A Spanish Culinary Consolation

I should have been in Spain today.

For months, Tom and I had planned to spend this week in Madrid. Then came the government shutdown. Overstressed air traffic controllers (those who hadn’t called in sick) were working double shifts. TSA screening lines were lengthening. Airplane maintenance crews weren’t working. Flights were being delayed, rerouted, cancelled. Though the shutdown ended (for now), its consequences were still looming. With the addition of potential threats from this winter’s polar vortex, it just seemed that too many things could go wrong with this trip. We’d go to Spain another time.

So here I was at home, thinking of the wonderful Spanish food I’m missing. What else could I do but put together a fine dinner from my Spanish cookbooks as a consolation prize?

For the centerpiece of my dinner menu I chose Lomito de cordero relleno de hongos: a roasted rack of lamb stuffed with mushrooms and scallions, from Penelope Casas’s La Cocina de Mama. The book’s picture of the dish was enticing:

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Happily, I had a small lamb rack in the freezer, just the right size to serve two. When it was defrosted, Tom carefully cut slits in the meat so that when the chops were cut apart each would have a layer of stuffing in the middle.
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He also minced ¾ cup of mushrooms and ¼ cup of scallions for me for the stuffing. I sauteed them in olive oil until the mushrooms were softened; salted and peppered them; poured on 2 tablespoons of Madeira, and cooked until it evaporated. (The recipe actually wanted a sweet sherry, but I had an open bottle of Madeira, which was close enough.)

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I stuffed that filling into the slits in the lamb rack, put it in an oiled baking pan, sprinkled on salt, pepper, and dried thyme, and drizzled olive oil over the meat.
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Meanwhile I was also making two easy vegetable dishes to accompany the meat. These were zarrangolo murciano – zucchini stewed with onion – a recipe from Teresa Barrenechea’s book The Cuisines of Spain, and patatas pobres – poor man’s potatoes – from Penelope Casas’s first cookbook, The Foods and Wines of Spain.

The zucchini dish needed two saute pans: one for slowly softening minced onions and garlic in olive oil, the other for cooking diced zucchini, also in olive oil, until it had rendered up its liquid. That done, the recipe called for draining the zucchini, transferring it to the onion pan, salting, peppering, and cooking everything together for just five minutes. The separate cooking allowed each vegetable to retain its own character, while the final mixing just gently blended the flavors.

The potatoes, sliced very thin, also simmered in olive oil, in a covered pan, being turned often enough to keep them from caking together. I turned up the flame at the end to brown them lightly, then tossed them with minced garlic and parsley. (But I forgot to photograph them: my bad.)

Now back to the lamb. After the stuffed rack had 15 minutes in a 400° oven, I poured a little white wine and lemon juice into the pan and roasted for 10 more minutes. That was all the cooking it needed. I was pleased to see that it came out looking not totally unlike the book’s picture.
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The chops and their stuffing were heavenly together, in both aroma and taste. The meat was still rare enough to please two serious carnivores, and the two vegetables made good flavor contributions, with a lightly sweet allium presence knitting the components together. This combination of recipes made a harmonious plate, hearty and satisfying, but with elegance and complexity.
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Tom gave us a very good Spanish wine from his wine closet – a 12-year-old Prado Enea grand reserve Rioja from Muga – to drink with the meal. It made an excellent companion to the lamb, being elegant and complex in itself, even though El Exigente would have wished it ten years older.

Finally, to complete our consolation-for-Spain meal, after coffee and clean-up we poured snifters of 1866 Gran Reserva Brandy. We discovered this wonderfully intense, aromatic after-dinner drink on a trip to Spain four years ago and brought back a bottle, which we’ve been doling out for special occasions ever since. It isn’t sold in the USA, and the shipping cost from Spain is prohibitive. We’d been counting on buying at least two more bottles in Madrid this week. Alas, it wasn’t to be. One more reason to reschedule that trip!
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Sweet-and-Sour Marinated Onions

It’s being a good year for many local summer vegetables: tomatoes, corn, peppers, and onions. The small early-season onions at my greenmarket were especially mild, moist, and sweet. As they grew bigger, they lost some of that fresh youthful charm, and by now the onions being sold are mostly “cured,” having the paper-thin dry skins of year-round store onions. But one greenmarket stand is still offering nearly fresh small ones.

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My original intention for the box I bought this week was to make a batch of the Italian sweet-and-sour preparation cipolline in agrodolce. But as I browsed recipes ranging from very simple to quite elaborate, none caught my fancy. So I turned from my Italian cookbooks to my Spanish ones. In Penelope Casas’ Tapas I found a recipe called cebollas in adobo, which instantly appealed. Its slightly sweet marinade was unlike any adobo I’d seen before and looked to be very tasty.

