Balsamic rage

Last week José asked for fried eggs with chanquetes in a very basic elemental place in Sevilla. The egg came dribbled all over with balsamic glaze.
J, a calm fellow, just shrugged and dunked his bread in the yolk.
I am all rage, and strong arms had to forcibly restrain me from throwing those eggs at the cook´s head. I´d ordered the rice, it wasn´t my problem, but really, in what stupid parallel universe does anyone think a fried egg is improved by a brown squiggle?

This has got to stop. I will now be beaten into submission by this stupid fad. I´ve had it.

Listen: balsamic vinegar is not a neutral ingredient. As well as acidity, it has a bunch of other flavours (wine vinegar, grape must, sulphites E22o, caramel colouring E150D, anyone?).
It should not be thrown about any old how. It can be a wonderful product, but it can also be pretty intrusive and pointless. If I had my way, I´d forbid the wanton use of this substance to all except
A. Italians. they invented the thing, they know what to do with it
B. good chefs. Ditto about knowing

I also think it´s fine to carry a small quantity for personal use at home.

Otherwise, people opperating bars or restaurants, de-glue your hand from the neck of that bottle with the Duke of Modena on it. Morever, don´t, I repeat, DO NOT, reduce it to a syrup and doodle on plates.
If you´re artistic, or think you may be, ask for help. There are other substances for you to try out, like charcoal and paper. Hopefully, you won´t expect us to eat those.

The worst thing is, we have excellent vinegars here. We should be selling them to the world, bottled prettily and labelled with the Countess of Chinchón, or whatever, and spending the hard cash on Ferraris. Instead, where are we? Buying stupid cheap balsamic from those clever fellows in Modena, who already have too many Ferraris anyway.

So listen, keep to Sherry vinegar. It´s the best we have to offer, and understandably, it´s the one best suited to traditional Spanish cuuisine. Anything else is pure daftness.
If you must waive your kids´ college education and spend millions on cute little bottles, then go for PX vinegar. It´s Made from Pedro Ximénez, a generous dessert wine made from raisins. It´s good, it´s pretty, it´s expensive, it´s sweet and heady and I daresay it may even reduce marvelously well. Just the thing for you arty types.

And now, enough ranting. I´ll give you my recipe for a killer vinaigrette, so we can all compare notes.
If anyone makes this with so much as a drop of balsamic, I´ll combust, die, become a ghost, and hide in your store cupboard, howling forever. Be warned.

Take an empty, clean jam jar. Put a heaped teaspoonful of Dijon mustard, and another one of honey. Mix well, maybe even put it a few seconds in the microwave. Add vinegar, the good stuff, from Jerez, to double the volume of mustard and honey. Add salt. Be generous. Now add olive oil, also the good stuff, to double the volume of vinegar.
Add a good pinch of cumin (this is optinal, but excellent if you´re serving your salad with cheese) and a couple of spoonfuls of water.
Screw the jar tight, and juggle it vigorously until it looks creamy and perfect.
This vinaigrette will keep for weeks in the fridge, and will truly make your salad preparations a thing of minutes.

Heartburn: the book, the movie, the carbonara

I don´t know if you´ve read Heartburn , but if you haven´t, do, because it´s a very funny book about a cookbook writer. The thing is chock full of food, and even has a few recipes. It was written before the Craze That Swept The World, and isn´t self-conscious in its foodiness.
Plus, it has the über foodline "pesto is the quiche of the eighties", later used in When Harry met Sally, to great effect.

I´ve had the book for ages, but it wasn´t until I came across a reference to the film in Nigella´s Feast that I even knew the film existed. A quick Imdb search, and I saw that it was made by Mike Nichols 1985 with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, music by Carly Simon. I was intrigued. Why wasn´t it more famous? Was it one of those overlooked masterpieces, like Love in the afternoon, or Soapdish? Or one of those good-on-paper, bad-in-bed star vehicles like About a boy?

It´s neither. An ok film, but nowhere near the book. It has carbonara, though, which the book doesn´t.

