Chicken skin

Some months ago I wrote about the contents of my freezer, listing among them chicken skins. Someone asked me in the comments if they were for my cats. I felt too sheepish to answer. The truth is, I don't have any cats, and if I did, I would certainly not share the chicken skin with them. I could have shouted it out from the rooftops, though, because it seems chicken skin is The New Bacon.

Cooked chicken skin can be flabby, slippery and rather gross. Even if you take care to brown your chicken pieces, after braising the whole thing goes soft, and what's the point of that? I don't usually bother to brown anything, anyway. And please, don't talk to me about Maillard reaction. Bla bla bla whatever. 

I cook chicken without the skin, at least for everyday chicken things like rice or soups or a sandwich. But because I now live the suburban life of the supermarket chicken thigh package, I have had to learn how to deal with the skin myself. A deft pull and you have your skinless thigh. A few inept wiggles and cuts and it is now boneless. 

The meat for whatever dish I'm making, the bones for stock, and the skin? It pains me to say that I used to toss it. No longer. 

Now the skin goes, salted and cut into small strips, into a non-stick pan on a low flame. And if you have one of those things that look like the child of a strainer and a ping-pong paddle, put it over.

Leave it on its own while you make whatever else you're making. It starts to change colour, spitting a little, shrivelling and crisping and after a few more minutes and a bit of turning becomes crunchy and golden and irresistible. Properly irresistible. It is the most delicious thing, and I can't think of any chicken dish it doesn't improve. Sandwiches, soups, noodles, rice, anything, really. 

If you don't want to use it right away you can leave it in the fridge, and use it to enliven leftovers. My favourites: crisp some to crumble over soups of the heartier variety, like black beans. 

Let them cook til golden and use the rendered fat to cook fried rice, or to make a hash with cooked potatoes, or for the most heavenly ropa vieja.

Add them to poached chicken for  the whole foods, beak-to-tail answer to the Club Sandwich.

You can think of it as kosher chicharrones and serve it as a snack, but that is something I have never got round to. To me, they are simply a very handy way to make sure that I have the best of both worlds, crisp chicken skin and juicy, flavourful meat.

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. 

Puchero (chicken, chickpea and rice soup)

This is not an exciting recipe. 

I'd better start off like that, because it would be a shame if you expected something else and then saw this soup and thought "bo-ring". So let's be frank: this is a restorative, lovely soup, but it is a dull shade of beige, the texture is all soft and you would never serve it to guests. 

It is just comfort food, a pillowy, wonderful elixir, sure to warm you through if you're cold, fill you up if you're hungry, perk you up if you're tired, send you to sleep if you're exhausted, and bring you back from the brink if you're ill.

So. Even if it ain't exciting, I think we can all agree that you need this soup in your life.

Better yet, it is made from stuff you probably have lying around, and if not, from things you can buy at even a ratty supermarket. 

Of course I use a pressure cooker, but a normal pot will do (just multiply time by three). 

In goes a can of chickpeas, drained if you're not liking the taste of the liquid. Three chicken thighs (this is the standard at my supermarket, but whatever you have), bone in, skin off. A whole carrot, peeled. Half a cup of rice, long or short grain, doesn't matter.

Salt, cover with water, lock the lid and when it comes up to pressure, give it ten minutes. Let it come down naturally if you can, but if you can't, then cook it for twelve.

There. That's it. You'll have cloudy, fragrant chickeny chickpea soup, thickened by the by now very soft rice. All you need to do is shred the chicken, mash the carrot against the side of the pot with a fork, check for salt, and serve. Bring lemon and hot sauce to the table, just in case.

Kedgeree risotto

It seems that every minute two or three cookbooks are published that have the word "seasonal" in the title. Or at the very least, the subtitle.

Which is all very well, if you´re in California, or Spain, where things grow plentiful under the generous sun. But see, now I live in a place that has two seasons: bad, and worse.
The calendar says I should be going for the salads and the first gazpachos, the bowls of cherries, the lightly grilled fish, the ice cream. But my eyes see clammy fog, and my stomach says to hell with all that. I want stodge.

