Smoked sardines in olive oil

I´m preparing a big post about empanada gallega, which has been something of an obsession lately. While I write it up, you can check out Pille´s version, which looks great and has the best possible and least Galician name: Galiitsia tuunikalapirukas.

This is just a quick Sunday evening post to highlight an ingredient I´m totally in love with: smoked sardines. You can buy these at the market if there´s a good stall with olives, boquerones, tuna and all the rest of the gang.
They are just sardine filets in oil, with a faint smokey taste. They are rich but not oily, and the taste is strong, but not overwhelming like it can be with anchovies. They are quite expensive, for sardines, but very cheap when compared with something truly expensive like wild salmon.

If you don´t want to take them home, Fide in c/Ponzano does a beautiful canapé that is just to die for several times over when paired with their classic Madrid-style beer caña.

Drop in and decorate

Just a little reminder to go and check out Lydia´s great job making cookies for donation. And if you don´t know the blog, then you´re in for a treat of browsing all the back archives.
I´m off to Santander for a book launch, hoping to eat some amazing fish. Back tomorrow.

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.

Delicooks

Delicooks is a new food website in Spanish, and it´s beautiful, stylish, fun and helpful.
Also, there is an interview with yours truly, not in English so you´ll have to take my word for it that it´s perfectly fascinating.

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.

Julie & Julia

Can you beleive it´s taken all these months for Julie&Julia to finally be released here? I haven´t waited so breathlessly for a movie since Return of the Jedi.
I loved it, of course, but I feel I must warn all viewers in Spain to watch it in English, because the voice over is a bit of a massacre. And also to watch a video of the real Julia Child (totally unknown in Spain before the movie), or they will come away thinking that Meryl Streep was on something stronger than butter.
And the bonus? This is the video I watched, and I tried the method tonight and got it perfect straight away. Magic omelette. Viva Julia.

Polenta in the rice cooker

The one thing I hadn´t tried in that Gourmet article about rice cookers  I go on and on about was the polenta. It seemed too good to be true, but I needen´t have been so mistrusting. It works a treat. You put the cornmeal and the water and a bit of salt and in a short while there is a creamy mush inside, beckoning with its promise of bland comfort.

I don´t adore polenta, so I wouldn´t be making vast batchces of these, except that I´ve discovered that my baby loves it. This is great because I can plug the thing when we get back from our evening walk and it´s ready by the time P comes out of the bath, hungry.

But even more wonderful, she is just as happy to be fed it the next day. Now, if I am to eat old polenta, it has to be grilled to a crisp and dusted with Parmesan, but P, bless her, knows no better, and is perfectly happy to it wolf down, barely warmed in the microwave. She finds it very easy to spear with a fork and eat it on her own, so it´s all win-win.

Therefore, even at the risk of being a complete bore, I will rework my mantra and say it this way : "parents of toddlers, get yourselves a rice cooker, NOW!" 

Seriously. I have always enjoyed the idea of food that cooks itself, but when there is a young varmint in the house who has just learnt the trick of climbing onto chairs and diving off them, it becomes a necessity.

15 minute emergency brownies

I don´t want to start with a tiresome cliché about how brownies are the little black dress of chocolate puddings, so I won´t.  I will say, though, that they´re an endlessly useful recipe, because everyone seems to love brownies, and they go with everything, and they can be served just as is for a picnic or dolled up with hot fudge and ice cream for your best dinner party.

Or so I think, anyway.

They can also be frozen, so that when you make a big batch and have leftovers you can remove temptation, a little. Once they´re frozen they don´t even have to be thawed; just slice them thinly  and you won´t miss any Swiss bonbon.

If they have one shortcoming it´s the  impromptu chocolate binge. From start to finish, including baking time and cooling time, it´s at least an hour before you can be biting into your brownie. Not bad, but sometimes not quick enough.

For these moments we have the wonder brownie, also known as the brownie-cookie (no, I won´t say brookie).

This is simply a scaled down recipe, made with just one egg, and baked in dollops, cookiewise, for just five or six minutes.

The result are about fifteen wodgy disks, chewy at the rim, fudgy in the middle, perfect for scoffing right out of the oven, or to serve any way you would a brownie, in case of a brownie emergency.