The first time they sleep together, Meryl cooks spagetti carbonara and takes it, in the pan, with two forks, to Jack, who´s still in bed. He wiggles his eyebrows in that wicked way of his, and she says, very indignant, "Usually I never cook on the first date, you know"

In her recipe for carbonara, Nigella writes about this scene, and then blithely gushes about " a panful of hot pasta, to be taken back to bed and sharingly slurped". Which is all very well, but I´m too bourgeois not to worry about my nice sheets. And judging from the mess José makes eating at a normal table, I shudder to think what he might do in bed with a bowl of pasta. We wouldn´t be married now, so it´s good news that I don´t cook on a first date, either.

I´ll spare you the writing of another carbonara recipe. You probably have one you like already, right? If not, here´s one . I do it like that, minus the garlic, and adding a splash of vermouth to the bacon and then reducing it to a fatty caramelized jus.

You don´t have to eat this in bed, of course, but it does lend itself to lazy times. I suggest the sofa, deep bowls, and maybe even Heartburn, the movie, which won´t distract you from the pasta.

Sorry about that

I hope not too many of you have been listening to dance music for an hour, like me. I don´t´know what happenned to the interview.

Radio reminder

Tonight´s the night. From 8 pm, Spanish time (that´s GMT+2), you can hear the interview I did on Hot FM.
It will be repeated on Monday, same time.
I´m off to the country now, to be woken at dawn by chirrupping birds instead of sycopath builders. I wish you all a very happy weekend.

Thermos therapy: Moroccan tea

I´m not so frantically busy these days. Everyone is shifting gears in September, and they let me alone, mostly. Maybe a couple of calls to say "be ready in october", but by and large I´m only doing magazine work, and that´s quick stuff.
Perfect, you´d say, for sleeping in, watching lots of dvds, and catching up with tomato preserving.
No way. Peace and quiet are out of the picture. They´re tearing the walls of my building to pieces. Ostensibly to install a lift, but mostly to drive me insane, I think.
Two builders start blasting away with a jackhammer at 8 in the morning. At 9 they stop, and spend the day randomly dissappearing for hours and hitting the walls with heavy bludgeons thatmake the building shake. After lunch they get the hardware out again, and drill away to their heart´s content, while you start to mutter darkly and wish bad things. This has gone on for a week now, and by the time a picture fell off the wall today, I´d had enough. I had to leave the house before it crashed about me, or I went on the rampage with a baseball bat.

This is the recipe for a calming yet slightly energetic afternoon.
First, make moroccan tea. Shredding the mint will soothe you enough to stop the murderous thoughts, and pay attention to the proportions.
500 ml. water, 3 tsp green gunpowder tea, a fistful of mint leaves, and 2 tsp sugar, which is less sweet than the usual. Make the tea first, don´t leave it more than 4 minutes or it´ll go bitter. Then mix everything inside a thermos that fits snugly inside your handbag.
Step two, walk briskly. The Retiro is a lovely park, and just thirty minutes away.
Step three, sit down on the grass, and enjoy the sunlight filtered through the trees. Sip your tea.
Step four, a good book. Today I had "Right ho, Jeeves!", by the great inmortal P.G.Wodehouse. All P.G. is the best thing ever, but this particular novel features Anatole the chef, a.k.a. God´s gift to the gastric juices, and is a neat tie-in for a food blog.
Within five sips of this treatment, you should be grinning like a Cheshire cat. Five minutes into the book, you´ll be laughing out loud.
By the time you´re back, the builders will have left, leaving only a trail of dust and debris, and you can enjoy silence until 8.01 a.m.

Not food

Here´s a bit of a silly post. This morning I finished this tube of toothpaste, and went to buy another one. And thought I´d write about it.
I really hate mushy toothpaste, you see. And I like the mint taste to stay inside After Eights. This brand, Lacer, is creamy, and the taste is, I don´t know, more like the liquorice chewing gum orbit does.
Not a very good description, but anyway, I love it, and there it goes.

Porra antequerana.

