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.

Finally, lobsters.

Six years of blogging on lobstersquad and this is the first time lobsters make an appearance. At last.

Scotland has many shortcomings in the grocery shopping department. In Aberdeen we have no market, so I miss out on all the banter, the great produce, the old ladies at the queue who can tell you how to cook anything. We have no greengrocers, so I have to buy all my vegetables and fruits encased in plastic, in a supermarket with no soul. I haven´t eaten a tomato since I arrived, two years ago. 

But on the plus side, we have parsnips, and kale, and raspberries and real strawberries, and new potatoes, and crisp apples, and sausages and gammon joints, and Marmite and hot mango sauce and chapati flour and gorgeous thick yogurt and creamy milk and cream so rich that your arteries clog just from looking at it.

So we´re ok. 

Then on top of all that there are the shellfish. In Spain they are the most highly prized, expensive, luxurious articles you can buy. Here, not so much. Boiled crabs cost about the same as smoked mackerel, far less than sole or monkfish or that ethically unsound tuna. And you can buy the crab meat, neatly picked, in a box. As for lobsters, a fat whopping thing at the fishmonger will set you back about the price of a plate of nachos and two beers in a pub. In other words, a bargain.

So when we have guests from Spain, we like to order one of these beauties for a showy first course. They are already boiled, so there are no Annie Hall antics to suffer. All we need is a bowl of mayonnaise and another one of chopped herbs and pickles, so people can mix and match their tartare as they like.

Wine, or beer, bread, salad, and away we go.

When we´ve finished, I put the lobster shells in the pressure cooker with an onion, a stick of celery and a carrot, cover it with water and give them 30 minutes under pressure. In a normal pot I guess that´s 90 minutes, but you can stop when you think it´s ready.The stock is thin and malevolently red, tastes strongly of lobster, and makes a next day risotto or fish soup a thing of beauty. Of course there are never any bits of lobster meat left (cookbook writers, what planet do you live on?) but you can throw in frozen prawns and white fish and it will be wonderful.

Merluza en salsa verde: hake in parsley sauce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick squid: chipiron plancha

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

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

Ingredients

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

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

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

Boiling octopus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Ugly, thrifty, wonderful fish soup

If you call something or someone "morralla", you are doubtless referring to "scum" or "bilge". It´s an insult. But actually what morralla means is the heap of fish and shellfish left at the bottom of the net, too small or too damaged to sell, and often used by fishermen in soups and broths. And that´s not so bad, surely?

I´d never had access to it because Madrid is far from the sea, and the fish that arrives, while plentiful, tends to be of the good-looking, important type. But yesterday I scored a handful of morralla, a beautiful, slightly scary looking lot of tiny sea monsters.

With the economy so bad and everything so glum, it´s great to know that you can feed four people with this hearty soup, and not feel deprived at all. It´s reasonably sophisticated, and tastes great. Which of course it might, since it´s served with Gruyere and rouille toasts, and frankly, what doesn´t taste amazing with that? Mind you, it starts out so ugly that you might think I´ve gone crazy, but trust me, this works.

It´s a very simple soup that starts, as so many good things, with a sofrito (and to be truly Provençal you should use fennel, and orange peel and saffron. But I don´t like fennel and had no oranges on hand, so I used leeks, and oregano and lemon peel, and vermouth instead of Pernod).
Then the whole fish and water to cover are added, and left to simmer for 40 minutes, until everything is falling apart.
Now comes the weird part: you puree it, bones and all. If it was ugly before, now it looks like an untidy sludge you wouldn´t feed your cat, but, patience. Strain it through a chinois and you´re left with a creamy thick soup.
I add a slug of sherry because I can´t help thinking it brightens up every soup.
Serve with grated cheese, toast and rouille.

If you can´t find morralla (and today already there was none at the market) then just do it with whole fish, cut in big chunks. Or buy a couple of whole fish and ask for them to be boned and filleted, and simply make a broth with the bones from your fish and any others the fishmonger may give you, and do this less alarming version.

Oven baked breaded fish

I love crispy crusty breaded fish, but since I don´t fry, I´d assumed it was something I´d never eat at home and that was that.
This is done in the oven, and is falling off a log easy, takes just a few minutes and comes out just great. There is no greasy fug around the house, and even though it pains me to point this out, it is a much lighter and healthier way of cooking.