Kedgeree risotto is a beautiful dish. The real thing is a sort of pilaf, served with boiled eggs, but this is much better. A creamy risotto, light yellow and faintly smoky from the haddock, flecked with parsley and topped with a runny five-minute egg. Really good stuff. And if you can find it, samphire, that weird crunchy seaweed, is a great last minute addition.

When I make it in Spain I have no smoked haddock, of course, so I proceed as for a normal risotto and add smoked salmon or trout at the end.

The method is as for a normal risotto, except that you start by poaching the smoked haddock for a very short while, and setting it aside. This fishy smoky water is the stock for your rice.

Start with onions in butter and oil, as always, and when they´re transparent, add a spoonful of curry powder. You heard me. Curry powder. None of your fancy freshly ground spice pastes, please. The yellow stuff from the jar.

When that smells good add the rice, then the stock, etc. As you know, I always use a pressure cooker for this, so just give it double the volume of stock to rice, lock, cook five minutes at high pressure and there you are.
If you do the normal method then it´s the stirring, adding stock, etc. A very soothing, gentle way of relaxing after a long day and enjoying a glass of wine, if you must.

While this is happening drop eggs into boiling water, and simmer them for five minutes, too. Chop parsley, and when the rice is done, add the flaked fish and the parsley.

Serve with the peeled eggs on top.

Pressure cooker tag, and a potato and mussel stew

A reader reminded me to put a sidebar with pressure cooker recipes on the side, so I have.

Also, to recommend a pressure cooker. I can only do that with the one I have, which is the only one I´ve ever used. It´s not a very informed opinion, but for what it´s worth, I think the WMF Perfect is the bee´s knees. I have the 6,5 litre model and pine for a 3 litre one too. I can´t quite justify that, as it´s an expensive piece of crockery, but it´s so useful and so great that I might someday. The big model is great for soups and stocks and beans, since you can´t fill it up to the brim, but for rice, or a flan, it might me more comfortable to use a pot that´s not so heavy.

So there.

As for a recipe, here´s one for a simple mussel and potato stew. It takes about fifteen minutes total time to put together, which is pretty impressive for something so satisfying. The beauty of it is that the rythms are perfectly synched. One thing leads to another so there´s no waiting around, just some mindless chopping and debearding and then a beautiful dinner.

Dice an onion and sautee it in the pressure cooker, with a smashed garlic clove. Meanwhile, peel and break a few potatoes into rough chunks. Add as spoonful of tomato puree and a splash of white wine (have a glass, do, and if you don´t have wine, do it with beer, or cider), and then the potatoes. Now add water to just cover, salt sparingly, lock it, bring it up to pressure and when it´s up, count five minutes.

In this time, about seven minutes, you can clean a kilo of mussels. When the five minutes are up, bring the pressure down with cold water and throw the mussels into the pot. Cover but don´t lock and give it a couple of minutes, until the mussels are open.

You can scatter some parsley on top, or better still, coriander for a Portuguese touch. I don´t know why but this dish looks Portuguese to me. 

Instant gratification chocolate pudding (the toddler special)

Remember when you were a kid, how long everything took? It used to drive me nuts to be told that we were almost there, or that something was almost done, and then have to wait the ages a half hour seemed. In the case of cooking, it was aggravated by having to wait while something baked, then wait for it to cool. I usually ended up sick from eating warm cookies.

It´s with that in mind that I offer this recipe, perfect for making with children. It takes almost no time to mix, needs only a scale and a bowl and a spoon and you don´t have to turn on the hob or the oven. The cooking time is two minutes, and you can eat it warm.
I don´t claim that it´s the most elegant or stylish concoction, but boy is it fast. It tastes very good, specially when served hot with a scoop of ice cream, and it´s real food; not a rice crispie in sight. You can keep them entertained for a little while, and by the time the sugar rush hits them and they go berserk, it will hit you, too, and leave you with a beatific smile on your face, and the calm of good chocolate.

Chocolate steamed pudding

Makes two generous deep ramekins, or three less bountiful ones (which is fine. remember that ice cream?)