People all over are beginning to go autumnal, talking about apples and nuts and even mushrooms.
Here in Spain we´re still with the first rains after the summer, and the weather is beautiful and fresh, but doesn´t warrant full-on adventures into soups and stews, yet.
Plus, the markets are still full of gorgeous nectarines, and ripe, beautiful tomatoes are practically given away.
Here´s a recipe to suit the times. Summery in looks, autumnal in texture. Porra antequerana, a stodgy tomato-based dip, close cousin to gazpacho, and twin sister of salmorejo. But I´ll deny having said that. You know how touchy people are about their regional dishes. Let´s just say that it´s a gorgeous dip, and has a very pretty colour that will make your hummus/tzatziki/tapenade layout all the more pleasing.
I´ve had this recipe from Cecilia, who is one of the best cooks in the world, and that includes Ferran Adrià and your mother.
Having said that, I´ll admit to having tweaked the recipe just a little. My vanity knows no bounds.

The basic recipe is made by soaking stale bread with water, adding ripe tomatoes, some garlic and oil, and blitzing to make a salmon coloured paste, as thick as hummus or slightly less,as you like.

Cecilia told me to take equal weights of tomatoes and bread, and I started out with 200 grams of bread from a country type loaf, crusts off. Instead of soaking it with water, she recommends peeling the tomatoes directly over, and letting their juice soak the bread. Leaven them standing a little while, or not, depending on your patience. I didn´t.
Add half a clove of garlic, a 1/4 cup olive oil, and salt to taste.
Blitz away. Depending on how juicy your tomatoes were, it will be a very thick paste, or a rubbly mess of soaked crumbs.
The canons now are to water it down until it´s to your liking. I thought, however, that since we´d started without water, it made more sense to just add tomatoes. That way, it didn´t become so thin so soon, but the flavour, my friends...
In the end I used up about half a kilo, and achieved a bowl of the most glorious orange stuff ever.

It´s traditionally served with bread or breadsticks, but that makes it "pan con pan, comida de tontos", as my darling Escolástica says.
Personally, I think it cries out for crudités, cucumber and red peppers being especially suitable, carrots and cauliflower also very nice.

Mercamadrid field trip.

Here´s something I´ve signed up for, rather rashly. A visit to Mercamadrid, the huge wholesalers´market, the biggest in Europe, or so they say.
I´m very excited now, but have the feeling that at 5:45 am, on the day, I´ll wondering just what I was thinking of.
Maybe we´ll run into world famous chefs arguing over the price of red tuna. Maybe not. I bet it will be fun, and I bet I´ll enjoy my breakfast, once I´m back.
If anyone is in the ´hood and wants to come along, here are the details.

Celebrations vs. Heroes.

I just found this sketch, done exactly four years ago today.
I had just moved into this flat. My friend Katie was staying for a few days while she house-hunted.

Today that mug with the xxx is not with us any more, but Katie is. She came over for a short visit, and brought with her two boxes of chocolates that have kept us pretty entertained for quite a while.

They were´t designer chocs, you see, but honest-to-goodness bite-sized versions of chocolate bars. The kind where you think you´ll have one, and end up trying one of each. How can you not? You simply must know wether the new, beige version of Milky Way is better than the old one. The Malteser thing deserves discussion; why not just bung in a single Malteser, rather than that odd thing with the puffs inside? Does Galaxy stand up to being described as "chocolate doesn´t get much better than this"? Why does the Celebrations box weigh 460gr, plus 15 gr. of wrappers, when the Heroes has a whopping 20 gr. of wrappers? Is Katie the only fence-sitter in the world on Bounty, that love-it-or-hate-it bar?

Endless questions. It´s not that we´re greedy, you see, but that we find ourselves intellectually challenged by food.
We now have a table littered with at least 18 gr. of wrappers. I ain´t drawing that, you may be sure.

A radio interview.

People, let me blow my own trumpet. The moment of fame and glory has arrived.
I´m going to be interviewed on The main ingredient, a Gourmet/Lifestyle program in English that airs on Rem FM & Hot FM throughout the Costa Blanca, Costa del Sol and the Canaries, as well as live on the internet. On Friday the 29th you can hear me babbling away on the topic of breakfast (as usual).
I´ll post a reminder next week, unless I make a complete fool of myself during the interview. Thank goodness it isn´t live.
It´s all too exciting. I already have visions of "Lobstersquad: the movie".