So, Sunday 1st July, and it´s been a pretty Perfect Day here Up the Mountain.
(I´m just enjoying the song for the music, not looking into the deeper meaning here)!
We packed up the car with dogs, chairs and a picnic and headed down to a shady picnic area near a local lake. Of course, there was Jamon y Queso (ham and cheese).
No Spanish picnic would be complete without tortilla, and we also had some fried, salted peppers (although they were sweet today, not spicy).
Chicken is a great healer, so they say, especially chicken soup. Well, I made soup last week for the sick girl, but fortunately she was at that point of recovery where she was wanting to move on from invalid food and, as we joked, to using a knife and fork!
In London it´s easy to get wonderful vegetables year round and I was inspired by a beautiful little butternut squash that was in the veggie basket. As with most of my dishes, this is simple to put together, then you forget about it for a while, then you eat it and the next day you make another delicious soup. Well, I fancied it, it was raining.
Ingredients for 2 people
4 chicken thighs
1 large onion cut into about 8 chunks
1 small head of garlic (all the cloves peeled)
1 small squash, cut into about 10 large chunks (washed but not peeled)
4 medium carrots, peeled and cut into quarters lengthways
4 medium potatoes, washed and cut into 8 pieces each
Olive oil
Sea Salt and freshly ground black pepper
A sprig of lemon thyme (or use ordinary) and a sprig of rosemary
Half a teaspoon each of dried cumin and hot chili powder (or use sweet)
A small glass of white wine (or water or stock)
Put all the ingredients into an oven tray, pour over a little olive oil and season then sprinkle over the cumin and chili. Mix it all up to ensure everything is covered with oil and seasoning then pour over the wine/stock and tuck in the herbs.
Cover with foil and cook on a medium heat for about an hour and a quarter. Remove the foil, check that the chicken is cooked through (if not leave for a little longer) then turn the oven up to high and cook for a further 15 minutes until the chicken skin is crispy and the vegetables start to turn brown at the edges. Serve and enjoy!
The next day I peeled what was left of the pumpkin and potatoes, put it all into a pot, added a little more cumin and chilli then covered with water. I bought the dish to a boil and then simmered for about 15 minutes. Then I blended with a stick blender and added about a cup of milk to thin it slightly then warmed through and served.
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!
Now that the heat seems to have arrived (and looks to stay), we make the shift to summer food. Fast cooking, not so much time spent in the kitchen, and a lot of cooking on the barbecue…as long as we can find a shady spot for it.
Couscous ticks a lot of the boxes as it´s so quick and easy to prepare, and provides a blank canvas to work with. I´m sure many of you have your favourite ways of preparing it, and I´d love to hear what they are. Here are a couple of ways I´ve served it recently. Both versions serve 4 as a side dish and were made with 1 cup of cous cous prepared according to the packet instructions and served chilled.
Couscous with Mushrooms and Courgettes
1 medium onion, 1 cup mushrooms and 1 medium courgette all finely chopped and sautéed until soft.
Mix with the cous cous, season and dress with olive oil, lemon juice and some finely chopped parsley.
Couscous with “Gazpacho”
Inspired by our summer favourite, I mixed the cous cous with finely chopped red onion, tomato, cucumber, green pepper and mint and dressed it (after seasoning) with olive oil, white wine vinegar and some finely chopped mint.
I am truly blessed when it comes to friends. I have some extra special best girlfriends who have been there for me through the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, the youth and the wrinkles. Ria and I met at school, a wonderful convent in South London, and have been best friends ever since.
We laughed through our school days, she sent me stamps to write to her when I went to University as I was poor and she was earning. She also gave me a sewing box as a going away gift and still, to this day, gets me to adjust her clothes and sew on buttons. We even worked at the same company for a few years and mopped up the tears through tough endings to relationships in later years.
She invited me to a weekend with friends in Scotland without telling me we would be walking part of the West Highland Way. She knew I would have refused, but we had fun and I forgave her, eventually. Then I told her she was doing a run to raise money for Charity and she didn´t complain once.
Hot, sweaty but very happy with what we achieved!
We know and love each other´s families like our own, and also know our way around each other´s kitchens. Very important indeed.
When we both hit 40 within a month of each other (not soooo long ago), we threw a massive party then went off on a Round the World Trip. I have a lovely photo of us on our last day before we headed back to London. It was taken in Hong Kong on the Kowloon ferry. We don´t look glamorous, or made up. In fact we look exhausted, a little chilly, but happy. We had spent about 3 months in each other´s company 24/7 and not a cross word or row, just fun, laughter and quite a few adventures.
I moved to Spain permanently six years ago, and we had to find a new way to make things work across the miles. E-mails, phone calls and of course, visits.
So, when your best buddy comes to visit you don´t want to spend too much time in the kitchen as there is talking, laughing, dog walking and wine drinking to be done.
We barbecued squid which we enjoyed in the sunshine.
