Food blog search

What was I thinking all week? Maybe all the nutrients from the organic veg have addled my brain. I forgot to mention Food blog search. Elise, not content with having the überblog Simply Recipes has now come up with this great idea, a search engine that allows you to look for recipes in food blogs (I´m not sure if search engine is the technical term, but I´m sure you get my drift).
I don´t know about you, but I´d much rather hear what a real life person has to say about a recipe than to battle it out with the bare lines stuff from Epicurious, good though that is.
I´ve had the pleasure of doing the illustration for the header, and also for the nifty search bar that anyone can add to their site.
Have a look, it´s really great.

The organic box veredict, and artichokes vinaigrette.

So, my organic vegetable box arrived on Tuesday, promptly at 8:30 am, just in time to slice a tomato for breakfast pa amb tomaquet.
A tomato, you say? I was surprised, too, but this is Spain, after all; the seasons tend to become fuzzy, especially in a droughty sunny year like this.
The contents were:
6 big tomatoes on their stems
a generous handful of cherry tomatoes
a non-curly head of frisee. I think I might swap this with my mother, and get her garlic shoots instead
tiny pickling onions
a head of broccoli
7 artichokes
four oranges, four pears, six bananas, and the courtesy parsley and bay leaves.

If I have one quibble it´s the plastic everything came wrapped in. If the stuff arrives in a neat little box, why do they need a plastic bag for each offering? Surely the box is enough, except maybe for the garlic shoots, which could have made everything smell, and which were, in fact, unwrapped anyway.

We used the garlic shoots in a risotto on Tuesday evening, with mushrooms (not in the box). Wednesday seemed perfect for steaming the broccoli and serving it alongside some rice noodles with minced pork and a nice and kicking garlic black bean sauce. Today for lunch we´ve had the cherry tomatoes in a salad, the artichokes with vinaigrette, and a fruit salad with a mix of the stuff in the box plus some kiwis I had.

The veredict so far? Very positive. I only signed up for this because they promised very fresh stuff. I don´t mind pesticides so much, really, but the idea of a piece of fruit being picked while very green and then languishing in storage for weeks seems plain daft. The rest, all the sustainability and ecology and good health are all very well in their way, I guess, but mostly a bobo concern that I´ll indulge as long as it doesn´t incomode me in any way. It´s the taste that matters. Yesterday´s broccoli may have been more chock-full of nutrients than others, but what leapt to the mind straight away was the fact that is was tender and almost buttery, and so flavourful that I didn´t add salt (though there was plenty of soy in the noodles, so that may have played a part).

So anyway, here´s my favourite way with artichokes. Rather than coring them ruthlessly and reducing them to just the tender little hearts, I like to strip them of just the very obvious hard outer leaves, and the tops. Boiled briefly, they are then allowed to cool for a little while, before being handed out, with little dipping bowls of vinaigrette. You tear out two or three leaves, dip the bottom, bite it, and toss the hard tops into a pile of debris on the side. In a few moves, you´ll be at the heart, and that you can dip whole and munch happily in its entirety.
I wouldn´t recommend it for a first date, but it makes for a more fun way of eating artichokes, and they don´t go so fast, after all that boring prep work.

True loves, and tomato sauce for dummies.

I´ve been on a slightly mad cookbook buying spree lately. The kind that takes place on the web, when you´re bored. Not a good way to buy books, not really. Some stuff is easy to choose, but a cookbook should be thumbed first, I think.
So anyway, I have all these new fellows looking at me from their high stack next to my armchair, and I feel only a slight guilt when I look at them. No love there. They´re one night stand books. My true loves have been knocking around the kitchen for years now, and can show battle scars ; they bristle with post-its, fall apart at certain pages, refuse to open at others where I absent mindedly left a greasy spoon.
This lot are general cookbooks, the sort that have the author´s favourite stuff, culled from many other books and friends, that have Japanese noodles and pizzas and steak sandwiches jostling happily in the index . They never fail me. And their most endearing trait is that no matter how much I think I know them by heart, every time I take them up there´s something I hadn´t noticed before, or had flagged and forgotten to try.
I could cook for many years from Nigella´s How to Eat, Nigel Slater´s Real Fast Food, Lindsey Bareham´s A wolf in the kitchen and Laurie Colwin´s two heartbreakingly short little volumes. All the others, they mean nothing, really, even if they´re fun to read.