Put 50 gr. of 52% chocolate and 50 gr. butter in a big microwave safe bowl. Give them one minute on half strenght, and then mix well with the wooden spoon. Little fingers willl interfere but let them. Butter and chocolate, what´s wrong with that?
beat in an egg, and add 25 gr. of flour and a pinch of baking powder. Mix well and put the mix into ramekins. Cover them with clingfilm and microwave on high for 60 seconds.
That should have a bit of sauce underneath, but if you prefer to have the thing cooked through so you can turn it out, then give it 90 seconds, and butter the ramekins.
(You might need a test run. Microwaves are notoriusly weird, and different from each other)

See? Easy as anything. And satisfactory. By the time the bowl has been thoroughly licked, it´s cooked. If you need to entertain a toddler who doesn´t understand delayed gratification, this is it.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Chicken soup in a relative hurry

Ideally the freezer should never be out of some chicken stock, neatly parcelled and labelled, the sort that has simmered for hours and is full of jellied goodness. But we all know that is not always possible, and so, here´s a way to make chicken soup that will give you a steaming bowlful in thirty minutes or so.

Buy some chicken, preferably on the bone.Chop leeks and carrots, onion perhaps, celery if you like (I do), potato if you don´t want pasta later. Chop them small. This might seem counter productive if you´re in a hurry, but the smaller you chop the quicker they cook. Sweat them in a bit of oil, then add water and some good bouillon powder. I have some Marigold I brought over from the UK, but plain old Knorr is quite ok, really. And yes, I know it´s just flavoured salt, but what do you think is in those nice looking cartons of broth? Stock cubes and water, my friends, marked up to make us all look like idiots.

So, stock cube, water. Now the chicken bits. If it´s breast, then you don´t want to give it much time, but thighs or drumsticks can take twenty minutes´ slow simmer very well, by which time the vegetables will have cooked to an agreeably soft texture. At the end, throw in a handful of tiny pasta and take out the chicken. Let it rest a little and tear the meat, put it back in the pot, and taste. You´ll probably need salt, possibly some lemon juice to perk it up, definitely a dash of sherry to enliven it, a small cube of butter because it´s always a good idea, and a sprinkling of parsley to make it look good.

A bowl of this won´t keep you on your feet for a day´s skiing, but it´s just the thing for a blustery January evening.

Soup month

The problem with January is that you´re supposed to be all virtuous all of a sudden, even though you are still wrapped in a million layers of clothing, and it´s so cold that the mere thought of a salad can make tears freeze in your eyes.
There´s precious little point in even pretending that a big turnaround is going to happen. You might as well be realistic and eat something good and filling, because if you don´t, you´ll just walk intoLe pain quotidien and demolish some overpriced croissants and hot chocolate, and what´s the good of that?

Also, there´s a lot to be said for making food that keeps the kitchen hot and steams the windows. You can then wipe a bit off to watch the snow, which is always fun.
The best thing to have on hand is soup, of course, which can be all things to all people; filling, nourishing and light, all at the same time. I will be doing a few soup posts, because Pía and I are living on soup at the moment (oh, and pie, too, and cake, but that´s another just recreational).

One such is Scotch broth, which, in Laurie Colwin´s version is a beauty. Not physically,really, but in a general comforting bowlful way. I have given this soup to extremely picky eaters and to lamb haters and they ate it up and had seconds.

It´s very easy, too, as long as you do it over two days. If you don´t, you won´t be able to skim the fat properly, and it won´t be so good.
Just boil some bony cheap cut of lamb, like neck, with a few parsley stalks and the green tops of some leeks, and celery and onion if you have them on hand. Do skim well in the first twenty minutes because the broth can look rather grey and disgusting. Leave it for a couple of hours, until the meat falls off the bone. Pick the meat from the bones, and put it, with the broth, in a container. Next day, defat this well.
Chop leeks and carrots, as small as you can or feel like, and sweat them briefly. Then add the broth and the meat, and either throw in some pearl barley or, if you are like me and grudge the grain drinking up all the broth, boil it separately the day you make the stock, until it´s just al dente. Then add it to the soup until it´s as you like it.

I think no clear soup is complete without a dash of sherry, and a grind of black pepper, perhaps.

