight to the must-haves.
My aunt Begoña gave me this recipe, and if I didn´t love her already, just for this she´d have my undying devotion. It falls under the category of high impact-low effort cooking, and is just so so good.

It takes just two ingredients, fresh butcher´s sausages, and some balsamic vinegar. The basic elemental stuff that´s mostly caramel and who-knows-wat-else.
First, boil the whole sausages briskly for ten or twelve minutes, until they´re cooked trough. They´ll emerge pale and quite gosh-awful looking. This is ok, never fear.(they can be made ahead up to this point, yet another bonus of this marvelous dish)
Take non-stick frying pan that will fit the sausages snugly, and tip some balsamic into it, enough to just cover the bottom. Put your sausages in over a medium heat. The vinegar will start to bubble and reduce, coating the sausages in a sticky glaze. When one side is brown, turn them over.
In a couple of minutes, you´ll have a panful of sausages that will be a dark, glossy brown. They will be sweet and savoury, but the acid of the vinegar will have evaporated. As the sausages are cooked already, all they do is take on the colour and the flavour as the vinegar reduces. It´s very quick.
You´ll be spared the grease, the smokey fug, and the uncertainty of wether the insides are really cooked under the burnt exterior. There is no burnt exterior here, just some fingerlicking marvelous jammy outside.
They can be served with some rice (duh) or salad, but they´re so good, it´s hard to keep them from being eaten on the way to the table.
So, ok, I don´t take back what I said about balsamic glaze as doodled on plates, but I´ll admit that as an actual glaze, and as a sweet-sour complement to something that usually benefits from that treatment, pork, it most definitely has its points.

Facing my fears : wiener schnitzel

The other day, as I wrote my post about fried eggs, I thought maybe I was being a huge phoney. What are the ethics of slagging off a whole cooking technique when one has never attempted it? Surely "try everything once" applies to more than braving your way through a bowl of glutinous soy with raw squid ( that´s the one dish I have truly hated in my adulthood).

So today I decided I´d be brave, and at least know what I was talking about.

Because I love and adore schnitzel, escalope milanese, filete empanado or however you want to call it. For years and years it was the only thing I ordered in restaurants. And even now I still do, often. There´s nothing I like more, and today I wanted it. I thought, why deny myself my favourite thing?
So I faced my fears, refused to be a wimp, and bought two thin veal escalopes.

I blitzed stale bread to make crumbs. I pounded the meat wafer thin. I beat eggs, I floured, egged, breaded. I made a salad, I oven-fried the potatoes (well, I wasn´t going to fry everything ), and when the time came, I flung the meat in the hot oil. Like a little trooper. You should have seen me. Unfazed. I was so proud of myself.

And it was delicious. My favourite restaurant meal, there, on a plate, at home, so much better for having the salad just how I like it, and all the potatoes I needed. The meat so tender, the outside so crusty and golden...

But never again. That´s it. By the time I started to eat, I was a nervous wreck, I was flushed, sweating, and beginning to curse my wild idea.
José swears my hair doesn´t smell of fried stuff, but I can´t tell if that´s the truth or just a desperate attempt to make me fry again.

Today I am a stronger person, and I know I can face my fear , but also that I don´t want to.

The only thing I love more than schnitzel is being proved right, and I can say with all truth, and from first hand experience : Frying sucks. If you want something fried, let somebody else do it.