The only exception in all the books I bought last year is Relish. I´ve posted about it before, and I mention it again because, even though it might turn out to be a passing affair, I think it´s here to stay. It´s cool and witty and makes you wish you were Joanna Weinberg´s best friend, and the recipes work perfectly.

The ultimate proof of its worth was the tomato sauce test. With every book, I always check out the tomato sauce and the chicken stock. If I don´t approve of the author´s methods and opinions, I don´t even bother with the rest. If I do, I nod in agreement, but them go on making things my way, because tomato sauce and stock are very basic things, and what are you going to change?

Well, Joanna´s tomato sauce has certainly won me over to the winds of change. The method is incredibly simple, and the result is a smooth, dark orange, very savoury and velvety sauce that can play any of the million parts tomato sauce can play, and play them well. If you want chunky, then it´s not the one, but trust me, if you try it you´ll want to make sure you always have some around ever after, because it´s like all ideal tomato sauce from a jar should be, and then some.

I make it with the Thermomix, since it has to be blended at the end, and I´m always nervous of sauce sticking to the bottom of the pan. I´ve adapted the quantities to fit the machine and my taste, but if you´re going the good old fashioned way, then make a bigger batch, and you´ll be glad.

Put 2 kilo tins of whole tomatoes, and their juice, inside the Th. Add one roughly chopped onion, 3 peeled whole cloves of garlic, 4 tbs sugar, salt to taste, maybe a little dried chili, and half a cup of olive oil.
Leave to simmer for 90 minutes, and when it´s cooled slightly, blend.
Th. instructions, make it 60 minutes at 100º speed 1, and then give it half an hour more on Varoma. Don´t blend it too long or it will turn orange, not that that´s a problem, but I´m just warning.

Good old Banana bread.

This drawing is one I´ve used already, but I can´t help using it again. For one, I really like it, and for another, it appeared on this blog almost two years ago, back in the days when only I and my mother read it. The quote is more or less from Wendy Cope´s The uncertainty of the poet.

The thing is, I can´t be serious enough about banana bread to do a special illustration for it. I just can´t. Even though I love it, I dont´think of it as proper food, but as something that belongs in the "cooking for kids" section.
It may be the name. There´s something so wholesome about it, it sounds as the sort of thing you´d have after a tofu burger. And the fact that the first instruction is to mash bananas, well, I ask you. Is that a worthy pursuit for anyone over four?

The only reason I cooked it the first time was that J loves it and says it´s his favourit cake(mind you, I haven´t seen him refuse a slice of any other). He must have picked up the taste in some summer camp stint abroad, because here in Spain we don´t do banana cakes much.

My recipe is adapted from Nigella´s How to be a domestic goddess. I´ve substituted most of the butter for a pot of yogurt, and left out a couple of spoonfuls of suger, because, well, since it´s not a serious cake, it shouldn´t have serious calories. But anyone wanting the uncut real McCoy can head over to Pille´s blog and check out the full glory version.

For all my apparent lack of enthusiasm, let me tell you that I make this cake a lot, and that it´s really great. It´s fragrant and dense and full of flavour, it keeps very well for a day or two (as if!) and freezes very nicely, making it a perfect breakfast, lunchbox or picnic sweet.

The most important thing is to start with really ripe bananas. Really. The barest minimum is a banana with little brown spots, but if you can hold your nerve until your bananas look deader than dead, so much the better. If you can smell banana every time you walk into your kitchen, they´re probably ready.

70 g sultanas


Rum or brandy, for soaking them


175 g plain flour


2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda


1/2 tsp salt


50 g unsalted butter, melted (this may seem silly, but it makes a difference)

1/2 cup (125 ml.) yogurt


120 g sugar


2 large eggs


3 very ripe bananas (about 300 g peeled weight)


60 g walnuts, coarsely chopped

1 tsp vanilla extract ( I often forget this and it doesn´t seem to matter)



Put the sultanas and rum in a small bowl and soak for about an hour (again, if you forget and just bung them in, it´s ok) .
Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium-sized bowl.
In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then the mashed bananas. My method for this is to mix it all with a potato masher, eggs and all. Maybe it won´t rise so puffily, but who cares?
Stir in the walnuts, sultanas (liquour too, if you like, Pille´s tip, and very brilliant, too) and vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture, a third at a time. You will have a wobbly looking uneven mixture that will smell really good already.
I line my loaf pan with baking parchment, because it´s a pretty moist cake. Bake in the middle of a pre-heated 180ºC oven for about 50 mins/ 1 hour, and do the toothpick thing.
Leave to cool on a rack and try to hang around the kitchen for a while. It will seem that all the bananas in the world have vaporized and are having a convention in your house.