Tamasin´s Kitchen Bible, the book it´s from, is rather bossy in its insistence on fresh produce and seasonal stuff and what not. I agree in principle, but I hate to be told what to buy by cookbook authours, and it makes me hopping mad when they write "feel free to change an ingredient". Well,of course I feel free. It´s a cookbook, not Stalinist Russia. Are these people totally nuts or what?

All this is just to say that the fish I´ve used is some doubtless highly reprehensible frozen white fillet, and it was still delicious.

The recipe: preheat the oven to 180ªC, dredge the white fish in flour, then dip it in beaten egg, then in breadcrumbs mixed with parsley and lemon zest. It´s much better with home made, coarsely grated breadcrumbs.
Lay the fish on an oiled tray or baking dish and bake until golden, about ten minutes, but do check. It´s usually ten minutes per inch of thickness, but ovens vary, etc. That´s it. Easy easy, and plenty of time while it bakes to dress a salad and doll up some bottled mayonaise with lemon juice and olive oil.

Back in Spain, oh dear

Yes, we had withdrawal symptoms and really wanted to get back to our baby. But it was very hard to tear ourselves away from the coast yesterday, because as usually happens after a rainy weekend, the minute you pack your bags in the car, the sun shines merrily.
It was a very long drive, and we stopped in Elvas for lunch. J thought we might as well have the bacalhau dourada, and we did, and it was pretty good, considering we chose a nondescript touristy little bar in the square.
Elvas looked very beautiful but we couldn´t explore. That´s the problem with Madrid; it´s just too far from everything else.
J´s mother is coming for lunch, so cure the saudade I´ll make octopus salad to start with, and I´ll crush the meringues I bought in Evora to scatter over strawberries and cream.
As far as I can make out, the salada de polvo goes like this:

Octopus, boiled and cut thin (you can buy boiled octopus at the market here, so that´s easy)
Parsley, chopped
Onion, cut very thin and marinated in vinegar (?)
A generous dose of extra virgin olive oil

Just the thing with the so excellent bread we´ve also brought back from the Alentejo.

Marmitako, reloaded

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

Marmitako

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

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

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

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

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.

Cazuela : seafood-pasta-fish soup from Andalucía

I´ve often heard people complain about Spanish food, particulary the food in the south. My knee jerk reaction to this is "bollocks/idiot tourists/you don´t like food anyway". But on cool reflection, I can see their point. If you´re a tourist in Spain, you´re often at the mercy of the sort of people who serve every single thing floating in a pool of orangey oil. You might not see a vegetable for days on end, or else you´ll be subjected to the "ensalada mixta" world of iceberg lettuce and shredded carrot from a jar. I know. I´ve had that, and it sucks. 

But of course that´s not real food, right?
There are a lot of simple  homely dishes, full of vegetables even, that never make it to restaurant tables, and so tourists go away with a lot of bad ideas in their heads and some inferior jamón from the duty free shop in their bags. No wonder they badmouth us.
Here´s one of these,  a warming, beautiful chunky soup of fish, vegetables and pasta, deep yellow from the saffron. 

Cecilia gave me this recipe, but I´ve adapted it. She is a wonderful cook, and I could never hope to rival the real thing, so I might as well take a few shortcuts. The beauty of it is that it´s a blueprint, so you can change any of the main ingredients to suit what you have to hand, and tailor it to the season or your stores.

For four (more or less) you´ll need 2 litres of light fish stock. I make this by buying a block of la Sirena frozen fish fumet and dissolving it in two litres of water instead of the recommended one.

250 gr. of pasta, some short thick noodles, or the ones shaped like rice
or rice, about a cup, or 500 gr. of potatoes cut in chunks. Whatever you have, but remember that the cooking time will be different, so adapt accordingly.

Likewise, the fish is your choice, but I normally go with frozen prawns (250 gr) and a piece of desalted cod, or maybe some frozen hake. But mussels, clams, and any other white fish are more than fine.

The veg is again a matter of taste, but keep it in the range of asparagus, artichokes, spinach, that sort of thing. Not too many, this is a Spanish dish after all, it won´t do to make it all green.

