Having spent the day rushing around and generally being a busy bee, I wanted something quick and easy for a light supper. Leftovers from a chargrilled chicken dish made the night before included most of a chicken breast, so I decided to make some fritters and serve them with a big mixed salad.
Here in Andalucía they often make fritters with salt cod (which has been soaked and desalted) and serve them with Molasses (or sugar cane honey as it´s called here) drizzled over. When I was first introduced to this concept, I wasn´t sure it was going to be for me. The idea of sweet and salty mixed together seemed strange, but then I thought about how in the UK we often eat meats with fruit sauces (pork with apple sauce, turkey with cranberry) and realised that it wasn´t such a weird idea. I´m so glad I did give it a go as it´s a fantastic combination and works really well with these fritters.
Beautiful Jar of Miel de Caña
If you just can´t face the thought of Molasses though, a sweet chilli dipping sauce or mayonnaise also tastes great with these little fritters.
Ingredients used (which are approximate) made 14 fritters.
1 x 150g sweetcorn which I blended to make creamed corn (we can´t get it here)
Half a large or one small chicken breast, grilled and then finely chopped
4 heaped tablespoons of self raising (or cake) flour
About half the empty can full of milk
2 tablespoons of finely chopped chives
1 egg
Seasoning
Oil for frying (I used olive oil)
In a bowl add the flour and egg to the sweetcorn and mix well. Gradually add the milk until you get a paste the consistency of a thick porridge. You may not use all the milk, or you may need a little more, it will depend on your flour. Add the chicken and chives and season to taste.
Heat your oil in a deep frying pan and when ready, drop heaped tablespoons of the mixture in, flattening them out slightly with the back of the spoon.
Each side will take about a minute to cook, remove, drain and serve. And if you´re feeling Spanish, you can call them Tortillitas de Pollo, Cebollina y Maiz. Olé!
The end of the orange season and the start of a spring glut of broad beans and mint means that it´s time here for a refreshing, light and easy salad.
Most people here have at least a few citrus trees in the gardens, some have tens or hundreds of them. After three years our lemon tree is now producing more than we can cope with, but we only planted our orange last autumn, so still rely on the good will of friends and neighbours for our supply. Fortunately, we have very obliging friends and neighbours who keep us in oranges.
When I still went out to buy them, in the early years, I was surprised to be asked in the little local shop “if I wanted oranges for eating?”. Well, of course I did, what the heck did they think I was going to do with them? Of course, now that I am a wise old country biddy, I know that oranges are sold for eating (slightly more bitter) and for drinking (i.e. for juicing). The later are softer, juicier (naturally) and incredibly sweet. The difference is noticeable and as we eat a lot of salads made with oranges here, it´s worth looking out for the right ones.
This salad can be varied depending on the time of year. In the autumn, with the next crop of oranges, I substitute the broad beans for pomegranate pips. Either way, the colours and combinations of tastes are stunning. This salad goes particularly well with oily fish like sardines or mackerel or with fatty meat like lamb or goat. As a starter it´s delicious with a plate of salty jamon and another of a salty cured sheep´s or goat´s cheese. A cold glass of iced dry sherry finishes things off perfectly.
For two people you need:
Two or three bitter oranges, skin and pith removed and cut into small chunks
About half a cup of fresh broad beans (raw)
About 10 mint leaves shredded
Olive oil
Salt (flakes or coarse sea salt) and freshly ground pepper
Place the oranges on a plate, pouring over any juice that you have collected when peeling them. Sprinkle over the beans and mint, season and drizzle over the olive oil. Make the salad about half an hour before eating and keep chilled before serving.
It´s an unusual mixture of tastes, but it works for me. Do hope you enjoy it!
I´m not sure that this one can exactly count as a recipe, as it´s more a “chuck it together and enjoy” kind of dish. Here in Spain the main meal of the day tends to be at lunch time. Even in cities where people work in shops and offices, there is still a tradition to shut at 2pm and then re open at 5pm. Lunch is taken very seriously! The evening meal is rarely eaten before 10pm, which was a bit of a struggle for me at first, even though I usually ate at about 8pm in the UK. Over time I´ve got used to it, especially now that I´ve realised that the evening meal is generally something very light. A soup, or salad perhaps.
