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".

What to do with surplus oil.

Here´s a problem I bet many people would love to have.
Every year, José´s father sends us a case of extra virgin olive oil. The best, fruitiest, green-molten gold stuff you can think of, straight off the presses, made with olives from their own actual olive trees.
Sometimes, in the mad Christmas rush of parcels, we even receive two, one from Oleoestepa and one from Torcaoliva .
And that is a lot of oil. Especially when you consider that I don´t fry.
I´m generous with the bounty, and give away bottles to deserving friends. I even take a bottle of oil rather than wine to parties.
I cook with it, and also splash it around freely for escabeches, for pestos, and to cover jars of roast peppers or tomatoes.
But there are still five 500 ml. bottles there, so I´m going to make a batch of aromatic stuff.
For starters, chili oil.
I´ll take a bottle over to my father. He treats pasta like a personal insult, and the only thing that makes it palatable for him is a good glug of oil and a liberal shake of Tabasco. So I´m making it easy for him, and making sure I have a good chance of eating spaghetti at home.

The recipe, from the  Ballymaloe cookery course , couldn´t be simpler. Take 500 ml. oil, and 25 grams of chili flakes or whole dried chilies. Bring slowly to the boil, turn off, and leave to infuse for an hour.
It will keep in the fridge for months.

The mollete heartland

Having survived the wedding festivities, we´re now about to go further east, and visit J´s grandfather. He lives in the countryside, outside Antequera. Which is a very beautiful town, full of natural and mandmade beauties. But mostly, for me, mollete central.
Mollete, the perfect bread for breakfast toast, is a specialty of a Antequera, and in the house there´s always a basket of them sitting by the toaster in the mornings.
When I make a spectacle of myself at the breakfast table, there´s always someone who says, wonderingly : "You know, molletes used to be the poorest type of bread, so bad and cheap it was only possible to eat it toasted."
And I always smile though the breadcrumbs and the oil, and nod, and think, well, these peasants sure knew their bread from their elbow, and put another piece on the toaster.