For the sofrito, a small tin of plum tomatoes, an onion, a clove of garlic and a green pepper.
Start with this first, sauteeing the onion, then adding the pepper, then the tomato and garlic, and letting it go sweet and soft ( a spoonful of sugar is always a good idea).
Add the stock and a pinch of saffron threads, or a teaspoonful of paprika, or both.
Let this simmer for a few minutes, then liquidize it if you like ( I don´t often bother).
Add the pasta and vegetables. The fish should go in when the pasta is about five minutes away from being ready.
This is not a dish that needs to be exactly al dente, in fact the tradition here is to serve it pretty soggy, and the fish won´t be mortally dry with all that liquid around. But still, watch it carefully, taste for salt and pepper, and serve with lots of nice doughy bread and a big green salad.
See, that wasn´t so bad, surely?

Pasta alla bottarga

Summer. It kind of gets to you, in the end, doesn´t it? You may try to bumble along happily, pretending it´s not here, but before you know it, it will get you in the neck, nastily.
Forgive the hiatus, but really, these temperatures have made anything other than opening the fridge an utopia. Likewise, the computer keys smoke. However, since I´ll be in Estonia by Friday, I´ve taken heart.
Here´s a recipe very suited to summer. Pasta alla bottarga is one of those winners, pasta recipes that can be made while the pasta boils.
Even if it´s just pasta, it can´t fail to be impressive. Bottarga, the dried roe of red tuna, is so exotic, so thorougly mediterranean chic, and so expensive and hard to find, that you have an instant high-impact-low-effort classic on your hands.
I suggest that you attempt this only in case of having recently come into an inheritance, or if some kind friend has recently been to Cádiz and has picked up some of the stuff.
Once home, a piece no bigger than a zippo lighter is enough to feed four, so it´s not so bad.
You just need to peel and grate that piece into a bowl. Cover it with about a half cup of the best olive oil. Chop a bunch of parsely, crush a couple of dried chillies, and add them, together with some grated pepper. Salt need not apply, yet. Leave it to infuse for a little while, half an hour or so.
Then boil your pasta ( I think 500 gr. for 4, but you be the judge). Flat shapes optional, long non-negotiable, and don´t even think about parmesan. When al dente, toss into the bowl, mix well, and check for salt and oil. It may not look like much sauce, but the bottarga is so strong that the little pieces of oily roe clinging to the pasta will be more than enough. A little green salad after this goes down a treat. And if you happen to have any leftovers, it´s also great cold.

Super-cheat´s pissaladiére

I´ve just had a minor epiphany over lunch. Like one does. J´s sister had recommended a new sandwich place in the neighbourhood, so there we went to see if the fuss was justified.
We sat at the bar, and read the paper and sipped icy cañas while they made the sandwiches. In every bar they give you a little something with your drink, some olives or chips. What we got here was so good, so much better than any platonic ideal of any chip or olive or pincho. On the face of it, it was some sort of pissaladiére. However, my keen nose for a shortcut quickly detected the truth. What we are dealing with is a measure of genius of the sort I admire.
This was a torta de aceite of the sort they sell at Viena Lacrem, smeared with a mixture of grated tomato, mashed anchovies and a dash of oregano.
Provided you have ready access to this type of bread, which I think is nothing more sophisticated than a focaccia type of dough that is fried instead of baked, you´re nanoseconds away from heaven.
If not, well, you can make some pizza bases and fry them, of course, but I´m not sure with all that effort the whole thing might become a bit pointless and exponentially less delicious.
You´d be better off sticking with a normal cheat´s pissaladiére, as seen on Lindsay Bareham´s The fish store, or this post of mine from last year.
The sandwiches were excellent, so I´m proud to recommend "El burgado" bocadillería gourmet. c/ Espíritu Santo, 40. 91 521 28 77.
Viena Lacrem, as ever, still reigns supreme over all bakeries in Madrid from its tiny hole-in-the-wall at c/Santa Brígida 6.

Archaeological food: mojama

Here´s one of my favourite all-time tapas, mojama . I love it for its own sake, but even more I love it for the sense of history I get every time I take a bite.
I know it´s silly and snobbish, and that I should feel the same way with bread, or olive oil. But they´re things I´ve been seeing every day of my life, whereas mojama is a bit of an acquired taste, and I acquired it only a few years ago.

