Things are really shaping up in our huerto, our little vegetable garden. Yesterday the last of the broad beans were harvested and they leave us with a nice patch to fill with something else tasty.
Our garlic, which is a variety from Granada, is now just about ready for harvesting.
As you can see, it´s a small variety, slightly pink, and it tastes very sweet. Here it is alongside one of our onions which we had expected to be bigger, but no matter…they taste great.
So, we now need to pick our 320 garlic bulbs and dry them out a little. We already have a waiting list of people who want a few, so my worries about how on earth we would use that many are already being addressed.
In order to celebrate the new garlic I made a simple dish of chicken joints, potatoes, small chunks of a whole lemon, a bulb of the fresh garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil and some rosemary and oregano from our garden. I was inspired by this lovely simple recipe from Mary Cadogan over on the BBC website, but played around with it – I hope she won´t mind!
Into the oven it went, after having a good slug of local dry sherry poured over, where it sat cooking slowly at a medium heat for about 2 hours.
A little salad of finely chopped tomato with some chopped garlic and the last few fresh broad bean pods was my final tribute to the garden.
Simple, tasty and a perfect pick me up for the Up the Mountain garlic pickers!
I´m sure you´ve heard of the wonderful book Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart? Hopefully my book City Slicka to Spanish Chica, if it ever comes to print, will be an equal success and best seller, but I digress. Well, today we were Grafting onto Almonds.
Local Old Boy Domingo, King of the Fruit Tree Grafters (well, around these parts at least) came round and grafted some apricots and local peaches onto an almond tree we had given up for dead last year.
Big Man cut it right down to see if there was any hope and lo and behold, it sprouted. We have another almond tree which gives us plenty of almonds, so we decided to see if a little hard graft would pay off.
Start by stripping out leaves from branches but leaving the shoots up the branches intactNip off the top of the branch you are grafting onto and remove the outer “skin” of the branch
It´s a complicated process, although he made it look easy as you have to find a branch and the piece you graft on of the same size, it can take a few goes.
A tube (rather like a tiny section of a straw) is cut from the plant you will be grafting onto the host tree. It needs to include a little bud. Then it has to be slid off its own branch intact…tricky stuff.Slide it on…carefully now!Make sure it´s secureThe End Result…a job well done
Now we have to wait until about August, when we should be able to see which grafts have taken. Fingers crossed for success.
Celi over at The Kitchen´s Garden recently took us round her garden. Inspired by this, and as I had my camera in hand, I thought I´d show you a little more of our olive grove. We only have about 30 olive trees, it´s a piece of land of about 2500sqm but we are slowly planting fruit tress, and this is also where our chickens free range.
View to “my” mountains and the neighbours´ very posh chicken house
The overhead cables are not great, but in the campo it´s the only way to get electricity to the houses.
View out from olives across neighbour´s field to busy downtown!
I´ve realised that the shots are mainly out from the olives, but an olive grove is an olive grove. And here´s a gratuitous shot of the pesky olive flowers that cause so much suffering to people like me with hayfever.
Perhaps I should have asked Big Man to take a shot of me with my big sunglasses on and my Michael Jackson style breathing mask…that would have been quite entertaining!
We love pork belly, but here it is more traditionally used as “pancetta”, boiled in stocks and soups to add flavour or cut into tiny chunks and done on the plancha (griddle) or deep fried as a little tapas. Often it will have the skin removed.
Big Man knows that I don´t like the flowers sold in the very few florists we ever come across here (funeral meets petrol station bouquet) so I am romanced with food surprises. Cheese covered in rosemary, tangy little apples to remind me of England, bunches of wild asparagus, a freshly caught rabbit, mushrooms which have been foraged for, and yesterday a belly of pork with the skin on. Now that´s what I call love.
Today the sun is shining, time to get to work in the garden and vegetable patch, so I needed a dish that I could forget about for a while. This recipe from my old favourite, the BBC Good Food Website, seemed to fit the bill. I did change it slightly as several people commented on the sauce being very sticky and leaving them with some scary washing up. Not for me, I thought, and worked around it.
Ingredients
For the sauce
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
60ml vinegar (I used white wine)
2 tbsp honey
2 star anise, broken up slightly
1 tsp Chinese five-spice powder
100ml rice wine or sherry (I used a dry fino)
1kg boneless pork belly
Turn the oven on to its lowest setting.
Mix all the ingredients for the sauce together and warm gently until the honey has melted.