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.

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.

Hearty soups and an Anglo-Sherry condiment.

Here´s the hearty potaje I promised. A potaje is a thick soup/stew made in one pot and containing a variety of vegetables, some kind of bean and various assorted cured bits of pork, anything from a few rounds of chorizo to a whole pig´s ear.
And yes, I wrote about it a year ago. It can´t be helped, soups have a habit of turning up again and again. They´re never exactly the same, of course, but they´re pretty much sister soups, and I can´t justify whole blog posts about each one. All potajes are more or less the same, in spirit if not in deed, and they benefit from being prepard to fit a general pattern rather than a strict recipe, I think.

All I can say is:

1-make your life easier, and use tinned or jarred beans or chickpeas (not lentils). It´s the one sure and painless way of knowing they won´t be hard, or mushy, but just right. If you´re cooking for a crowd, look out for the 3kg. tins. They´re so cool, I´m longing to buy one, but haven´t yet found the right occasion for it.

2- Start with a sofrito. It doesn´t matter what it is, wether the Italian onion-celery-carrot or the Spanish onion-pepper-garlic-tomato, a mixture or the two, or whatever you have around. This isn´t traditional here, but it helps things along so much that:

3- you don´t really need so much pork floating around. It´s good, yes, but it will also make the thing heavy, and you´ll either have to restrain yourself to a single bowl (impossible) or spend the rest of the afternoon in a dazed stupor.

4- instead, mix lots of vegetables in. My last success had onion, carrot, celery, cabbage, potato, tomatoes, green beans and spinach, as well as chickpeas. Even my father, that notorious carnivore, had a big bowl.

5- Finishing touches in a contrasting colour make it so much prettier than the usual sludgy brown. Consider spinach, peas, parsley, or even cherry tomatoes.

6- I always have the second bowl mixed with salad. I love the crunch and the vinegary touch.
If you can´t be bothered to make a salad, some hot peppers in brine will do nicely, or failing that, just a dash of vinegar or lemon juice.

Or, you can do what J´s mother tells me is an old Anglo-Sherry* tradition:

Put a garlic clove and a hot chili pepper in a jar and fill it with dry sherry, sherry vinegar or a mixture of the two. Leave it to seep for a week, and use it to drizzle over your lentejas/garbanzos/judías.

I´ve never tried it, but will make a jar today so it´s ready by the time I return on Monday. We´re going to Málaga. Will report back. Happy Thanksgiving or just plain old weekend.

*Anglo-Sherry is the affectionate term for the descendants of the English, Irish or French winemakers and exporters who came to Jerez in the XVIII century and made the town and the wine famous.

First batch of soup

I made my first batch of proper wintry soup yesterday.
Monday isn´t a good market day, but I went in for some butter, and was inmediately sidetracked into buying carrots. And once there, why not go for the celery, cabbage and pumpkin? They´re not the sort of thing to suffer from being bought on a Monday.
And I happened to walk by the chicken stall, and there was a special on free range thighs. Now, I cannot resist a bargain, but I´m also a price snob, so I decided these legs were probably best used in a pot of stock.
So there I was, happy as anything, not minding at all that it was dark by six thirty. The windows on my kithen were steamed from all the chickeny vapours, and I was assured of a light and sustaining dinner.
And many more.
This soup started with onions, celery and carrot, simmered in olive oil. To which a potato was added, diced small, and some squashed, diced bigger. A handful of pre-soaked barley was tossed in, a bay leaf, Marigold bouillon powder, and a litre of water.
After half an hour, more water and some finely shredded cabbage, which simmered for fifteen minutes.
To serve, I nicked a bit of chicken from the stockpot, added a tiny shot of PX sherry, and it was a perfectly wonderful dinner, soft and unexciting but just what I wanted.
There´s a lot left, and it will have to be born again if I´m not to be bored. One option is a ladleful of the proper chicken stock. But the consomé is so good on its own that I tend to save it for just that.
So it´ll probably be some cheat´s stock and a bit of frozen spinach, with some lemon juice at the end.
Or a chunkier version, roast tomatoes from my freezer, with some chickpeas and pasta.
The list of variations is endless, but by then this batch will be finished, and another, different one, started, and so on, like this, until May, when soup season will be over, and gazpacho season starting over.