Of course, there are times when the evening meal is something more elaborate, but that tends to be related to an event, in which case you wouldn´t go to bed early (that´s around midnight here!) but more like somewhere between 3am and 7am…crazy hours. Of course, that gives you time to digest dinner, dance it off, and perhaps even indulge in a breakfast of hot chocolate and churros before going to bed to sleep off the festivities.
Last night was just a regular night. We fancied something light but filling, so I made one of our favourites – Chicken, Egg and Bacon Salad.
Ingredients are rather approximate – use what you have to hand. We used:
One lettuce heart roughly chopped
Two small-ish potatoes (boiled in their skins then peeled and roughly chopped)
Two hard boiled eggs, quartered
One large chicken breast, griddled
4 rashers of streaky bacon (griddled)
1 small packet of anchovies in olive oil
Olive oil
Lemon juice
Seasoning
I also made an extra dressing, which make enough for another salad
Half a small tub of natural yogurt (half a 125 tub)
The same quantity of mayonnaise
The juice of half a lemon
A tablespoon of milk
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
There´s no method to this, just combine the salad ingredients, season and dress very lightly with olive oil and lemon juice. You can leave this out if you like lashings of the yogurt and mayonnaise dressing. It´s entirely up to you. For the dressing, just put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix until you´ve got a smooth, fairly runny sauce and drizzle over the salad.
Other ingredients which are good in this salad, which I guess has a touch of the “Chicken Caesar” about it, are avocado, croutons, grated hard cheese….go on, give it a go!
I think I´m still about bit confused as to whether it´s Winter, Spring or Summer here in Andalucía. The calendar says May, so I´m thinking Spring. Last week we had torrential rain and had to light the fire again in the evening. Yesterday I was sunbathing and gardening and the temperatures reached the high 20´s. No wonder I´m feeling a little confused.
Soup always fits the bill, especially for a light supper. Warming when you want it to be, chilled when you need cooling down and always very comforting.
Saved...from the compost heap!
We still have the last of our Spring Onions in the garden which have grown to enormous proportions. Big Man is going to pull them up as the last few are pretty tough, but the centres are still incredibly tender, so I thought I´d save a few before they ended up on the compost heap and turn them into a soup. A quick nip outside the back door led me to my beautiful mint which has really taken off again after its winter rest and a trip to the freezer for some frozen peas and I was almost set.
Now, Big Man claims not to like peas, so when I first made this soup for him I told a porky and said that it was made with a mixture of broad beans and peas. Once he had declared it “delicious, you must make this again” I confessed and it´s become a bit of a favourite. Our broad beans are now ready to eat, so perhaps next time I´ll make the “true” version and see which one we prefer.
The serving I made fed two accompanied with plenty of crusty bread and is equally good served piping hot or icy cold.
I have a saucepan which I know makes a perfect serving for two, so measurements are a bit vague for this one I´m afraid. Will try to explain! Ingredients used were:
Just under half the pan full of frozen peas (a cup and a half approx)
A potato the size of my clenched fists (I don´t have big hands – if only the rest of me was in proportion!)
2 very large spring onions, including the green stems cleaned and chopped
About 10 large mint leaves
Water
Seasoning
This is quick and also very low fat (well, no fat actually), so also good if you´re watching the waistline. Which I really should be doing, but hey, back to the cooking.
I had a ready cooked potato left over from some potato salad – I cook them in their skins and then peel them and tend to keep these in the fridge as a staple. If you don´t have a ready cooked one, peel, cube, boil until tender and then drain.
Put all your ingredients into a saucepan, season and cover with twice the volume of water (or vegetable stock) and bring to the boil. Cook for a few minutes until the peas are done and then leave for another few minutes to cool down slightly. Check and adjust your seasoning.
Then all you need to do is to blitz it with a hand blender and it´s ready to serve. Quick, delicious and easy!
