Apple and pear sauce

Life is pretty hectic, and my kitchen is bubbling with all sorts of new things. I tote "The Zuni Café Cookbook" around, and make it bristle with post-it notes, even as I tell myself to ignore its higher flights ( use pecorino sardo for this dish, as pecorino romano would be way out of line. really?).
The markets are all closed for Semana Santa, so I can´t go wild with tubs of sardines. Instead, I boil vats of bones for ramen broth, after Hiroko Shimbo´s instructions.
Also, I mourn the loss of the shop where I bought the flakiest, crispest dough for turnovers. Will I find those Argentine beauties ever again?
Then there is Pía. Every day she has a lunch consisting of a bunch of vegetables and a few scraps of chicken or beef, simmered and pureed until they lose all identity and interest. She is very welcome to this.
Her tea, now, that´s different. That´s a world-class smoothie of several fruits, and there are always several vultures lurking around to finish off whatever she doesn´t eat.
I also make batches of applesauce to freeze, and to give her when we´re out of the house, as we were last Thursday, when she came with us to see the Bacon exhibition at the Prado (no, it didn´t seem to scare her or give her nightmares).
It´s a mushy, velvety, not overly sweet and very good apple and pear sauce. I´m not above stealing a few spoonfuls myself.

All you do is peel and core three apples and three pears, toss them into the Thermomix bowl, add a cup of water or so, and program 15 minutes at 90ºC, speed one. When it´s done, puree it at speed 7 until it´s very very smooth.

Salad or soup?

March was ablaze with sunshine; cotton jackets emerged from under heavy coats, cherry tomatoes covered the breakfast toast, creamy avocadoes turned up for almost every meal,
and it seemed that the jellied chicken stock would not go the way of onion soup but of asparagus risotto.
Except that now we´re firmly back in midwinter. With a fridge full of stuff bought with different weather in mind.
It seems too springy, despite everything, to make soup, and yet we can´t live on a few leaves and some silly white wine.
My favourite in between solution is lentil salad. Robust, yet sprightly enough.

All you need is lamb´s lettuce , topped with lentils that you´ve boiled yourself. THe reason for this is that the cooking liquid is full of flavour, and will help you to avoid dressing them with tons of oil. With a few spoonfuls of the liquid, a bit of oil, lots of lemon juice, some of the zest, and the garlic from boiling lentils squished in, you have a pretty wonderful combo.
If you have some bacon on hand, that can never hurt, and goat´s cheese is always good. A poached egg is heavenly. And for a gold medal, add a spoonful of onion jam.

I´m a huge fan of bottled beans, but lentils don´t seem to make it past the process so well, and they´re not such a bother to make, with the no soaking, no taking forever thing. So I definitely recommend making your own, specially if you can find the little black exquisite caviar lentils from León.

More sprouts

J and I received another sprouty present yesterday. More mustard, which is sitting pretty until it goes into another avocado salad; and fennel seed sprouts, which I´d never seen in my life and which are so gorgeous.

At first I didn´t quite know what to do with them (except munch them out of hand, which I did with gusto). Fennel isn´t very common in Spanish food, that I know of. I toyed with the idea of a Provençal fish soup, but it felt like too much work. And it was J who provided the anser. "That Sicilian pasta with sardines and fennel", he said. What a jewel of a man!

These shoots are tender little things, and I feel won´t stand up to actual heat. So what I did was mash a tin of sardines with some butter and lots of pepper and a dash of orange juice and the merest shaving of zest. This, spread on those Nordic dark crackers, and topped with fennel sprouts, made me feel utterly sophisticated and springlike and healthy and ready for anything.

I daresay thinly sliced fennel bulb might do the trick, but these little tendrils are so pretty, I´m almost tempted to start up a jar of sprouts myself. We´ll see. For now, I still have a few left, enough for another sandwich.

The illustration will be in next mont´s "Viajar" magazine.

Sprouts

Here´s the banner I´ve made for Mary, aka Breadchick. It´s up just in time for the tentative beginning of spring. In Madrid chairs and tables are already beginning to sprout on sidewalks, and one can enjoy frothy little cañas in the sun.

Also, in a suitable springly mode , my friend Mariana, aka MariaGodzilla, gave me a bunch of mustard shoots (sprouts?) on Monday. They´re beatiful, grassy and fresh, with a hot mustardy aftertaste. They´re impossible to find around here, and these were home grown. The first I munched straight out, but after a while I decided to do them justice, with:

a salad- cherry tomatoes, perfect avocadoes, the mustard shoots, a few drops of olive oil, a slosh of sherry vinegar and salt.

and also, a sandwich- very dark rye bread, mashed avocado (they´re all over the place now, fresh from Granada), smoked salmon. Topped with a straggly mess of, yes, mustard shoots.