Kids´ stuff

I´m rushing everywhere lately. Life is pretty crazy but any day now the long list of projects will be ticked off, and then maybe I´ll be able to have a proper siesta. In the meantime, I think now is the time for this, which isn´t a recipe, not really, just my usual impromptu, unplanned, anything goes pudding.
It´s gorgeously unsophisticated, sweet enough to make your head ache, and really should be given only to children. And yet it always goes down a treat, maybe even more so than things that I´ve actually slaved over. It takes about three seconds to make, with things that come out of packets, and thank heavens for that.
Even people who never ever cook can make it, which is why I always make it for people who don´t cook. I like to make converts if I can, and nobody stays away from the stove if they know that something golden, crunchy, gooey and mouthwatering is theirs for the making. And once there, who knows, they may climb to other things, slowly.
It works on the quesadilla principle, in which a wheat tortilla is filled and then toasted in a non-stick pan, no oil needed, until it turns crispy and golden, while the cheese melts. The filling is as simple as a good spoonful, be generous, go on, who cares, of Nutella, and some chopped nuts. If your guests include under twelves, or teens studying for their exams, you might as well bung in a few pieces of marshmallow.
Put them in the pan, turn them when one side is golden, and when both are, caution everyone that it will be hot. Bite away, try not to mind the fact that your chin will get chocolate all over, and enjoy.
You´ll start taking good care not to be out of tortillas or Nutella, ever again, trust me.

Fish-on-friday tuna sandwich

It´s Lent, it´s Friday, it has to be fish. I could enthuse over the baked mackerel we had on Wednesday. Or talk about my favourite salmon rice. But not today. I have a poltergeist cold that refuses both to go away and to manifest itself clearly. I have deadlines. I want something simple and comforting, and even the thought of defrosting some chicken stock seems like a challenge, so I´ll go with that old friend, the tuna sandwich. And before anything else, please let´s agree to not give the holy name of tuna sandwich to those pale foamy wet flabby sacrilegious things that lurk in chill-cabinets.

Recipes for sandwiches aren´t really recipes, but only lists of quirks and fads and phobias masquerading under the name. There´s a lot of sandwich hectoring, plenty of huffy condemnation of certain ingredients, and always rules. Everyone has them, and they can be as weird as my father´s firmly held belief that pork and mustard don´t go together.
The only answer to this is a Rule to end all rules : Do it yourself. It´s the only way to avoid nasty jolts like finding mayonaise and cheese nestling under the same slice of bread, which I, for instance, hate, and my sister Gadea loves.

My version, which is, naturally, the best in the world and the one and only one for me is as follows:

Wholemeal loaf bread, crusts off.
One small can of tuna in olive oil.
Mayonaise from a jar, tricked out with a drizzle of olive oil and a good squirt of lemon juice.
Several drops of tabasco.
A couple of gherkins, the sweet and sour Polish or German kind, chopped very small.
A whole lettuce leaf, cut to the size of the bread, but not chopped or sliced.
I am not averse to some boiled egg going in, but I think it has to be the sort of forlorn boiled egg that comes back uneaten from a picnic. If you have to start boiling eggs the simplicity of procedure is broken and the whole experience ruined.

Serve with potato chips, preferably salt and vinegar, and either ice-cold beer or ice-cold Diet Coke. I think the bubbles complement it nicely. Must try it with Champagne sometime.

Soup über alles

Every now and then I feel a hankering for German food. This always takes me by surprise, because I don´t feel at all German, despite my name. My great-grandparents came to Spain over a hundred years ago, but apart from them, all my ancestors are Spanish as can be. The only German thing in my childhood were the dirndels I was made to wear to birthday parties. Scarred me for life, of course, but that´s another story.

A quarter of blood ain´t much, but if you think of it in terms of actual blood, it makes for quite a few pints sloshing about inside me. It´s quite natural that every now and then I just have to have pale sausages with sweet mustard.