Being the salted and dried loin of tuna, it´s very strong. And salty. And dry. I´m sure you guessed that.
In Madrid it seems to be the specialty of a few cervecerías of the old school, where they pull the beer in small, perfect icy cañas with a creamy foam. One bite of the salty mojama is enough to make you order seven cañas, at the very least, so it´s good for business.
They serve it cut in very thin slices, fanned out on a plate, with a few just-toasted almonds, hot from the pan, and a drizzle of the best olive oil. See what I mean? Doesn´t that feel like an illustration of Mediterranean life BC? Don´t you see Dido having a salty snack among the ruins of Cartague?
Provided you can find the mojama, it´s a very easy and impressive aperitivo to serve to guests. Just make sure that you toast the almonds carefully, without adding oil, as theirs will come to the surface in the hot pan. And don´t add salt, on pain of serious dehydration.

Bonito con tomate (albacore in tomato sauce)

My mother insists that I say, loud and clear, that J is in every respect a perfect husband, and that he sent a big bouquet of blood-red roses yesterday, just so you know ( and yes, she does mean to imply that I am a shrew and don´t deserve him).
And since today isn´t my aniversary any more, I have no reason to fume. I have the house to myself, which means I have the whole sofa, undisputed control of the remote, and freedom of choice in viewing matter.
I have rented a stack of DVDs that J would hate, mainly The Sopranos, which I´d never got round to watching, and so I´m very happy, really.
I went to the market for fruit and cucumbers, but couldn´t resist buying some bonito. This white tuna is one of my favourite things, and it´s right in season now, which means it costs almost nothing (well, al-most).
So I´ve decided to cook it in a way that will make it very suitable for watching the Sopranos, bonito con tomate.

This is a very simple dish that I really love. It´s just bonito del norte, in a tomato sauce. All you have to do is make a tomato sauce in whichever way you usually do (mine has quite a bit of onion, some garlic and lots of sugar, with a pinch of chili and sometimes some oregano).
You then put the fish in this sauce and let it poach gently, until it´s juicy and white, and breaks into big delicate flakes. Five minutes at most, and let it finish cooking inside the hot sauce.
Of course, as you can imagine, the standard orthodox bona fide recipe calls for frying the fish first, so it browns. But I find that it only makes the dish more greasy, the fish more likely to dry out, and you don´t see the nice brown colour with the whole thing smothered in red sauce.

So there you go. Serve with white rice (this is not the influence of my rice-cooker craziness, but actual tradition).
Leftovers are heavenly with a change of nationality, reincarnated as a pasta sauce.

Buñuelos for All Saints

Sitemeter informs me that only 15% of my hits come from Spain, so I thought it´d be nice to write a little ethnographic post, in the manner of the Discovery channel, so that you´d know what goes on here for Halloween.

We call it Todos los santos, or All Saints. And it´s all about honouring your dear and departed, so cementeries are chock-full of visitors. Nothing like Mexico, don´t be imagining any graveside picnics. People take flowers, and clean up the gravestones, lest the neighbours ( or the departed ) think them slatternly, but that´s it.

The food is eaten at home, buñuelos de viento, a fried dough with a sweet filling, being very typical. You can find them all year round in some places, but huesos de santo are strictly seasonal. This delicacy are little tubes or marzipan with various fillings, and look quite pretty.

I don´t really know much about All Saint´s day, to tell you the truth. I´ve never been to visit the graves of any family member, and I´ve never had a hueso de santo, so if I complain about people embracing the Jamie Lee Curtis version of Halloween, I don´t do so from a deep-seated love of our own tradition, but because I´m grouchy.
I just think it´s silly to have left out the trick or treating, which, along with Disney´s Sleepy Hollow, seems to me the best part about the thing. They´ve just concentrated on dressing up like extras of Thriller, but hey, whatever rocks your boat, and I suppose that´s fun, even without the sweets.

To keep the thing on a Spanish tune, I´ll give you a recipe for salty buñuelos. I never make it, myself, since you know I don´t fry , but everyone loves them, so I give it out a lot, in the hope that somebody will make them, and invite me over.

For a kitchen soundtrack, I suggest Mozart´s Don Giovanni. It´s appropriate, having a back-from-the-dead dinner guest, and is a version of the play old fashioned theaters always run for All Saints, Don Juan Tenorio.