I made them on Sunday and it took me eighteen minutes from start to finish, but that included doing the sums, never my forte. Since you have it done already, count on fifteen minutes, tops.

Preheat oven to 180ºC.

Melt 65 grams of chopped chocolate and 65 of butter in a bowl in the mircowave, on medium, for a minute. Once out, stir thoroughly with a wooden spoon so it mixes really well. Add one egg, beat, add 65 grams of sugar, and 40 of flour. Pinch of salt, stir well and spoon onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake for six or seven minutes. 

In this time you can lick the bowl and spoon, wash them for real, make coffee and prepare a pretty tray.

A palette knife might be good to take the things out, as they´ll be still sticky in the middle.

Serve and astound friends and family. You´re gonna love me for these, I bet.

Oh, and if you want to make a proper tray, the recipe I use is Nigella Lawson´s from How to be a domestic goddess, minus 100 gr. of sugar. It´s here.

Bread, II.

I´m on a bread kick. It happens to me every year, but I would lie if I said it led to my making all the bread I eat. Usually after a few weeks my interest peters out.
But maybe this time it won´t. My last two loaves were so stellar, they may just have hooked me.
I made two, by the old hit and run method I wrote about, except that in one I used more water and it whooshed into an airy, domed creation. I also forgot to add the yeast to it, and bunged it in later, and mixed it without much hope. But it still turned out fine, so I´m beginning to think that it´s really no big deal.

One of the loaves, the normal one, smelled very yeasty on coming out of the oven, but didn´t taste so strongly of it. Not that I mind bread tasting of yeast. If it tasted of fish, or old socks, then I would worry, but yeast? Hardly.
However, I just bought the latest River Cottage book, and since I had the baby off my hands for the whole morning yesterday, I decided to try out the sponge method.

It bubbled away merrily all day yesterday, and the kneaded dough has risen admirably overnight, and now I´m waiting for it to prove. It seems to be a slow process but there´s no hurry. I´m curious to know if the flavour is really all so much better, because, frankly, that basic elemental bread turned out beautiful, delicious, and lasted all week.

So, while I find out about the supposedly fabulous bubbling sponge , here´s the variations on the basic recipe from the other post.

I used 350 gr. white flour, 150 gr. wholemeal, about a half cup of wheat germ, 40 gr. of gluten, a tablespoonful of dried yeast and one envelope of cultured buttermilk. This last is a very exotic ingredient that I´m almost running out of, but it´s just a question of using 1 cup of milk instead of all water.
The difference in this loaf was that I used almost 400 ml of water, which made the dough impossible to handle after it came out of the machine. But so much water means so much steam, and airy bubbles inside.
A sprinkling of cornmeal on the bottom of the loaf pan makes for a very good addition to a crackly crust.

Master mojito recipe from "Taste of Cuba"

Ah, Cuba... still as shabby and as gorgeous as ever. It was great to be back, even though the tropical summre heat knocked me flat.
Being deeply in love with Mad Men I was in a swoon over all the beautiful modernist architecture. We also went to Trinidad, a beautiful town that has managed to retain its XVIII century character without looking fake and over polished (unlike some bits of old Havana).
And the food? Well, Cuba has the sort of hearty Creole cuisine that I love, and staying at the house of a wonderful cook I was lucky enough to taste the best of it, which isn´t always easy for a tourist (or a Cuban citizen).
I could give you a recipe for beans and rice, or those fritters, or the amazing Key Lime Pie we had . Instead, I think I´ll do you a favour and pass on this great mojito, because that´s the best way to win friends and influence people, and if you´d been at the book launch, that´s what you´d have had, so here goes.

The beauty of it is that it´s a mojito base that you can make and keep in the fridge for any impromptu mojito madness. It will also make serving a lot of them the work of a moment, which, you won´t need me to point out, is great for a party.

Mix well, really well, like, shake the hell out of: 1 cup sugar, 1 cup fresh lime juice, a bunch of mint (stalks and all) and 1 75 cl bottle of 3 year old rum.
It keeps in the fridge for at least a month, as the rum in the mix keeps everything fresh..

When you want to make the mojito, just quarter fill a tall glass with the mixture, add ice cubes, sparkling water and a sprig of mint. Maraca noises optional.