Little Bites

Here´s a roundup of news I think are interesting.
First off: Veronica, whose beautiful Test kitchen I´m sure you know, has a new business, Petites Bouchées. I was so happy when she asked me to do the logo, because not only is it a pleasure to work with Veron, it´s also such fun to be allowed to go crazy with macaroons and polka dots. Anyone lucky enough to be in or around Richmond (VA) can try them already. Rest of the world, try to hold in your impatience til online ordering is available.

Second: Disfruta&Verdura is starting up in Madrid. I´ve already signed up, and in a couple of weeks will be able to give an informed critique of their organic vegetables box scheme. All the fruit and veg comes from their own farm in Tarragona, which might not sound very local to sticklers, but since Spain is smaller than Texas, I think we´re ok.
Apart from all the vitaminic and smug-green advantages, I also think it will be a lot of fun, the surprise and the figuring out what to do.
Third: my great pal Guru has a new blog header, also very tastefully made over, if I may say so. It´s a food blog, but we decided to opt for a quasi-Tiki island theme, since she´s lucky enough to live in the Canary Islands. Spanish speakers, check it out regulary because there is plenty of delicious stuff in there.

Four: My kitchen is not as humming with activity as it used to be, but nevertheless this week I´ve managed to make a 6 liter batch of chicken stock, and to locate a brand of flour tortillas I really like. Quesadillas are back on the menu chez nous, and there are three bananas turning appropriately black that will be reincarnated as banana bread tomorrow. Recipe to follow.

Lemon cupcakes

(This post is for my mountaneering friend Simón, who requested the recipe several times in between mouthfuls of cupcake. Hence the non-lemon related drawing.)
Forgive the hubris, but I am proud, proud as in before-a-fall; downright smug, in fact. I can´t help it. These cupcakes are so damn delicious, and I practically invented them!
Ok, invent is a bit of a stretch. But I threw around the ingredients in a way that contradicts that often heard sage advice: "improvise all you like, but never improvise when baking."

I don´t, normally. Part of the pleasure of baking is carefully wheighing out stuff, measuring out the cups, folding just-so, and putting a wet sludge in the oven secure in the knowledge that it will be cake, as promised, in a little while.

But this was Friday morning. I´m always restless on Friday mornings, and don´t really like to work, as there´s little point in handing in stuff that won´t be looked at til Monday, anyway.
But I couldn´t leave the house, as I was waiting for a client to pick up a drawing, and I was prowling like only a caged illustrator can: from the depths of the big armchair by the window. What to do? My mind hit on the last post of my pal Guru, and I thought, aha, cupcakes!

I had fired up the oven and printed out a couple of recipes and tied the apron and warmed the fridge-cold eggs in warm water when I began to realize I didn´t have all the ingredients I needed. Options:
A- dash to the shop and get the required butter and muffin cases
B- brazen it out

You know it´s always going to be B, right?
So anyway, what I did was mix the two muffin recipes in Guru´s blog, more or less. One called for eggs and butter, the other for yogurt. I compromised with less eggs, and since I only had 75 gr. of butter, and had no yogurt, but instead a carton of milk had gone sour, that went in too.
The resulting mix looked curdled and less than fascinating, and I wasn´t sure how the teflon in my Ikea muffin tin would shape up with no liners, but everything was more than fine.
The cupcakes came out whole and golden, with no damage from being naked. The crumb was moist and very flavourful, chock full of lemony egg flavour. A bit coarse, with thickish crumbs that clumped in beautiful small lumps on breaking. Since I still had time on my hands, and icing sugar left over from the biscuit adventures, and lemons from my Absalom days, I iced them.
They looked very pretty, were wolfed down by my near and dear after lunch, and when I made them again on Sunday to clinch the recipe, they received rave reviews, so:

Lemon Cupcakes

The measures are in cups, but for Spanish eyes, half a cup is 125 ml, or the size of a normal yogurt.

1 and 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 caster sugar
1/2 cup natural yogurt
1/2 teaspoonful baking powder
pinch of salt
zest and juice of one big lemon
2 eggs
75 gr. butter, melted or really really soft

Preheat oven to 180ºC and put muffin cases in tin (12)

Measure out the flour, salt, baking powder and sugar in one bowl.
In a bigger one, mix the butter, eggs, yogurt and lemon.
Tip the dry stuff into the big bowl and mix, with a very light hand. Better have lumps than overbeat.