Nearly ready
I´ve also served this with cubed jamon (or you could use lightly fried lardons or diced bacon). If you wanted a creamy version you could swirl in some cream or yogurt just before serving. A drizzle of extra virgin olive oil over the top just seems to finish it off perfectly. No photo of the finished dish I´m afraid as we were clearly too hungry and forgot to take one! Enjoy…
Love ´em or hate ´em – my friends and family seem to be divided in their opinion of croquettes. I´m most definitely in the “Love” camp, as is one of my god daughters who can eat them non stop. Big Man sits in the other camp and every now and then I try a new batch on him to see if I can convert him. He loved the Falafel I made recently, which are pretty “croquettey” in my view, so I haven´t given up hope.
Love, love, love ´em!
Croquettes in Spain are generally made with a béchamel base to hold them together, rather than potato, which is the way I´ve always done them. I´ve never tried to make them Spanish style, but after making a fish pie the other day I had a small bowl of béchamel sauce left over and I thought I´d give them a go. What with having dogs and chickens, it´s unusual now for me to have many leftovers in the fridge. The chickies get the sad vegetables, salad and fruit (if I haven´t already turned them into soups or jams) and the dogs get bones and scraps of meat. Anything else should go onto the compost heap, but there never seems to be enough left!
Croquettes can be made from any filling, but I really recommend searching through your fridge and using up any little scraps of leftovers. I had a small bowl of cubed jamon which hadn´t gone into the soup and a few leaves of chard which were looking a bit floppy, so my decision was made. Other suggestions could be cold veg, tuna, leftover chicken, cheese, hard boiled eggs…ooh, I could go on, but I´ll just get on with telling you how they were made.
Not a lot of photos today as my hands were getting mucky (despite wearing latex gloves) when making the croquettes and Big Man wasn´t around to take snaps for me.
Ingredients used were:
About 2 cups of cold béchamel which had gone quite solid. If you need to make it from scratch, use about 250-300ml of milk for your béchamel and then leave it in the fridge to get really cold.
About a cup and a half of filling – I had a cup of very finely chopped Spanish jamon and a cup of shredded chard which, when cooked, reduced to half its volume
A tablespoon of plain flour
Salt and pepper
A beaten egg
Dried breadcrumbs for coating the croquettes
Oil for deep frying
A pair of latex gloves if you don´t want to get too mucky and a couple of tablespoons
Mix it all up
Start by mixing your filling into the béchamel and season to taste. Add the flour to bind together slightly.
Beat your egg in a shallow bowl and prepare another bowl with some breadcrumbs.
Take heaped spoonfuls of the mixture and shape either by hand or with the spoons into croquettes. I went for the traditional cylinder shape but this is really up to you. As soon as you start to work with the béchamel it will soften (hence my recommendation of using gloves!) but persevere as things will get easier once you get to the breadcrumb stage.
Roll your croquette in the beaten egg mixture. Using a spoon to lift it in and out and spoon the egg over seems to help here, then drop it into the breadcrumb mix. Roll it around and then put onto a plate.
When all your croquettes are ready, and I got eight pretty big ones from the above mixture, pop them back into the fridge for at least an hour or until you are ready to cook them.
Get your oil nice and hot, once it starts to smoke, turn it down a little and gently drop the croquettes in. They probably take less than a minute to cook – just enough time for the outside to turn a golden brown and the centre to warm up. Lift them out with a slotted spoon onto some greaseproof paper and then to a serving plate. You can make them in advance and then gently warm them up for a few minutes in the oven if you are not serving straight away.
Pour yourself a nice cold glass of white wine or dry Spanish sherry and imagine a hot Andalucían summer´s evening in a noisy tapas bar while you enjoy your Croquetas de Jamon!
My birthday falls at the end of January. A month of cold and damp here and after the excesses of Christmas, it feels like a time to shy away from more celebration. Especially when you´re suffering from bronchitis like I was. Big Man asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate my birthday and I told him I wanted to be like the Queen of England and celebrate on a second date, preferably when the weather was warmer. Anyway, last year he surpassed himself and surprised me with our rescue puppy, Luna, so I didn´t think a bottle of perfume or a box of chocolates was going to tick the boxes for me. Selfish moo that I am.
