Making home made yogurt

It is well known that I am very lazy and refuse to cook croquetas or tortilla, am more than glad to buy roast chickens, would not dream of making my own jam and feel faint at the mere thought of cleaning anchovies for boquerones en vinagre. So severe is the case that I won´t go near most recipes that call for sepparating eggs or browning meat. I don´t fry, I don´t roll and I don´t stuff, and am constantly plugged to my freezer, Thermomix and rice cooker.

So you see that when I say that making yogurt is well worth your while, it´s true, and not the kind of annoying off-the-cuff remark of someone who can take apart a car and put it back together. The basic elemental yogurt you buy costs ten times more than what you´ll make and tastes nowhere nearly as good. And if you buy good milk, even organic, the economics of the thing really start to make sense. And it´s so so easy. 

Back when Abba were still together, my mother owned a yogurt making machine, and I´d always assumed that it was necessary for making yogurt, as a waffle iron is for making waffles. But like so many of my late seventies beliefs, this isn´t true. All you need is milk and yogurt and a bowl and time and a blanket. 

To further convince you of my laziness I won´t even bother to type the recipe, but instead direct you here. Though I´ll warn you that Heidi makes it sound much more complicated than it is (really, you just boil some milk, wait for it to cool down a bit, mix in yogurt, leave it to set somewhere warm). Just one piece of important advice given by my friend Cristina, dairy expert of Malasaña: to retain the heat the best thing is to put the yogurt bowl inside one of those insulated coolers one takes to the beach. Much better than blankets or shawls, whatever Ms Roden or Ms Colwin may say.

Make your yogurt int he evening in five minutes, shut it inside the cooler and awake next morning to thick, creamy, sweet tasting yogurt you got for pennies.

Strawberry gazpacho

Gazpacho is such a great soup that some people just can´t hold themselves in and wait for tomatoes to be good. The minute the thermometer flirts with 30ºC they´re off, and the resulting gazpachos can be a little bit boring and somewhat pale.
This is a version I was taught last week by Isabela Muro. Throwing strawberries in with tomatoes and olive oil into a blender may seem a little bit wacky, but it works very well. The strawberries give it sweetness and colour, and the whole thing is fruity and light and satisfying. The normal gazpacho is much much better, but this makes for a fun little change, and good sense if you must have gazpacho right now.

All you do is mix 1 kg. strawberries, 1 kg. tomatoes, 300 ml. olive oil, 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 1 garlic clove (seedling out and blanched beforehand). Blitz it in a stong blender, strain it with a chinoise and you´re good to go.

Strawberries

We had a strawberry discussion this weekend, and all agreed that the best we´ve had came from Aranjuez, and were grown in the open air. The great whopping plastic-raised fresón from Huelva is no love of ours. But. Apart from nísperos, it´s all there is, so we eat it very happily in all its possibilities:

plain
with sugar and yogurt
with chunks of pineapple
with whipped cream and meringues
crushed with whipped cream and sandwiched between two sponge cakes
with pancakes and caramelized apples

doubtless we´ll think up a few more before cherries begin to claim all the love.

Marion

It works! It really does. Yesterday´s pancake batter looked a bit dodgy in its plastic container, a bit more alive than yesterday, but the minute it hit the pan it made fluffy, perfect pancakes just the same.
I had two plates of pancakes with caramelized pear and a pot of tea ready in less time than it took J to change Pía and install her in a highchair. Mind you, he´s not fast, and has some issues with the straps in the highchair, but still, this was a lightning fast operation, and possibly the only way to make Mr.No-Breakfast go out into the world with a full stomach in the morming. Now I know.

Exhibition

Tomorrow is the opening of my show, and I am in that marvelous state where I am either staring blankly at the wall or snapping at whoever has the misfortune to speak to me. I can´t eat, or I am ravenous. I feel there are a million things I must do, but can´t think of any. Very much like pre-wedding nerves, except on that day I knew what I was going to wear, and had only to make sure I fit into it.
Since I have no idea what I will be looking like tomorrow, I have instead cooked myself a beautiful, decadent breakfast: pancakes with sauteed pears.
I´d never made pancakes for one, because one egg makes too much batter, and if I make the whole batch intending to freeze some it´s more than likely that I will eat all the pancakes anyway. But Marion Cunningham says you can keep batter in the fridge, and if that is true, well then, we´re home free.
I made three panckaes from this batter and sauteed a pear in butter and brown sugar in another pan, and it all took fifteen minutes, including one phone call to J to apologize for having snapped before, and another to my mother to schedule Pía´s morning.
Why don´t we make pancakes every morning?

Sauteed cherry tomatoes

One of my rules is: no tomatoes between October and June. There are enough dissappointments going around to add mushy, mealy, pale, tastless toms to the list.

And yet. Sometimes, I really, really want a tomato. Or big bags of them are on sale, and, well, I´m not made of iron. The rule that ammends the broken rule is: cook them. Slow roasting makes up for their sins pretty well, but it takes forever. My new favourite thing is to achieve a similar result within minutes. 

All you need is a handful of those accomodating little things, cherry tomatoes, and a bit of balsamic vinegar.