Lovely.

Knife skills course

The index finger of my left hand is missing a small chunk. Are we downhearted? No. I´ve signed up for a knife skills course.

I can slice and dice with more panache than precision, and pretty quickly, but there comes a time when one must be able to tackle brunoise, julienne, baton, batonets, chiffonades. In order to never do them, probably, but what fun.

Venison and escabeche salad

I´m not very used to eating game, never mind cooking it. Even thouh my father is a keen hunter who feels that Bambi´s mother had it coming, he´s never been allowed to bring back meat that he´s shot.
So the piece of venison I was given yesterday has had me fairly flummoxed all day. Now it´s in the oven, simmering in a basic stewy sauce made the usual way, with bacon fat added. I figure if I can get the meat to go as tender as I like, the sauce will still be pretty terrific, which is good enough. One should never look at a gift of deer, etc.

In the meantime, dinner is done, leftovers from yesterday´s dinner party escabeche: a salad of lamb´s lettuce and avocado, dressed in the escabeche, with pieces of pickled mackerel and salmon, and a smattering of bacon on top. A winner, I feel.
And the pie crust from yesterday´s dried apricot crostata was too big, so I left a piece in the fridge and it´s yielded thirteen cookies (ok, I ate one, so fourteen) that we can have after dinner. Doubly thrifty, as I cooked them as the oven warmed up for the stew. I´m so proud of my green, responsible way with puddings.

The drawing is one I´ve done for a good friend, and has nothing to do with anything much, but I like it.

The Oscar slumber party

Starry starry night of the Oscars for us on this side of the Atlantic really means night. We stay up, in varying stages of wakefulness, and hope that a rush of sugar will make up for the Academy´s upsetting us, as they usually do.

Always on the menu: chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and this year also oatmeal-raisin, all done by the new exciting method of the giant squidgy cookie. And by the way, that stuff of letting the dough rest for days: it really works.

And now, fingers crossed for Kate Winslet, and let´s hope we don´t wake up baby Pía with the groans.

Giant cookies

Cookie eaters are divided between the squidgy cookie lovers and the ones who must have a snap.
Cookie bakers fall into two camps: those who have a reliable oven, thick baking sheets, a timer, concentration on the timer and a quick wrist inside the oven mitt - and the others.
Me, I just have the oven mitt. Which hasn´t prevented me from turning out some pretty darn great cookies in my time, but at the expense of years of life, I fear. Stress, burns, carbonized cookies, warped cookie sheets.

All that is over. I have found that if you bake all the dough at once, making one big cookie, you have the maximum squidge for the minimum fuss. No baking in batches, no anxiety. Not much in the way of looks, either, but who cares? These aren´t pretty golden cookies, but wedges of a massive golden cookie. They are crisp and golden only on a small portion of their surface.
I love them.

All you do is take a recipe for a favourite drop cookie, like this, and make one big cookie, 30 cm in diameter or so. You simply let it bake for longer, say, 17 minutes or so, always depending on your own particular oven.
Once it´s out quickly cut it as you would pizza, into triangular wedges. And that´s it.
If you must gild lilies, dribble some icing over it, as is suggested in that wonderful book, Big fat cookies. Otherwise, just go for them. They may not be pretty but they are seriously good.

Mush

Yesterday I made a puree of potato, leek, green beans, carrot, squash and chicken breast. No salt. It was bland and uninteresting, but it had deep historical resonance, being as it was Pía´s first ever savoury food.
She´s been happily eating a fruity mush made of apple, pear, orange juice, grapes and banana for a week, but this was the real test.
She spat most of it out, but apparently it´s a huge compliment that she neither cried nor treated us to some exorcist-style projectile vomiting. So it´s all good.
In the drawing, my sister María, Pía´s favourite aunt, and the one who wields the spoon with enough skill to make most of the food get into the baby´s mouth.

Bloody Mary

What´s better than whiling away a snowy Sunday morning with a bunch of friends watching Nadal win the Australian Open? Watching it while sipping a Bloody Mary, that´s what.

I wouldn´t presume to write a recipe for it, because the best Bloody Mary will always be the one you make yourself, just how you like it. I make mine easy on the vodka and strong on the lemon juice, with real celery salt (that´s to say, Maldon salt and celery seeds, crushed in a mortar) and lots of celery leaves peeking over the top of the jug.
And a recently learnt trick, via Nigella Bites: a splash of sherry. Makes perfect sense, if you think about it. Mary Tudor, the original Bloody Mary, was married to the King of Spain, so it´s only right to have something Spanish in the mix. What a wonderful PR turnaround, to go from hated XVI century queen to much-loved XX century cocktail.