Luckily for me there´s a salchichería in c/Arenal that has wonderful stuff. It´s called La Madrileña, but don´t be fooled. Beyond the chorizo and the callos lies plenty of teuton goodness in the shape of all kinds of wurst, plus jars of pickles and mustards. Last time I walked away with a tin of sauerkraut on top of my usual package of sausages and leberwurst ( for daddy).

I did this recipe of Elise´s, but wasn´t too pleased. It was ok, but I think I was expecting too much from it. My mind was on some form of Romantic, sturm und drang mythic food, which boiled pork and cabbage just ain´t.

So I decided to start over, and sauteed two onions and carrots, plus a bayleaf and some peppercorns. That perked it up a bit, especially since to sweeten the onions I added caramel, which gave the thing a bit of colour. With some crispy roast potatoes and plenty of ketchup, it still wasn´t Caspar David Friedrich, but it was good.

There was still a lot of it, though, so I decided to ring the changes for a second helping. A couple of stock cubes, a generous litre of water, and a cup of barley that had been soaking overnight were added to the pot, which was put on a low flame for an hour or so.

This resulted in a wonderful wintry-looking soup, with the orange of the carrot and the pearly barley grains floating in a dense light brown broth. Sharp from the sauerkraut, yet sweetened by the added vegetables, with the meat taking second place to the barley, still al dente after all that while. I loved it. I just wish it was cold enough to really warrant such a hearty soup.

I´ve frozen two portions, and will have the last one tonight, maybe with a glug of sherry, to reflect both sides of my heritage.

Espinacas con garbanzos

Of all beans, chickpeas are my favourite by far. I think it´s because beans can so easily become mushy, but garbanzos, being rock hard, hardly ever have that problem. Of course that´s what makes cooking them such a lengthy pursuit, so you can guess that this is another of those beans-in-a-jar recipes.

It´s quite an oddball recipe in the Spanish canon, in that there are no pig parts lurking around. It´s just chickpeas with spinach. You´ll find no panceta, chorizo, morcilla, ear, snout or knuckle. Also, it´s eaten with a fork, usually served as a first course or a tapa, not as a hearty potaje. I love it on toast doused with extra virgin olive oil.

Of course in a normal country it would be a side dish, but you know how it is here. Orphan hunks of meat or fish, or else beans escorted by a phalanx of cholesterol.

Which is not to say that you have to do it our way. As you can imagine, it nestles very comfortably up to Moroccan or Middle Eastern food, and personally, I think it´s a winner with roast lamb as served in Burgos, but don´t let them hear me say so, or I´ll have my citizenship taken away.

A note about proportions. I´ve used the ones normally available here, that is, 185 gr. jars of chickpeas, and 400 gr. packets of fresh spinach. But it´s a pretty accomodating dish, and you can change the quantities to suit you or your grocer. At most, you´ll find you have garbanzos con espinacas instead of espinacas con garbanzos.

As for the half cup of tomato sauce, well, I know it sounds like an irritating thing to say, but bear with me. You don´t have to use tomato in this recipe, but it´s so much better with it. And if you have half a jar of tomate frito left over, I´m sure you can find a use for it. So go on, try it.

Espinacas con garbanzos

1 small onion
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup tomato sauce ( tomate frito, without corn syrup or dubious stuff, please. Just add a bit of sugar if you like)
1/2 tsp of cumin, or to taste
400 gr. fresh spinach
185 gr(drainded weight) chickpeas
Tabasco or dried chili
salt, pepper, olive oil, lemon juice

In a biggish pan hat has a good lid, sautee the onion in olive oil, and when it´s transparent, add the minced garlic and cumin. Let it cook for a minute, until it´s fragrant.
Now add the spinach, tomato, and drained chickpeas.This is a messy procedure, as the spinach takes up a lot of room, but it will collapse quickly, so just move it around, clamp the lid, and after a minute, shake it around. The idea is that the liquid the spinach gives out is soaked up by the chickpeas, so there´s no sogginess. In no more than five minutes, it will be dark green and soft, but very juicy. Taste for salt and cumin, add a splash of Tabasco, a squirt of lemon juice, and you´re in business.
It tastes better lukewarm, so try not to be greedy.