The local town hall often organises “cultural activities” for the village folk, not something I have ever been interested in. Probably a bit of smug self importance creeping in, thinking I´m already culturally aware enough already and mixed with a healthy dose of a severe fear of group activities of any kind. When Big Man surprised me (again!) on my birthday by telling me that we were going to join 35 other villagers on a three day trip to Tangier at the end of February, I wasn´t really sure what to think. It´s a destination I´ve always wanted to visit, but Big Man had always said it didn´t interest him, and we both hated anything that involved coaches and tour guides. I decided to keep an open mind about the whole thing, dose myself up with cough medicine and make Falafel to get us in the mood.
Here´s how we got into the Moroccan vibe and made six Falafel. Enough for 2 as a light lunch or 6 “tapas” sized servings:
1 tin (400g) or jar of cooked chick peas
2 spring onions
1 large clove of garlic
Salt
Half a teaspoon of ground cumin
Half a teaspoon of ground coriander
Large pinch of chili powder (optional) or a chopped fresh green chili
2 level tablespoons of flour plus extra for dusting.
Parsley (enough to chop down to about 2-3 tablespoons according to taste)
Oil to fill a frying pan to a depth of about 1cm (I used olive oil)
Serving Suggestion
Pitta or flat bread and chopped lettuce and mint, a squeeze of lemon juice (optional)
This is a dish which is very fast to prepare if you have a food processor. It took me longer to wash up than to whizz the ingredients. It can also be done by hand with a potato masher and a bit of fine chopping and mixing in a large bowl.
Put all of the ingredients apart from the oil and serving suggestions in a food processor and whizz them up for about 30 seconds then pulse until they reach the texture of grainy, wet cement. If it looks really sloppy add a little more flour but it will still be fairly wet when it´s ready. Add salt to your taste.
Put a couple of tablespoons of extra flour in a bowl and drop in a heaped tablespoon full of the chick pea mixture and using two spoons get it lightly covered in flour. If you can work quickly just drop this straight into your frying pan of hot oil, or if you prefer to work more slowly, prepare the falafel first and put them onto a plate, then heat the oil and drop them in.
Sizzle those Patties!
Make sure your oil is hot, let is start to smoke then turn the heat down slightly. You only want to get a nice crust to the outside, the chick peas are already cooked. Flatten the balls of mixture down as you put them into the pan and after about a minute flip them over (but make sure they´re nice and browned first).
The second side will take slightly less time, so just check on them, take them out and place onto kitchen paper to blot the excess oil and you´re ready to serve. They´re great with a squeeze of lemon juice then stuffed into pitta bread with some finely chopped lettuce and mint and a spoon full of natural yogurt mixed with an equal quantity of mayonnaise. I´m not sure how authentic that is – but it´s delicious!
So, the damp weather was looking like it was going to continue, and my yearning for comfort food followed the same pattern. I love casseroles and braised dishes with lots of sauce to be slurped up with a spoon or soaked up with bread or creamy mashed potato. It was time to make something warm and comforting. A hug in a casserole dish.
Hearty Winter Food
Oxtail used to be, I understand, a cheap and cheerful cut of meat to buy. It needs long and slow cooking, so this probably influenced the price. It now seems, from my recent visits to the UK, to be a bit of a “gastro pub” highlight and the price has correspondingly increased. Even in Spain, where it´s sold as “Bull´s Tail” it´s no longer that cheap a cut of meat to buy. But hey, sometimes you´re worth that little bit extra and it´s that delicious, it´s worth all the love and long cooking it needs.
I made a large pot of this delicious casserole which gave me 2-3 main portions plus enough meaty sauce left over to give me a further 2 hearty bowls of oxtail flavoured soup.