Line a small, deep baking tin or dish (one that will fit the meat quite snugly) with greaseproof paper making sure it comes up the sides. I used a large sheet and just placed it in the tin, scrunching it round the meat once it was placed in the tin.
Pour the sauce into the tin then place the meat on top, skin side up. Gather the paper up a little and then make a lid of aluminium foil so that the meat is sealed in the tin.
Cook slowly for about 3 hours, test the meat at the end of this time to ensure the meat is no longer pink. If it is, leave in for a little longer.
Now turn the oven up to the highest setting. Drain the sauce off the meat into a small pan and replace the meat in the baking tray, still skin side up. Continue cooking the meat until the top has turned crispy. Mine took about 45 minutes but you could always put it under a hot grill instead (not too close though or it will just burn).
Meanwhile remove any fat from the top of the sauce (I did this with a small ladle) and then fast boil the sauce until it has thickened slightly.
When the meat is done, cut into slices and serve with some of the sauce poured over. We ate ours with plain boiled basmati rice and spinach, picked only an hour before from the garden, which was simply steamed.
Now…has anyone noticed a slight improvement in my photos today? I do hope so! When I was in the UK last week I picked up my new (well, new to me) camera. It´s a Nikon D60 and I am a total photography virgin when it comes to the camera I now have. It has a couple of lenses. One of them, I am sure, will be able to pick out the hand of cards Big Man is holding when playing with the old boys in the summer if he is sat on the terrace of the bar down the road. I haven´t even read the instruction book yet, so am going to enjoy playing with it over the next few months. Wish me luck…but don´t worry Roger, you have nothing to fear from me…
Now, if there was a prize for the least photogenic dish in the world, this one would be up there with the final contenders. It´s a very simple and tasty dish, especially made with the young tender broad beans which are in season right now. Our vegetable patch is delivering nicely and I make these regularly.
And then I take a photo. But to no avail. Broad beans braised slowly for about 30 minutes just don´t look pretty. You have the photos to prove it here. Sigh. If only they were as photogenic as Roger´s beautiful beetroot. But what they lack in looks, they make up for in taste, you´ll just have to believe me on this.
It´s quite a versatile dish – it is served here as a tapas, a side dish or with fried or poached eggs as a light supper dish. It can also be mixed into beaten eggs and made into a tortilla or huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs).
Ingredients
500g of young broad beans (podded, but keep the skins and slice them into 1cm pieces)
1 medium onion finely chopped
About 6 cloves of garlic peeled and sliced lengthways in half
100g of finely chopped jamon (or use lardons or pancetta)
Olive oil
Seasoning
Sweet pimentón (optional)
The Spanish way of making this dish is to braise the onion, garlic and beans (pods and skins) in olive oil until tender. It does taste wonderful but this is how I do it.
Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil and add the bean pods and skins and cook for about 4-5 minutes until just starting to become tender. Drain. Put about 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil into a deep frying pan that has a lid (or that you can cover with foil) and gently poach the onions and garlic (with the lid on) until they are soft.
Another dish..another day...and no, still not pretty!
Now add the beans and continue to cook gently, stirring to mix the beans into the oil every so often, with the pan covered. They will simmer and braise until very tender. Near the end of the cooking time add the jamon which will also cook through. I also like to add a sprinkle of pimentón when I add the jamon, but this is not typical. Taste and season if necessary and serve hot or cold.
For a similar dish using runner beans, take a look at this recipe.
Big Man and I are heading to the UK tomorrow. We have packed our umbrella as I think we have a few rainy days awaiting us. I won´t have access to e-mail but I look forward to catching up with you all next week – hope it´s a good one for everyone!
Spring is sprung,
De grass is riz,
I wonder where dem birdies is?
De little birds is on de wing,
Ain’t dat absurd?
De little wing is on de bird!
Apologies, but I do enjoy nonsense and nursery rhymes! Yesterday at 6.14am, Spring officially began here in Spain. Unfortunately someone forgot to tell the weather and the warm temperatures we have been experiencing dropped overnight.
No matter, we have been putting some early plants into our veggie patch, but Big Man has been creating mini polytunnels to protect them on cold days and nights.
In about a week we´ll be eating our first broad beans, and the onions are also coming on nicely.
We planted a totally ridiculous 280 cloves of garlic, and are now planting lettuce between the rows. Big Man will cover them with netting or the little sparrows will think they´ve been invited to a Michelin starred restaurant.
We planted a first “wave” of tomatoes, peppers and chard.
The tomatoes are already producing flowers.
The chard is almost ready to start picking.