BUÑUELOS DE BACALAO
(salt cod fritters)

serves 4. If people hover around you while you cook, nothing will get to the table, because they are very very good straight from the pan while you blow on your fingers.

250 gr. Salt cod, soaked and desalted,cut in little pieces, like a chocolate chip. You can also use raw prawns.
1 bottle beer ( you won´t need it all, so make sure it´s chilled and you can enjoy drinking it)
250 gr. flour
1 tsp. baking powder or soda
salt, maybe,depending on the saltiness of the fish
1 egg
1 clove garlic, chopped
chopped parsley
chopped onion ( I often leave it out)


Mix the flour, baking soda, egg, parsley and garlic. Add the fish. Mix well, make sure there are no lumps. If it´s too thick, add a glug of beer. You´re after a honey-ish consistency, thick but pourable.

Fry in small batches in hot olive oil, until they´re puffed up and golden. The oil has to be hot, or they won´t puff up. They cook very quickly.

J likes to drizzle them with honey. I go for that really delicious sweet/sour/hot Thai sauce in the big bottles.

La festa al fresco: bonito en escabeche

I was very happy last week to receive an invitation from the so wonderful Ivonne to take part in a food event she and Lis are hosting.
It´s called La festa al fresco, and we all have to rally round and bring the best and freshest and most beautiful of summer produce to their table.

Of course the first thing to bring is a crate of the beautiful peaches and nectarines we´re having this year. I am in stone fruit heaven. All peaches so far have been excellent, ripe and juicy and so fragrant

But that´s by the way. My pièce de résistance is a beautiful jar of bonito en escabeche.
I do run on about bonito, don´t I? Well, it´s an awsome fish, you know, but you can use any other blue fish you want.

Escabeche is an old method for preserving meat or fish. I know you can find it in cans, but it tends to be dry and has none of the nuance of this dish. It´s ideal to take to an alfresco lunch in summer, because being more or less pickled, it won´t matter if it´s left standing around while you go grape picking, or swimming or playing badminton or whatever.

It took me forever to find the right recipe. I won´t bore you with the search, which was long. Basically, your elemental escabeche technique tells you to deep fry a fish, then pour over a sauce made of 4 parts oil to 1 part vinegar. Piecing together bits of different recipes, I arrived at this method. I don´t know how useful it would be if you mean to preserve the fish for long, but otherwise it´s awsome.

It has a lot of escabeche, the liquid, but that´s not a problem. Just think of it as the best possible vinaigrette for fish dishes. A salade niçoise dressed with it will bring tears to your eyes, I promise.

Here it is, anyway:

1 kilo of fish ( I´ve tried bonito, mackerel, trout, salmon and chicharro and they´re all good. If you do the salmon, use pieces from the tail, with the skin on)
3 carrots ( I cut them in batons, but do slices if you prefer)
2 leeks, coarsely chopped
5 or 6 whole cloves of garlic
a handful of pearl onions, or 1 onion in half moons
1 bay leaf
1 tsp peppercorns
1 sprig of thyme
1 cup each water, white wine, good vinegar and olive oil
plus a little olive oil


Take a wide mouthed non-reactive pan. Cover the bottom with the extra oil, and sautée the vegetables, herbs and pepper for about 5 minutes, until they´re a bit soft.
Add the liquids, and leave for 15/20 minutes at a brisk bubble.
Slide the fish in, making sure it´s covered by the escabeche. If it isn´t you can try to take out a few of the vegetables and then put them on top, or you can cover the pan so the fish will steam.
Turn the fire down, and leave it for a little less than you think it will take the fish to cook. For thick chunks of bonito I make it 7 minutes.
Leave the fish to cool inside the escabeche. The residual heat will finish the cooking, and if not, the vinegar will.
Keep it in a glass or earthenware container with a lid. Don´t keep it in plastic, as the vinegar might spoil it.
Refrigerate it for two days at least, so the flavours can develop, and serve at room temperature.
It´s heavenly with boiled potatoes, or in a salad of crunchy lettuce and avocado.

A really awsome fideuá

I´ve always wanted to learn how to do a proper paella. But it seems to be a pretty huge undertaking. So many factors to take into account, so much fiddling around, so many arguments as to what constitutes a "true" paella...And there´s always the tricky question of the "punto del arroz", that exact nirvana of the rice grain, achieved only with extreme precision and an almost otherwordly flair. Or so they say.