Tiny onions are often the devil to peel, but the ones I took to make up the recipe’s ½ pound behaved like angels. A brief dip in boiling water, removal of the root and stem tips, and the delicate skins slid right off, smoothly and evenly.
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To start the cooked marinade I needed small amounts of chopped tomato, onion, garlic, and parsley, plus a bay leaf, some basil, and dried thyme.
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After a brief sauté of the onion, garlic, and tomato, I added the herbs, salt, pepper, and a little water, covered the pan, and simmered for 20 minutes.
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Then I put the onions in a small saucepan with the tomato mixture, 1½ tablespoons of olive oil, ¼ cup of my own red wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons of raisins, 1 tablespoon of sugar, a little more thyme, basil, salt, and pepper, and another ½ cup of water.
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All this was to simmer, uncovered, for 45 minutes. By then, my kitchen was scented with the zesty marinade reduction, but my onions still weren’t quite fully tender. They took another 15 minutes of gentle tending, along with a tad more water to keep the sauce from scorching.
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They looked very tempting, just as they were, but the recipe said to cool and refrigerate them, so I didn’t even sneak a taste. Besides, the recipe also said they’d go well with any other sauceless tapa, so I needed time to prepare a companion for them.

From a recipe in the same Casas book I made a tortilla of potato, chorizo, ham, and peas.
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This was also to be served at room temperature, so it was evening when we finally sat to the two tapas.
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It was a good combination, as well balanced as were the flavors of the onion dish itself. That was neither strikingly sweet nor strongly sour, but a pleasing blend of flavors, the lightly enhanced sweetness of the onions counterpointed by the acidity of vinegar and tomato. The tortilla was also very tasty, with its own counterpoint of smoky ham and chorizo poised against the sweet young peas and egg, and with a texture just firm enough to welcome a little moistening with the onions’ excellent adobo. Both tapas went very well with a bottle of 2011 Consejo de la Alta Rioja, highlighting the affinity a region’s dishes always show for the kind of wines they grew up with.

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Caramelized Torrijas

All of three years ago, on my return from a trip to Spain, a post that I wrote here about many of the foods I enjoyed there mentioned a dessert called a torrija. Entirely new to me, it seemed to be a sort of structured-chunk-of-bread pudding with a crunchy crème brûlée topping – quite delicious. Here’s the picture I took of it:

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Eager to try making it at home, I began looking for recipes. There were two in my Spanish cookbooks, and I found others on the internet, but they were all essentially French toast: bread slices dipped in a thin custard, some also in beaten egg, and fried to thorough brownness in oil or butter. It was clear from my photo that the one I had in Spain hadn’t been done that way.

The soft white sides of that torrija made me think it couldn’t have been fried at all, so when I attempted to recreate the dish I baked it and ran it under the broiler with a brown sugar topping. Never mind the details; it didn’t work. I never got around to trying again.

But I couldn’t get that torrija out of my mind. Recently I had an idea about it: I searched for the name on Google Images. Among the hundreds of photos that came up, a few looked something like the one I had in Spain. Pursuing those to their sources, I learned that there are two kinds of torrijas. “Mine” was the kind called caramelezada, and it’s cooked in a way different from the French-toast type. Eureka!

But not so fast: the underlying recipes were all in Spanish. The little of that language that I know wasn’t enough to fully grasp the techniques, and Google’s translations were ludicrous. So I had to improvise somewhat. Here, by the way, is the recipe I relied on, to the extent that I could, for my experiment.

Making just a fraction of the recipe’s quantities, I stirred together milk, heavy cream, beaten egg and sugar. I put two thick slabs of my own white bread into this uncooked batter and left them to absorb it, which turned out not to be as simple as it sounds.

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The recipe said they’d need 45 minutes on each side. That seemed like a lot, but fortunately I’d started early enough in the day, because it did take that long, even with occasional pour-overs to expedite the process.

Then came the actual cooking. This was where the Spanish instructions weren’t clear to me. Here’s exactly how Google translated the final words of the recipe:

We go with the marking of the French toast. We light the pan with butter. We pour plenty of sugar on the top and put them in the pan for a while until the sugar is roasted (but be careful not to burn). We do the same for the other side and put them on the plates.

Was I supposed to put the sugar on top of the butter, which was just referred to, or on “them,” the breads? How much sugar is “plenty”? It would also have helped to know how high a heat to use and how long it might take for the sugar to “roast.” ¿Quién sabe?

First I tried putting the sugar in the pan and laying the bread slice on top of the sugar.