But helpers are thin on the ground here. Better to sleep in the warm sun room.
Luna says "Just five more minutes and then I´ll come and help"
Maybe I´ll get up and help.
Did someone mention digging?!
Maybe not, I´ll just put my head down and no one will notice I´m here.
Think I´ll just stay here and wait until my fur grows back after the home haircut Mum & Dad gave me...
And a final piece of “newness”. John From the Bartolini Kitchens, very kindly sent me a fantastic tutorial on how to insert the Flag Counter I now have right at the very bottom of my blog page. If you scroll down, down, down you will see that it is now starting collect flags from the countries that have visited my blog. Very interesting and a lot of fun to check up on. Maybe one day I´ll get to visit more of them. Thanks John, my brilliant long lost Italian cousin!
It´s been such a long time since I talked about the garden or the vegetable patch. Naturally, it´s still winter, the soil is resting.
But not quite. It´s been an exceptionally mild winter, and while things could still change, there are signs of life.
My cyclamen, bought before Christmas, continues to stun us with its beauty. I am doubly shocked as I generally manage to kill pot plants within a few days. What do I do next with it? It currently sits inside our sun room, with the door open all day and sun in the afternoon. It seems very happy.
Some of our geranium cuttings are already producing little flowers.
Daffodil and narcissus bulbs planted last year (bought back from the UK) are flowering.
My parsley survived the winter outside, this is the first year this has happened.
Broad beans and onions in their little winter shelter. We open the door and let the sun in during the day and we´ll be eating beans again in a few weeks.
Plenty of garlic for the year ahead. I thought it was only a month away from being ready, but wise old Big Man tells me I need to be much more patient. In the background one of our lemons and our artichoke plants which are already producing baby artichokes.
Our other lemon took a battering in the recent high winds, but still has plenty of lemons and produces new flowers with each new moon.
We don´t tend to grow our produce from seeds as many of Big Man´s family do this on a large scale for a living. We are going to risk some early planting. Nothing to lose, we think. Basil, thyme, chard, spinach, frying peppers, bell peppers, some more lettuce and some salad tomatoes.
Winter has been kind to us this year. Fingers crossed it won´t take us by surprise in the next few weeks.
When you breed chickens for eating, you´re going to have to deal with the chicken, the whole chicken, and nothing but the chicken.
Most of our Fat Boys end up being cut up into individual portions with the skin off – they´re easier to store in the freezer that way and you don´t have to pluck them. Chicken Breast has always been my least favourite part…typically it can be a little dry and bland. Now that we get to eat our own chickens, I can at least say that the breasts are neither dry nor bland and taste great just done on the griddle with olive oil and salt and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end.
Some of our chickens are real monsters though – and with no artificial feed. Just corn, wheat and a long-ish life (at least in terms of chickens for eating) pecking around our olives. One chicken breast can weigh about 500g and is plenty to feed two. Sometimes it´s nice to jazz it up a little, and this is a firm favourite.
One monster chicken breast or two regular
Two tablespoons of cream cheese mixed with one crushed clove of garlic, a sprinkle of salt and a tablespoon of your favourite herb finely chopped (I like basil or chives with this)
About four tablespoons of tomato sauce (i.e. made from fresh or tinned tomatoes)
Grated cheese
Seasoning
Olive oil
Split the chicken breast in two without cutting all the way through. Fill with the cream cheese and close. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle a little olive oil over, massaging it in all over.
Put into a baking dish and pour over the tomato sauce. Bake on medium for about 30 minutes. Check that it is done by piercing it – if the juices run clear, you´re done. If not, cook for a further 10 mins, check and repeat if necessary. When cooked, grate cheese over the top, pop it under a hot grill until the cheese is melted and bubbling, and serve.
This is a great prepare ahead dish (up to the stage before you start to cook) and if the breast is large, serve cut into slices with a little extra tomato sauce on the side for your loved ones who prefer things saucy!
Now that we seem to have caught up (vegetable-availability-wise) with everyone who was posting squash and pumpkin recipes back in the autumn, I am finally cooking lots of warming winter dishes which include this fantastic ingredient. Having said that, it´s not actually very cold here at the moment, but it is Janaury, so I feel justified in making wintery food.
Although we didn´t put on any extra kilos over Christmas, no one could ever accuse either me or Big Man of being under weight, so recipes which are healthier and packed with vegetables are perfect for us.
A mild flavoured curry was on my list – Big Man doesn´t like them hot, and I can always add a little dried chilli at the end to turn up the heat in my own portion.