Spoon the mixture into the cups, and good luck to you if you think you can do it without spilling stuff between the paper and the tin. Don´t go above two thirds, although you won´t, if you´re dividing evenly.

Bake for 20 or so until golden and puffed up.

Ice, if you like, and if not, not.

Lovely bones; marrow and parsley salad.

One of the signature dishes of Madrid is cocido. It´s one of those balls-to-the-wall porcine fests, chock full of every conceivable bit of it, and complemented with chick peas, potatoes, cabbage, and tomato sauce for good measure.
Everyone has their favourite bit. Some prefer the chorizo, others the morcilla. The cabbage is usually given a wide berth, and the boiler chicken considered a little dull, but everybody loves the broth, infused with all the flavour that can possibly go into soup, and of course the garbanzos are always a hit. In our house, the ugly fight breaks out over the marrow bone.
There are many bits of everything else, but only one marrow bone, two at most, and my mother (and her mother before her) always collars it, so that I was quite old when I tried the delights of marrow for myself, and then away from home. And when I did, I loved it, but wondered if I´d have to be a proper motherly matron before being allowed to stake out the marrow in every cocido.
It turns out that no, it´s ok, non-matriachs. Marrow can be roasted and eaten just like that, without all the cocido complications.
Though it´s not that easy to get many marrow bones, it can be done. Butchers in Spain give them away, and tend to hoard them and give just one each to each cocido maker. It works out pretty well for them, as they sell chorizo, morcilla, tocino (lard), shin of beef and maybe even the boiler chicken too, and then look courtly and generous, in a Sweeney Toddish way, by giving away one single bone.
But if you go at the beginning of the week, at a quiet time far from the weekend cocido madness, you might be lucky and wheedle four or five good pieces from the middle of the bone.

The thing to do then is, of course, call your mother and offer to serve up a mini troglodite fat-fest.
All you need is to fire up the oven, wait for it to be hot, put the bones in a dish and wait til they´re cooked. I´ve read that the minute the fat starts running out you should stop, but I´ve always found bloody bits inside the bone, which is gross. Leave them there half an hour at least, and wait til it´s all white.
During that half hour, take a bunch of parsley and pick out the leaves. Chop them roughly, and put them in a bowl with some thinly sliced fresh red onion and a handful of capers. Dress with fruity olive oil and lemon, no salt. Toast bread, a ciabatta-ish one for preference.

Serve the bones with the toast, the salad and a little bowl of Maldon salt. Proceed to scoop out the jellified, quivery fatty inside, spread it on the toast, sprinkle with salt and top with the salad.

It´s a wonderful starter, and practically free, given that both the bones and the parsely will have cost exactly nothing.
And on the plus side, you get to give the picked out bones to your dogs, who will be very happy indeed. A win-win dish for lean January when everybody´s skint.

Oatmeal raisin cookies

Look, I know we´re all supposed to be cutting down on the calories and the high jinks and generally behaving like Trappist monks during recession. But come on. It´s only January. January is bleak, there´s nothing to look forward to, and, let´s face it, bikini issues are still a long way away. Will it kill you to have a bag of cookies in the freezer, and have the occasional one with a cup of tea? I don´t think so, so here goes.

You know that episode of Friends where Phoebe gives Rachel an oatmeal-raisin cookie, and Rachel moans, and says "omigod, these are the best oatmeal-raisin cookies ever!", and Phoebe says "yeah, I don´t make them very often, it wouldn´t be fair to other cookies"? Well, ever since I saw that, and it was years and years ago, it´s been floating around in my brain. I wanted to make oatmeal raisin cookies. There´s no such thing in Spain, so it´d have to be home made.

But what with one thing and another, mainly being side-tracked onto cupcakes by Sex and the City, I never got round to doing much about it.
Until this summer I found myself with a copy of Joy of cooking, plenty of time, and a friendly oven, and so a craze was born.

These really are the best oatmeal-raisin cookies ever, and contenders for the title of best cookies ever. Sure, they´re not showstoppers like other cookies, but they have a sneaky, quiet charm that finds me hankering for one at odd hours. They are very chewy, but very crisp on the edges, and stay that way even after a couple of days, after being defrosted, after being knocked about in a lunchbox all morning.
I love them just as they are, and of course cold milk is a perfect match, but so far the most exciting way I´ve had them is with cheese, gallego for choice.
And if you have an apple afterwards, it will be so brimming with health that you won´t even feel the tiniest pang of guilt.