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The butter bubbled along merrily, but when I tilted up the bread to see how it was browning, I couldn’t see any effect from the sugar. So just before turning the bread, I put some sugar on top of it.
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The butter was getting pretty dark, and I worried that it, not the sugar, might burn. When the first chunk of bread was well browned, I took it out of the pan. No sugar had caramelized on it, but it was clearly cooked enough. For the second chunk, I added more fresh butter and put sugar both in the pan and on each side of the bread.
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I got basically the same result: The sugar just dissolved, and the bread simply browned in the sweetened butter. I gave up and called them done.
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They weren’t a disaster. Their texture and flavor were very like the torrija I had in Spain. But I’m really sorry I couldn’t get the crunchy topping. Not just for the pleasant mouthfeel: Caramelizing sugar cuts some of its sweetness, and the amounts of sugar each torrija absorbed in my futile attempts to caramelize it gave it a far more intense sweetness than I’d have liked.
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A little blowtorch would probably have done the job, but I don’t own one. Beloved Spouse is voting for a few minutes under the broiler, but that didn’t work when I made my first torrija try. If anyone who reads this post has had success with torrijas caramelezadas, I’d be grateful for any tips you’d care to provide. In English, please: My Spanish is clearly inadequate for this dish.

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Two Octopus Tapas

Octopus, which used to be a culinary curiosity in this country, is increasingly coming into the mainstream of locally available seafood. Three different fish stores within half a mile of my home now carry it regularly, both raw and cooked. I’ve had very good results from a few Spanish and Italian octopus recipes and am always interested in new ones. The two latest ones I’ve made are from Tapas: The Little Dishes of Spain, by Penelope Casas.

My copy is an attractive large paperback, with more than 300 recipes. Those I’d tried had all been successful, so when I came across two for octopus tapas that I hadn’t much noticed before, I read them with interest. Both have you start by simply boiling the octopus, so for the sake of convenience I bought a pound of cooked tentacles – enough for half recipes of each tapa.
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The first dish I made was Pulpo con Patatas, Octopus with Red Peppers and Potatoes. The full recipe is said to serve four, but I could see that even the half would be plenty for a main dish for the two of us. Along with the cut-up octopus, it calls for chopped onion, cubed potatoes, Spanish smoked paprika, skinned and chopped sweet red pepper, minced garlic, and bay leaf.
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Once Beloved Spouse had done all the knife work for me, the rest of the preparation was easy enough. Boil the potatoes until tender, drain them, and save some of the cooking water. In an ovenproof dish sauté the onion, pepper, and garlic in olive oil. Add the octopus and sauté for a minute or two. Stir in the paprika, bay leaf, potatoes, salt, and a little of the potato water.
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Bring the liquid to a boil and bake the dish, uncovered, in a moderate oven for 15 minutes. It came out of the oven looking much as it did going in, but the flavors had blended a bit and intensified each other, making a rich, filling combination.
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This was a good, satisfying dish, but I don’t see it as becoming a regular in my repertoire: Though billed as a tapa, it would have been very heavy as an appetizer; and as a main course it wasn’t quite as satisfying as a few other octopus dishes I’ve made – here and here.  For us, those are the upper echelon of octopus cookery.

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A few days later, I made the second tapa recipe, Pulpo a la Leonesa, Octopus Stewed in Onions. With my pre-cooked octopus, it was the essence of simplicity: aside from the eponymous octopus and onions, the only ingredients are olive oil, vinegar, wine, and salt.

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I softened the onions in the oil, covered the pan and cooked them gently until tender. I added one-inch pieces of octopus, salt, and tiny amounts of white wine and my own red wine vinegar; cooked it all gently, covered, for 15 minutes; and served with slices of crusty bread.
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This dish wasn’t quite as successful as the previous one. Mostly my fault, I think: The recipe strongly recommended using tiny octopi, which would have benefited more from the condiments than my larger chunks did. Also, there was a little too much sameness to each dense, rich mouthful. It would have shown better in an assortment of several tapas, with varying textures and flavors to contrast, than it did as our only appetizer. The onions were extremely tasty, though – we’d have liked more of them.

The next time I get an urge for octopus, I might buy the tiny ones, cook them myself, and try this dish again to see what difference they make. And I’ll probably increase the quantity of onions.

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Chicken in Chorizo and Red Wine Sauce

Last week I went a little crazy at Miloski’s, the Long Island poultry farm we love. We’d driven out east 75 miles just to buy chickens. The trip itself was not unusual; we make it a few times a year, because they’re the best chickens we’ve ever had, even compared to all the free-range kinds available in Manhattan. We often make a day of it, pushing further out on the North Fork and adding farmstand and/or winery visits, even a little birdwatching. But this time we went just for chickens – straight out and straight back.