Ingredients(to serve 4 as a hearty soup or more as a side dish)
200g split yellow peas (the last of a stash bought over by visitors…so sad)
500g squash peeled and cut into slices
1 cup of tomato conserva or chopped tinned tomatoes
1 onion peeled, halved and cut into thin slices
1 head of garlic (you will be roasting this and only using half)
2-3 cups of vegetable stock or water
3 heaped teaspoons of your favourite curry mix (I usually make mine with ground turmeric, chilli, cumin, dried coriander, black pepper and cardamom seeds and then add a little fresh grated ginger when I cook)
1 teaspoon of mustard seeds
1 dried chilli crumbled (optional)
Oil for frying
Turn the oven onto a high setting and place the squash on a tray lined with foil. Sprinkle with salt and drizzle a little oil over. Roast for about 30 minutes until soft and brown at the edges. Put the garlic in at the same time, wrapped loosely in foil.
Start by dry frying the mustard seeds until they pop. Remove them from the pan. Add a little oil to your pan and fry the onion and garlic until they are soft, then add your curry powder and mustard seeds and fry until the lovely aromas start to come out, then add the split peas (or you could use lentils). Now add the tomato conserva and 2 cups of the stock or water plus the crumbled chilli if using.
Cook gently until the split peas are almost soft (you may need to add more liquid, just keep an eye on them). Remove the squash and garlic from the oven and cut the squash into smaller bite sized chunks. Add these to the split peas. Pop half of the garlic cloves out of their skins and add to the curry. Mash the other half and cover with a little oil, it will keep for at least a week in the fridge and can be used in other dishes or dips.
Add a drop more liquid to the vegetables if necessary, cooking the curry for about 10 more minutes until everything is soft and cooked through. You can mash some of the squash, garlic and split peas with the back of a wooden spoon, leaving some chunky. Add salt, you´ll probably find it can take quite a lot, but the choice is yours. Eat as a thick soup or a side dish and it´s lovely served with rice or naan bread.
Delicious with a squeeze of lime juice and chopped coriander, but I didn´t have either of them so I just used lemon juice. If you like it even milder and more creamy, stir in a couple of big spoonfuls of thick creamy yogurt.
We had some leftovers, so the next day I added some more stock, yogurt and some finely chopped chard (you could use spinach, kale, cabbage) and warmed it through to make a delicious soup – I´m not sure which version I liked best!
Well, who´da thunk it?! The lovely Betsy from Bits & Breadcrumbs passed this fabulous award on to me. In true Blogging style I have to answer a few questions and pass the baton on. Thanks Betsy, I´d be honoured!
1. What, or who inspired you to start a blog?
It was two things. First of all my lovely crafty friend Florence over at Florence and Freddie started blogging on WordPress and encouraged me to go for it. Secondly, I had just finished writing City Slicka to Spanish Chica and wanted to try it out on a wider audience. Still unpublished, but oh what fun to write. And now I can say I have written a book, so I´m quite proud of that even though it needs a good edit. Anyone know any editors….?
2. Who is your foodie inspiration?
Lots of people, but I guess it started at home. My beloved grandmother was the queen of cakes and taught me how to bake. My mum was a 19 year old English girl who married an Italian and had to learn pretty damn quick. My parents still laugh that the first meal she made him when he visited his future in laws was severely over cooked Spaghetti with tomato ketchup on it. Fortunately she´s an amazing cook now and even ran her own catering company for many years. Chef wise I love Rick Stein, Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and finally I am now inspired daily by my fellow food bloggers.
My beautiful grandmother aged 26
3. Your greasiest, batter – splattered food/drink book is?
It´s not a book, it´s a folder filled with recipes torn out of magazines, scribbled notes, print outs of recipes. I love it, but maybe I should get myself a new folder (ideally wipe clean) as it´s falling apart.
4. Tell us all about the best thing you have ever eaten in another country, where was it, what was it?
Oh, that´s hard, I´ve travelled a lot and eaten some amazing (and some revolting) meals. Freshly grilled fish on the beach in Bali, a papaya for breakfast in the Cook Islands, an amazing Seafood Feast in Watson´s Bay Australia, my auntie´s pasta in Calabria, an incredible Japanese meal at Nobu in Paris, fresh bread out of the village oven in Morocco….sorry, can´t make my mind up on that one.