Here´s what you need:
1 ox tail, cut into slices. Your butcher should do this, or it will come ready prepared. Mine weighed about 1.2kg
3 medium carrots, diced
1 medium onion, diced
2 medium courgettes, diced
2 sticks of celery, diced
3 fat cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 jar or tin of cannellini beans
1 tin of tomatoes, crushed or chopped
2 heaped teaspoons of tomato puree
1 bottle of red wine, less a glass for the cook
1 mug of water or stock (beef, chicken or vegetable)
Salt and pepper
Approx 2 tablespoons of plain flour
2-3 tablespoons of olive oil
A large, deep, ovenproof dish with a lid
Take One Ox Tail...
Chop. Chop
First prepare all your vegetables and put them to one side. No need to keep them separate as they´ll be cooked together.
Now coat your pieces of ox tail in flour and after heating the olive oil in the ovenproof dish, brown them on all sides. Don´t rush this part as, if you over crowd the pan, the meat will steam and not brown. Put the ox tail to one side.
Start to brown...
In the same pan, and with the oil that remains, add the diced vegetables and make sure they all get coated in oil. Put the lid on and let them sweat for about 5 minutes.
Turn your oven on low (about gas mark 2).
Put the meat back into the pot, add the beans, tomatoes and tomato puree, stir and bring it up to a simmer.
Bring to a simmer
Now add the wine and water, season lightly (you can adjust this when the dish has finished cooking) and bring it to a simmer once more.
Put a lid on the pot, and the whole thing now goes into the oven where it will cook slowly for at least 4 hours. I like the sauce to thicken a little so it usually ends up cooking for 5-6 hours. It won´t dry out, you have plenty of liquid in there. Every couple of hours check on it and give it a stir. If it does look like it´s getting too dry for your taste, add a mug of boiling water.
When the cooking time is up (and it´s a very forgiving dish), take it out and check for seasoning. If it´s too liquid, simmer on the hob to reduce a little. You can eat it immediately if you wish, but it´s a dish which really does improve if left until the next day. Leave to cool completely. If you find your have a layer of fat on the top the next day, you can remove this before heating up and serving.
It looks like a lot of meat, but it´s nearly all bone. How many it serves depends on how hungry you are and how much sauce, vegetables and potatoes you serve it with. Any leftover sauce and can be diluted slightly with stock or water and served as a filling soup another day.
We´ve had some amazing mild, sunny February weather, but yesterday things changed and the rains came down. The temperature dropped and made me yearn for warming soups. I had bought a couple of kilos of red onions from a lady in the market a few days previously. They were probably home grown as she had a wheelbarrow full of them and nothing more. The onions were eye wateringly strong, as I had found out when I used some in a salad, so I thought that perhaps they would have a gentler flavour if cooked slowly in a chutney or soup.
Memories of a romantic week in Paris with Big Man reminded me of French Onion Soup. I went to the top of the Eiffel Tower for him, despite a severe dislike for heights. After returning to ground level, pale, shaking and cold, we found a little bistro where we warmed ourselves up with Onion Soup and a bottle of red wine shared on one of those tiny Parisian Bistro tables which lend themselves to knees and hands touching over a romantic meal.
If you fancy a bowl of cockle warming Onion Soup, with or without the Gallic Romance, open yourself a bottle of white wine, pour yourself a glass and get ready to chop and cry. For two, you´ll need:
Half a kilo (or more if you don´t mind chopping them) of onions, finely sliced. French if you have them, but otherwise any nationality of onion – it doesn´t even need a French accent
Two tablespoons of olive oil
A thick slice of butter
A level teaspoon of sugar
Two heaped teaspoons of plain flour
750mlof beef stock or chicken stock with a teaspoon of marmite or Bovril (or you can use stock made with a beef stock cube)
A glass of dry white wine
Salt and pepper
A slug of brandy (optional)
It´s not a difficult dish to make. It´s cheap too, but needs a bit of patience. No rushing this one I´m afraid!
Cry Me A River...
First you´ll thinly slice those onions, then you´ll blow your nose, wipe your eyes and melt the butter with the oil in a large frying pan. Add the onions, mix them around to coat them and turn the heat down to low. These will now cook very gently until they start to caramelize but still remain soft.