Oatmeal raisin drop cookies, adapted from The Joy of Cooking

Preheat the oven to 180ºC

Cream 100 gr. butter, 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup white or vanilla sugar.
(Thermomix users, beware that I´ve broken two butterflies already. Start with soft butter)
Add one egg and a bit of flour so it doesn´t curdle. One teaspoonful of milk, and when it´s nice and fluffy, 1 cup flour (minus what you added to the egg), previously mixed with a half teaspoonful of salt and 1/2 a teaspoonful of baking powder.
Now pour that out onto a big bowl (I´m assuming you used a mixer for this) and mix in 1 cup rolled oats and 1/2 cup of raisins.

Drop the cookies 5 cm apart. If you make them big, they´r divine, if you make them small, they look adorable and crunch even more. Whatever you do, given 10 minutes or so and take them out the minute they´re a pale gold.

Finally, the stuffed bird.

I know I said yesterday that I´d keep my posting to one a week. But that´s starting from next week.
You see, my dear friends, even though I´ve had more than enough of tinsel, coloured lights, mindless cheer and silly presents, the fact remains that here the holidays are still alive and kicking. We still have the last hurdle to get through, Reyes.
I´m a well-known Reyes grouch, as can be seen by last year´s post , but I won´t go into that again.
Instead, I´ll give you the recipe I promised for stuffed capon.
It´s not a suitable recipe for right now, but you can file it away, because it´s good. A beautiful plump bird, stuffed to the brim with meat and other goodies, it´s basically a combo of two favorites; meat loaf and roast chicken.
On the night, we serve it with mashed potatoes, red cabbage, apple sauce, sweet chestnuts and glazed onions. No wonder I can´t leave the sofa for days after, uh?
It also makes divine sandwiches, with chutney and mayo.

Ingredients:

The bird can be a small turkey, a big chicken, a capon, a guinea hen, whatever. Just make sure it´s a properly brought up specimen from a good family. And ask for it to be de-boned (also ask for the bones so you can use them another day).

The weight of the bones will give you the quantity of meat for the stuffing. Somewhere around 1,5 kg of pork meat. You can substitute some of that for fresh sausage meat if you prefer.

3 eggs.
3 cookign apples, cut in small chunks.
200 gr. prunes, cut in four
1 cup of almonds, more or less, chopped

Butter for basting (plenty), salt, pepper, nutmeg and brandy.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC

In a big bowl, mix the meat with the almonds, eggs, prunes, apples. If you like, you can throw in some slivers of raw chicken liver, too.
Salt, pepper, nutmeg to taste, and a good glug of brandy.
Squish with your hands until you have an evenly distributed mix.
Proceed to stuff this into the bird, making sure you get meat into every last little nook and cranny.
The bird, which in the beginning looked deflated and very sorry for itself, will begin to look like Popeye on steroids.
Don´t overstuff, though, or it will burst later (not that big a deal).

Now´s the tricky part. Take a tick needle and stout thread, and patch the skin. Apart from the two big cavities, there will be little nicks where the butcher was too zealous. You must sow these carefully, again, to prevent the juices from oozing out.

Slice a couple of onions and lay them on a baking tray. Salt and oil them a little, and manouver the bird on top. By now it will be heavy and unwieldy. Ask for help. Dot it with butter, douse with brandy, and begin to roast.
It will probably need three hours, with occasional topping up of the tray with water and brandy as the sauce dries out, and occasional basting.
If you have a meat thermometer, let it work its magic, but if not, you´ll probably know it´s done when it looks golden, crusty, and has made every last corner of the house smell heavenly.
The gravy can be served as it is, or blended till smooth and light caramel in colour.

Resolving

Happy New Year.
I´ve been terrible, I know, I´m sorry. The holiday cheer just gets to me. Not in a bad way, but it does pin me to the sofa. There´s no way to work when you know for a fact that every editor and art director is away skiing or shaking the seriffs from the soles of their feet under a palm tree.
The problem with laziness is that it spreads. And before you know it you´ve managed to neglect everything, from cookie baking to present buying to blog updating.
I don´t know if I can get my life on track, but for now, here are a couple of resolutions for the new year:

I´ll tame my ambitions, but be disciplined. From now on I´ll post once a week, but it will be a proper post.

I´ll endeavour to keep some kind of home baked good around at all times cached in the freezer for unexpected visitors or sudden cravings.

I´ll learn to make empanada gallega.

There.