We ate what we jokingly called a “deconstructed chicken salad sharing platter for friends” – cold cooked chicken, spiced cauliflower, a platter full of delicious vegetables and topped with blanched then grilled asparagus with a lemon dressing and mayonnaise. Perfect for sharing.
And of course, my best friend knows how much I adore curry, so several happy hours were spent in the kitchen cooking up a storm, or the “Cortijo Curry” as we called it. Goat curry, tarka dhal, spinach and tomato curry, poppadums and roti.
I´ll share the recipes with you soon, but now I´m tired, happy and sad, and rather full up, so I´ll leave you with a photo of the perfect dessert for friends who don´t have time to make dessert.
So, regular readers of this blog (and I thank you!) will know that here in Andalucía we tend not to waste much when it comes to food. All the unsual bits get used from the meat we eat, and even our broad beans shells, when they´re young and tender, get used in tortillas, scrambled eggs and cooked with jamon.
Another Andalucían dish using broad beans is called Cazulea de Habas which translates as a broad bean stew. As ever, I asked around for recipes and this time I tended to get pretty much the same replies from everyone. An exceedingly simple and humble dish. Well, a little dull if I´m being truly honest, but that is just my opinion. I asked Big Man if he was sure he wanted me to make it, as it had been his idea in the first place. Well, he said, maybe you can give it a little Chica Andaluza touch to make it more exciting. So I did.
It´s still a simple and humble dish, but with some nice flavours going on and more filling than its ancestor. I also have some suggestions for making it your own, so here goes.
Ingredients to serve 4
500g of thinly sliced tender broad bean shells (save the beautiful beans for something more glamorous)
One medium potato per person, peeled and cut into rough 2cm chunks (this is not included in the original recipe)
One medium onion finely chopped
A large spring of fresh mint and a bay leaf
Water
Pinch of saffron or half a teaspoon of turmeric (here they use colouring…eek!)
½ teaspoon of sweet pimentón
½ teaspoon of hot pimentón (optional, not in the original recipe, but I used it)
3 fat cloves of garlic peeled and halved lengthways
About 10 peeled, raw almonds
A large slice of day old bread (something like sourdough or ciabatta)
Olive oil for shallow frying
Seasoning
Put the bean shells, onion, mint and bay leaf in a pot and cover well with water. Boil until the shells are really tender (this can take about 30 minutes, so be patient). About 20 minutes into the cooking add the potato. Meanwhile fry the garlic and almonds until browned, put into a blender jug. Now fry the slice of bread on both sides until browned and also add to the blender jug. Add the saffron and pimentón and a large ladleful of the cooking water from the beans. Blend (I use a stick blender) until you have a smooth sauce. Add to the beans and season. I found it needed quite a lot of salt.
Now, you´re done! However, you could serve it with a softly poached egg on top or some pieces of grilled chorizo or morcilla (blood pudding), although it will obviously no longer be a vegetarian dish.
It´s a simple dish, but a lovely starter using seasonal vegetables or with a few additions could be a hearty main dish for two.
Big Man approved the changes, and we agreed that the Chica Andaluza version was much more tasty than the original!
The gorgeous dish of Spanakopita hails from beautiful Greece. A delicious spinach pie, filled with feta cheese and egg and then wrapped in filo pastry – it´s a wonderful combination of flavours.
The weather here has turned overnight into summer with temperatures in the early 30s. Although we have used our gas barbecue on and off throughout the winter, we haven´t eaten outside. The weather now is perfect and we are going to make the most of it to eat in the garden, before the tremendous heat of summer drives us back inside to eat in the cool of the house.
I had bought a large salmon fillet (half of a whole salmon) which weighed about 1.5kg to cook for friends. The best laid plans and all that…well, the lunch didn´t happen and I had a massive piece of salmon to cook for two people.
The first lunch we simply cooked the whole thing on the barbecue, sprinkled with salt and served it with lemon juice and home made mayonnaise. We ate about a third of it so I divided the remaining piece into two and froze one piece. In this dish I used about 250g of cooked salmon so still have plenty left over to make a rice dish with prawns and salmon tomorrow.
I fancied making something different from fish cakes and remembered this lovely dish from Greece and set about recreating it, albeit with a few Up the Mountain twists. Or Making Do with what I had available. I realise that the traditional dish doesn´t contain meat or fish, but this is an interpretation rather than a faithful reproduction!
Ingredients (to serve 4 as a main course or 6 as a starter)
Please note, the ingredients are approximate, so feel free to add a little more or take a little away it it suits
One pack of puff pastry (275g) rolled out thinly (or use filo if you have it)
180g of feta (I used fresh goat´s cheese made by a neighbour). Do check out Chgo John´s amazing method to make feta here.