This can take at least half an hour, sometimes double that. It just depends on the time of year and how much water the onions have. Stir them with a wooden spoon from time to time and when they start to turn brown, sprinkle the sugar on top and keep cooking until they are dark brown. This can take another 10-20 minutes.
Starting to carameliseAdd flour and wine
Now sprinkle over the flour and cook gently while stirring for a minute.
At this point you can add your wine and then your beef stock (if you have it, but it´s very hard to buy good beef, let alone find beef bones to make stock in Southern Spain). I use chicken stock (if I have some made) otherwise water and a stock cube and I add a good teaspoon of marmite to give it a beefy taste. I know it´s salty, but you haven´t seasoned yet, and depending on how much salt you like to use, you can leave this part of the seasoning out at the end.
Add stock and simmer
Today I used homemade chicken stock, and because our chickens are corn fed, my stock is very golden in colour. This means that unless I add loads of marmite to darken it, it won´t be as dark as it usually turns out. Too much marmite makes it super salty, so I live with golden coloured soup sometimes!
Simmer gently for about 15 minutes and you´re almost ready to serve. Taste to check and add salt and pepper if you like. If it´s a touch sweet from the caramelized onions, I find a sprinkle of salt and a slug extra of white wine usually balances the taste out.
If you like you can serve with little rounds of melted cheese on toast at the bottom of the soup bowl, or floated on the top, but what really gives it that extra warming hit is a small hit of brandy poured in just as you serve. Bon Appétit!
Just as I finished making my soup, the sun broke through the clouds and rain, and I had a beautiful rainbow to look at and brighten my day. Lucky me, Onion Soup and a Rainbow – life can be full of the most unexpectedly lovely moments.
A beautiful sunny, Sunday morning. All the more surprising because it´s the penultimate day of January. But just warm enough to brew a pot of coffee while I feed the dogs and get myself a little breakfast sorted out before Big Man and I head off for a walk. It´s been dry for two days with rain before that. Perfect weather for heading up the mountain and looking for wild asparagus. I have to confess I´m not the biggest fan of these beautiful fronds. Although I love strong flavours, they´re just too bitter for me. But Big Man loves a little tortilla made from these for a light supper and I enjoy a simple poached egg on toast – so everyone is happy and minimal cooking for those evenings when you just don´t fancy spending time at the stove.
I do enjoy my breakfast. I don´t go all faint and feeble if I miss out on it, but my favourite quick and easy breakfast here in Spain is fresh bread, drizzled with olive oil (from our olives if I´m lucky) with crushed fresh tomato and seasoned with sea salt and a good grind of pepper. All you need to do with the tomato is blitz a ripe tomato with the hand blender – remove the skin or not, your choice and that´s it. It´s usually tastier in summer when the tomatoes have more flavour, but if I come across a gorgeous specimen outside of the warmer months, it´s earmarked for my breakfast. If the bread is a little stale, it´s toasted lightly on my griddle pan. If I fancy some spice, it´s sprinkled with little fresh or dried chili at the end (not so Spanish), and if I´m extra hungry a few slices of jamon are added. But the truth is, the simpler the better.
That´s not to say I don´t enjoy a Full English, or a Bacon Buttie when the mood strikes. Come to think of it, a bowl of porridge in winter always goes down well too.
It´s a grey old Saturday in January here, with no particular plans for the day. I hear a loud “toot, toot” outside and my heart lifts. Fish Man is here. Although we live in an isolated part of the mountains, we´re not entirely cut off. In fact, food-wise we could probably survive without ever going shopping. We have our chickens and the vegetable garden of course. We have goatherds who sell us a goat for the freezer, or a lamb too come to think of it. Bread Man stops daily and leaves me a lovely crusty loaf, the grocery man comes at the weekend with all sorts of exciting things, even the man with gas cylinders stops at my door. But two or three times a week we have the excitement of Fish Man.