All these tiresome rice pundits do agree on one thing, though ; fideuá is a sort of paella for dummies. The preparation is similar, but there´s none of that stress about perfection. It can be dry, or soupy, and pasta is pretty foolproof to cook. It doesn´t even have to be al dente, so you have a few minutes grace.

One day I´ll try my hand at rice, but yesterday I took my first steps, and produced fideuá. And, I am happy to say, it was excellent. It was delicious. It took less than half an hour to cook, and was bursting with flavour from all the things that were inside.

I´ll give you the recipe, and hope I´m not being irritating with the imprecision, but that´s the beauty of it. You can be pretty slapdash and it will still be good. This is how it goes.

I had some good fish stock in the freezer, about 1 1/2 cups, and the especial fideuá noodles in the cupboard. They´re small, curved and hollow in the middle, but you can do it with normal thickish noodles. Onions, garlic, saffon, pimentón and tomatoes I had. I then bought a courgette, one small squid, and a handful of mussels.
It can be done with any other vegetables, shellfish, or even chicken. Your call. The quantities here are for two.

You start the sofrito with onion and garlic in a frying pan, or similar wide low pan.
While they soften, you grate the tomatoes. Dice the courgette pretty small. By this time the onions will be pretty floppy. Add a pinch of saffron strands and a third of a teaspoon of pimentón. Mix it for no more than thirty seconds, and add the tomato. It´s important that you do this, otherwise the pimentón will burn and taste really horrible.

Let that reduce. It will take around ten minutes. Cut up the squid into small chunks. Open the mussels. I do this in the microwave, but use your preferred method. Add the liquid to the fish stock, and reserve the mussels.

When the sofrito is done ,add the squid and the noodles. I used two good handfuls, about 150 gr. Move them around the pan for a minute, and then add the stock. It has to cover the noodles by about a finger.

Let it boil away for 12 minutes or so. You can spend the time doodling the bowl of mussels, or clearing up the kitchen a little, or making a salad.
Check after 10 minutes. By that time, the pasta will have absorbed most of the liquid, and the starch from the noodles will have made the stock all silky and risotto-ish. When you think the noodles are done, turn the fire off, scoop into bowls, and add the mussels.

Mine out came more soupy than not, but when we came back for seconds the pasta had soaked up everything, and it was quite dry. I think trial and error is in order if I ever want a crusty socarrat bottom, but for now, I´m very happy with this.

Bonito encebollado : white tuna in dark onion sauce

Lately my life is one of being tied to my desk all day. When I do leave the house in the daytime, it´s to run short errands. But I can never resist going into the market, just to see what´s there.
The other day I wandered in, aimlessly, just because I´d been to the bank and I had a vague idea of buying some fruit.
And then I saw the freshest, most beautiful looking bonito (white tuna, albacore). I had to have it.
Rashly, without thinking, I asked the fishmonger to cut it into chunks, as for marmitako.
Once home, I was sorry, because it would have been heavenly as a big slice,marinated in soy sauce and mirin, and then lightly grilled. But it was too late for that.
I was put off the marmitako, in a fit of pique with myself, so I had to think of another way to do it.
Bonito encebollado came to mind. It´s one of those brilliant ideas, a very simple dish that only requires a bit of patience to do, and pays back a thousand times.
It´s also pretty good for doing ahead. You can make the onion sauce in the morning when it´s still cool, and only do the fish when you want to eat.

You chop a ridiculous amount of onions. For 500 grams of fish, I´d say about 4 or 5 big ones. Peel and slice thinly, or chop. Heat a big skillet or sautee pan with enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Add the onions, and let them cook slowly. When they´ve been there for 15 minutes, I like to add a heaped spoonful of brown sugar.
After 30 minutes or so, they should be caramelized and dark. Add 200 ml of oloroso sherry, or some other generous wine that´s not very sweet. If it is, then don´t add sugar before.

Leave to boil away, and when it´s a dark syrupy mess, add the salted tuna chunks, and grind black pepper over. When they´re white on one side, that´s in seconds, turn them over, leave for a minute, and then cover and turn the fire off. The residual heat will cook the fish, and it will be perfect in five minutes. It´s important not to leave it dry.

Serve with plain white rice.

Quantities for two hearty eaters (aka outright pigs) or three normal people.