About 250g cooked salmon, flaked
225g Greek yogurt
3 spring onions finely chopped (I used 1 small onion finely chopped)
125g fresh spinach finely chopped and wilted (I put mine in a large metal colander and pour boiling water over it) with all the water squeezed out
2 large eggs
½ cup each of finely chopped dill (I used wild fennel tops which grow round here) and parsley
Seasoning
Heat the oven to 180ºC. Place the pastry on a flat baking tray which has been lined with greaseproof paper (or use a small one about half the size of your pastry which is a little deeper).
Mix all the ingredients together and season (you may not need much salt if you use feta). Put the filling into the middle of the pastry and bring the pastry up and over to cover it, neatening the corners to seal the filling in. Use some water on the edges if necessary to help seal them.
Tastes great even if you didn´t seal the top up properly….
Brush with milk or beaten egg and bake for about 45 minutes until golden brown. Leave to cool slightly before eating. Perfect with a salad and a cool glass of wine.
Any ideas for that last piece of cooked salmon in my freezer? Go on, inspire me!
This recipe of sautéed (or stir fried as very little oil is used) vegetables is fantastic as it can be used as a vegetable dish, a starter, or served with fried or poached eggs as a light lunch or supper. Add jamon or bacon for non vegetarians (as I did) and it becomes more filling or stir it into scrambled eggs. See? Lots of options!
Ingredients
About 24 thin spears of asparagus, finely chopped (reserve spears)
½ cup of broad beans (no need to skin)
2 or 3 large oyster mushrooms cut into thin strips
About 6-8 mushrooms and stalks finely sliced
2 cloves of crushed garlic
4 slices of jamon or bacon finely chopped (optional)
Olive oil
Start by simmering the asparagus (not the tips) and broad beans for 3-4 minutes in boiling water. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and then cook the tips of the spears for a minute or two until tender, reserving them separately. The stock is good for using as a soup base or for cooking rice.
In a frying pan warm a little oil and gently cook the garlic until it is soft but not brown. Add the mushrooms and stir to coat in oil then cover and cook gently until the mushrooms are soft and giving off a little liquid.
Add the asparagus tips and broad beans, stir and cover and cook for a further 5 minutes. If you like your vegetables very tender, add half a cup of water and cook until it has evaporated. If using bacon or jamon, add, turn the heat up and fry until slightly crispy. Stir in the asparagus tips, season and serve.
Fried for Big Man…I prefer poached…
This would also be lovely used in a risotto or stirred into pasta….or add cream and mix with gnocchi.
Spanish rice is a little different from Italian risotto rice. Like risotto rice it is generally cooked in a large amount of flavoured stock (for example in a paella) but the grains stay separate rather than turning creamy. However, use whatever you have, it will still be a wonderfully delicious dish.
To keep it vegetarian, use water or the stock from cooking the vegetables, otherwise chicken stock will add extra flavour.
And before the recipe, a little word about how we eat our broad beans around here. In the photo you will see about 1 ½ kilos of beans from our veggie patch. Many people here simply top and tail them and then chop them into chunks. Almost nothing is wasted, the pods are eaten too unless they are especially tough. The pods which give the biggest beans are more mature, and are less digestible.
It seems sad to me to throw so much away (although our chickens would be glad of such a sweet and tasty treat). I pod my beans and then finely chop the outer shells which I braise until tender and then add the beans to the dish at a later stage. Sometimes I simmer the beans for a few minutes and then pop them out of their skins, but this is a rare extravagance, although it does add amazing colour.
So, the choice is yours…single pod, double pod or use the shells and beans together…it´s up to you!
Ingredients – For two hungry people as a main course or four as a starter
1 cup of Spanish Paella Rice (or rice of your choice)
About 5-6 cups of water, vegetable stock or chicken stock
The braised pods from about 750 grams of broad beans (weight before preparing)
The blanched beans from the pods (save the cooking water if you want to keep this vegetarian)
About 150g asparagus cut into 1cm pieces. Reserve the tips, blanch them, drain and set aside
About 6 mushrooms thinly sliced (optional)
2 fat cloves of garlic, crushed
1 bay leaf
Seasoning
Olive oil for frying
Put a few tablespoons of oil in a deep pan or pot and add the garlic, bay leaf, bean pods (if using) and asparagus stalks and fry gently until the garlic is soft. Add the rice and coat it in oil for a minute or two then add 3 cups of the stock.
Bring to the boil and cook on a medium heat until the rice starts to absorb the liquid. Add the rest of the liquid and when the rice is almost cooked add the broad beans and mushrooms. Simmer until the mushrooms are tender, season, discard the bay leaf, cover and remove from the heat. The rice needs to rest for 3-5 minutes. If during the cooking period the rice gets too dry, just add a little more liquid. Typically Arroz Caldoso (which translates as rice with broth) is served more liquid than a paella or risotto and eaten with a spoon – but you decide how you like it.
Finally, stir in the asparagus tips and serve with some fresh lemon to squeeze over.
We ate ours with the leftover pork belly which I cut into slices and dry fried to remove the fat, to heat it through and to allow it to crisp up.
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!
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 