The downside is that we´re pretty much the last stop on his route, so he often doesn´t get to us until about 1pm. Sometimes he´s sold out of most things, but if I ask him for something specific, he saves it for me. Usually that´s Pulpo (Octopus) or Raya (Skate) which we love. The upside is that he´s usually keen to get back to Malaga, where he lives, for his own lunch, so prices come down so that he can shift the last few things, or he throws in a few goodies for free. He gets up early and heads off to Malaga fish market then sets off up the mountains to the villages around where we live.
Weekends in Spain are not about the weekend roast but about Paella, which we all know and love. In Andalucia, they just call it an Arroz, a “rice” which is just like Paella but often served with more stock. A soupy Paella, if you like. Otherwise it´s a Fideua, which is exactly the same but made with short, thick noodles, called Fideos. This morning I bought half a kilo of small prawns and eight medium sized squid. I grabbed a small packet of mussels (removed from the shell and frozen) from my freezer and a couple of small fillets of hake which were also in the freezer. Because it´s a bit of a trek to the supermarket, and of course there are things that can´t be bought our of the back of a passing van, I tend to keep my freezer pretty well stocked with things I can grab in the morning and defrost quickly.
I asked Big Man what he fancied – Paella, Fideua, Seafood Soup, Stew? A stew, it was decided, so I started to get things ready. What you need for four people with “normal” appetites, or three “greedy guts”, or two “greedy guts” with enough leftover to turn into a soup that evening with a drop more stock, is:
About 2 cups of peeled prawns (keep those shells, we´re going to make stock)
About 500 grams of cleaned squid cut into chunks
A cup of mussel meat
A medium fillet of white fish, cut into chunks
Half a red pepper, finely diced
A stick of celery, finely diced
Half and medium onion, finely diced
A third of a courgette, finely diced (optional)
Three fat cloves of garlic, crushed
Half a tin of chopped tomatoes
About a litre of fish stock. Either cover the prawn shells with water, add a few bat leaves, a chunk of onion and boil for about 8 minutes or use a cube
You can use any fish or shellfish you like really, and if you don´t have a lot of fish, you can thicken the stew up with a few noodles, or serve it as a soup with plenty of stock. Otherwise you could use rice and turn it into a paella – it´s up to you!
So, you start by sweating the peppers, onion, celery, garlic and courgette. Again, if you have other vegetables you want to use, feel free. Peas or broad beans are good, but best thrown in at the end with the fish as they don´t need much cooking.
Beautifully Chopped!
Add your tomatoes and continue cooking gently for a few minutes. I usually cook this in my favourite pan – a large, deep, non stick frying pan.
Now add your stock. It will look rather dull and unappetizing at this point, rather like watery tomato soup. Fear not. Now you´re going to boil it, but not too fiercely, for about ten minutes and reduce it by about a third. Pour yourself a glass of wine if you don´t already have one in your hand. If not, why not? If you want to serve this for guests, prepare it to this point, even the day before (but keep it in the fridge) and forget about it.
...with tomatoes...with stock
When you´re ready to eat, heat the stock to a simmer and put all your fish in. Start with the squid as it will take about 30 seconds longer than the rest. Simmer gently for about 3-4 minutes and then serve.
If you think it´s not going to be enough to go round, or you fancy something a little more “robust” add your noodles before the fish and when it is almost cooked through, add the fish. About a mug full would be good for this quantity leaving you with some soup and some thickness to the finished dish. The temperature has dropped here, and we´ve lit the fire, so we´re going with some Fideos today for a more filling meal.
If you want to make a paella (although the courgette is not very traditional, but hey, it´s your dish, you can do what you like with it), add the rice before the fish and cook for about 20 minutes. A mug and half would be good – you want it drier than the soup, but keep an eye on it and add a little boiling water if it looks like it might dry out before the rice is cooked. Add the seafood, stir, lower the heat and cover with a lid and leave to simmer for 3-4 minutes. Turn the heat off and then leave to “rest” for about 5 minutes.
Action Photo!
Serve in large, deep bowls with plenty of fresh lemon to squeeze over and a sprinkle of chopped parsley. Crusty bread and a salad are all that you need to go with this. Delicious. The Mediterranean in a bowl.
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 