Beautiful Bali
5. Another food bloggers table you’d like to eat at is?
Can I go to a few please? How about something amazing and vegetarian with Natalie over at Cook Eat Live Vegetarian, of course, cocktails with Greg & Katherine at Rufus Food & Spirits Guide, a long night of pasta and cards with Chgo John From the Bartolini Kitchens, tea, scones and a walk round the Farmy with Celi from the Kitchens Garden, a visit to pick supper from Claire´s allotment over at Promenade Plantings and shopping at Mad Dog´s butcher followed by dinner. Oh dear, I seem to have taken myself off round the world again!
6. What is the one kitchen gadget you would ask Santa for this year (money no object of course)?
Well, Christmas is long gone but ready for December 2012 I´d like to ask for something quite simple….an immersion blender. I have a knack of breaking things and this is probably one of the gadgets I use most in my kitchen. I´ve been in Spain 6 years and I think this is blender number 7 or 8 and is held together with Big Man´s electrical tape. Mind you, we now don´t have a handle on the fridge door and the oven doesn´t work well and I´ve always fancied a wine fridge….
7. Who taught you how to cook?
I´d love to say my mum and grandmother, and I suppose they did teach me the basics, but I am very much self taught. As soon as I left home I was off and experimenting (my poor friends) but I had great fun and built up my confidence to a point that I even taught a cookery class for a while.
My mum teaching Big Man how to cook a suckling pig...
8. I’m coming to you for dinner what’s your signature dish?
Oh, that´s tough too. I guess it would depend on what time of year you came as I´d try to use as much of our own produce from the vegetable garden, our own eggs, perhaps our own chickens. Ok, as we´re in Spain I´ll do a lovely seafood platter to start, a chicken paella cooked outdoors, you can digest, take a walk or a dip then we´ll have whatever fresh fruit is in season with honey and almond ice cream, little cups of coffee and some of my cantuccini biscuits.
9. What is your guilty food pleasure?
Now that one is easy. Walkers Cheese & Onion Crisps. And no, if you buy me some, I won´t share!
10. Reveal something about yourself that others would be surprised to learn?
I´m a trained and practising Psychometric Profiler as well as a (sort of ex) Human Resources Consultant. I think I used to scare people off (especially potential suitors) as they thought I was analyzing their every word or gesture. And I probably was a lot of the time! Finally…tag 5 other food bloggers with these questions…like a hot baked potato…pass it on.
I think many of the people I have already mentioned have already been tagged, but I´d like to mention a few new (to me) discoveries, the lovely blogs over at Ang Sarap, IamSimplyTia, FrugalFeeding, PeasePudding and SimpleSpeedySnacks. They should all feel free to join in or not….but I do enjoy reading their blogs and hopefully you will too.
Remember our beautiful walk recently? We had such a wonderful morning and came home with about half a kilo of wild mushrooms.
Because they were so fresh, I knew they would keep for a day or two, so in the first dish I made, I used half of them and kept things very simple.
We grow oyster mushrooms in our garage. No, don´t worry – there´s no nasty fungus creeping up the walls or anything. You can buy bales of straw which are impregnated with mushroom spores and then wrapped in black plastic. You cut slits into the plastic and keep the “alpaca” as these bales are known in the dark and ensure that they are kept damp. About a week after acquiring your little treasure your first mushrooms will appear. Just cut and eat. Then when you´ve harvested as many as you can, you flip the alpaca over and cut a few more slits. If you keep it going you can be eating your own grown oyster mushrooms for several months.
I took about the same quantity of oyster mushrooms as wild, cut the wild mushrooms into thick slices and tore the oyster mushrooms into strips.
In a deep terracotta dish (or you could use a frying pan) I added three crushed cloves to garlic to the mushrroms together with about 3 good tablespoons of olive oil, some Maldon (or kosher) salt, several good grinds of black pepper and two red chillis (these are optional). I turned the heat up to high and as soon as the mushrooms began to sizzle I reduced it and covered them to let them sweat and get tender for about 10 minutes. I then removed the lid and added a small glass of dry white wine and let everything bubble away until the liquid had reduced by half.
We ate this as a starter with plenty of rosé wine and some crusty bread to mop up the delicious juices.
PS. On a totally different subject – since I changed the look of my blog (i.e I changed the theme) my photos don´t seem to appear properly. They are cut off on the right hand side! Has anyone come across this and do they know how to resolve it? Thanks for any advice anyone might be able to offer me.
So in 2016 I turned 50. I was in Italy for my 21st, 30th and 40th. To keep this birthday tradition going I always knew I'd be in Italy for my 50! This blog starts with my 5 week adventure in Puglia but my love affair with Italy continues.....
Chica Andaluza 