Sauteeing the cherries at high heat brings out all the things you want in a tomato: juiciness, flavour, tartness, sweetness. A drizzle of vinegar at the end makes them caramelize, or look caramelized, dark and long cooked. And it all happens while you get a sandwich ready!

Over the past week I´ve used these in a salad with fresh mozzarella and anchovies, as a side vegetable, and as a garnish to perk up a bland sqash soup from a carton.

Brilliant.

Peanut slaw

Oh the joy of French onion soup. Not only the queen of soups, but probably top of my list of all time top ten grilled cheese greats, and high up there in any top ten list I ever make.
We had that on Thursday at the knife skills class, which was great, because I´ve always had some caramelization issues and I think now I know how to do it properly.
Also, I learnt this great tip: add vanilla right at the end of whatever you do with it because it tends to lose its perfume with long cooking. The reduced red wine sauce the chef made to prove this point was like hitting a brick wall of vanilla. Except, you know, nice.

All the stuff we did was classic bistro cooking and as such way beyond my usual scope, so instead I´ll link to this cabbage slaw, and just say I do it without the cilantro.
It´s a perfect thing to make when you´re distracted and kind of hungry but not really, because you had a heavy lunch, yet want some kind of a healthy yet not boring dinner. Or when you´re on a diet (but don´t go wild with the peanuts). Or when you want to serve vegetables but can´t be bothered to peel carrots or wash and dry lettuce. Or when cabbage is all you have, since it can last forever, unassumingly lurking in the fridge until called for.
So you see, most of the time, really.
It´s a good one for trying out new found knife skills, too, as chopping cabbage has to be one of the easiest, most rewarding chicken tasks. No matter how inept or slow you are, in no time you have a mound of crunchy leaves to be proud of.

Knife skills course, part 1

Yesterday we had the first leg of the knife skills course at Alambique with Alonso Roche. I really enjoyed it. I will never peel an onion the same way. My chopping might not change so much, because all those nifty little shapes professionals make come at the cost of a huge amount of scraps. And I don´t make stock every day, and I don´t mind irregularity in my soup at all.
But it was a lot of fun to chop carrots into tiny dice for a delicious soupe au pistou, and to watch an expert going through the motions of sole meuniere. A fillet of which I cut myself, a very impressive feat I don´t think I´ll repeat much, since my market is brimming with stalwart guys who are only to happy to do that, but still, very useful to know how in case I´m ever confronted with a whole flat fish.
Today, chicken, and how to sharpen. Fun.

Back in Spain, oh dear

Yes, we had withdrawal symptoms and really wanted to get back to our baby. But it was very hard to tear ourselves away from the coast yesterday, because as usually happens after a rainy weekend, the minute you pack your bags in the car, the sun shines merrily.
It was a very long drive, and we stopped in Elvas for lunch. J thought we might as well have the bacalhau dourada, and we did, and it was pretty good, considering we chose a nondescript touristy little bar in the square.
Elvas looked very beautiful but we couldn´t explore. That´s the problem with Madrid; it´s just too far from everything else.
J´s mother is coming for lunch, so cure the saudade I´ll make octopus salad to start with, and I´ll crush the meringues I bought in Evora to scatter over strawberries and cream.
As far as I can make out, the salada de polvo goes like this:

Octopus, boiled and cut thin (you can buy boiled octopus at the market here, so that´s easy)
Parsley, chopped
Onion, cut very thin and marinated in vinegar (?)
A generous dose of extra virgin olive oil

Just the thing with the so excellent bread we´ve also brought back from the Alentejo.

Portugal and chocolate mousse

J and I, when in Portugal, could bore anyone to death as we talk about the same thing, all the time, over and over; why is it that their coast is perfectly beautiful, while ours is a total mess of concrete apartment blocks?
Right now we´re on the Costa Vicentina, which is a string of sandy coves and dramatic cliffs where storks nest on jutting rocks and the surf pounds.
Also, the food is great. Not just the grilled fish, which is of course excellent, but the boiled vegetables that come with it, which are so sweet and fresh that we eat them outright, no oil, no salt, nothing. The fish soup, the cuttlefish stew, the octopus salad. All great.
One thing I find particulary charming is the chocolate mousse. In Spain, chocolate mousse is over. Trendy restaurants have banished it from their menus, and serve instead brownies, or carrot cake, or cheesecake. You might, perhaps, be treated to some foamy thing featuring local cheeses or honey, or a molecular rendition of some traditional nunnery pastry.
As for the basic elemental roadhouse restaurants, if they have mousse, you can be sure it comes in a little clay pot, straight from a factory who knows where.
These Portuguese, though, they know their way around a carton of eggs, and see no problem at all in dishing up such a classic.
It comes in fluted glasses, or little metal cups, maybe with a dollop of whipped cream, maybe not, but it is that homely type that is more creamy than moussy, having been too thoroughly beaten, perhaps, and is just chocolatey enough, being blissfuly free of any 70% cocoa conceits.
In fact, as J and I simultaneously mumbled through our first mouthful of the stuff, it is exactly the same mousse we had at our grandmothers´houses.
Brilliant. Next time I have people over for dinner, I´m giving them chocolate mousse, and I bet they´ll say wow this is great we haven´t had this in ages.