What we came back with is 18 pounds of poultry: 2 whole chickens, 10 very large chicken legs, and 4 duck legs. Even for me that’s excessive, but somehow they all called out to me. So now our freezer is full of fowl, and I’ve started happily working my way through it. Most recently I took out two of the big chicken legs and made Pollo al Vino Tinto, from Penelope Casas’s The Foods and Wines of Spain. I’ve made the recipe before and like it very much. Even Beloved Spouse – the irredeemable non-chicken-fancier – likes it, which helps ensure domestic tranquility.

I floured and browned my chicken pieces, then stirred in a mince of carrot, onion, garlic, and chorizo. Imported Spanish chorizo, I feel, is crucial to this dish.

When the vegetables had softened, I added a good dash of brandy and flamed it. (I tried to get a nice dramatic shot of the flames shooting up, but by the time the camera was ready I was in time to catch only the last spluttering.)

Next into the pan went a chopped roasted red Bell pepper – which I’ve found a reasonable substitute for a pimiento – salt, pepper, bay leaf, thyme, chicken broth, and red wine. Then it was just to stir, cover, and simmer until the dish was done. Casas says it takes 1½ hours, but I’ve found an hour to be fine, with the cover off toward the end to reduce the sauce a little.

Initially I wondered if I ought to puree that rough-looking sauce, but we actually liked the effect of the tiny nuggets of chorizo and vegetables in the same bites as the soft, tender chicken. The smoky, pimentòn spiciness of a good dry-cured chorizo gives an unmistakably Spanish lilt to this hearty, rustic dish.

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Chickpea and Cuttlefish Stew

Compared to its cousin the squid (culinarily familiar as calamari), cuttlefish is still a fairly exotic food in the US. Having enjoyed it very much in Italy (a.k.a. seppia) and Spain (choco), I keep looking for it here. Unfortunately, cuttlefish don’t inhabit American oceans, as squid do, so they rarely appear in our fish markets. But in one store recently I found some lovely little ones, imported from Spain. I bought these three, which weighed in at half a pound:

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I’d found a recipe to make with them in Penelope Casas’s cookbook La Cocina di Mama: The Great Home Cooking of Spain. I’ve had several good results from this book, as well as from other books by this author. I’ve already written about a few of them here, here, and here. The recipe I chose this time, Potage de Garbanzos y Chocos, is a spicy stew of cuttlefish, chickpeas, and potatoes.

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At first reading, I thought the ingredient list was awfully heavy on the chickpea component, given the way dried legumes swell when reconstituted: To serve four, it called for a whole pound of dried chickpeas, as well as a pound of chocos. But I trust Casas, and I had some good heirloom chickpeas from Italy, so for the half recipe I was making I used the full half pound.

Soaked overnight in water, the chickpeas duly grew to three times their dried volume. Undaunted, I put them in a big pot with water, half a head of unpeeled garlic, olive oil, a small chopped tomato, parsley, a bay leaf, a small dried hot red pepper, and half a teaspoon of pimentón dulce (Spanish smoked sweet paprika).

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All this simmered for a little over an hour, producing enticing aromas that wafted out of the kitchen and scented half the apartment. When the chickpeas were beginning to soften, I moved on to the next step: adding the choco – neatly cut into short strips by my obliging knifeman – and a few fingerling potatoes.

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After another half hour, everything was tender. To finish the dish, I squeezed the garlic flesh into the stew and discarded the skin, stirred in another dose of pimentón, and let the pot sit covered for 15 minutes before serving.

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It was a marvelous dish – everything worked together beautifully, and the taste fully justified the cooking aromas. The chickpeas had taken on good spicy flavors in addition to their own basic nuttiness. In fact, we couldn’t finish them all, but we got through more than I expected to. There was about a pint of leftovers, mostly chickpeas, which I carefully saved to use another day.

Thoroughly enjoyable as the cuttlefish were, I’d had a slightly uneasy feeling all during dinner, which I later decided was an overactive imagination responding to the splendidly lifelike Venetian glass cuttlefish that have looked over our shoulders for every meal we’ve eaten in this apartment. I couldn’t say for certain that they recognized their Spanish relatives, but the whole cephalopod family is highly intelligent.

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Pulpo a la Carlos

Back in the ‘70s, Tom and I often dined at a small Greenwich Village restaurant called El Rincón de España. We particularly loved the owner-chef’s specialty of octopus in a tangy red sauce, Pulpo a la Carlos. We didn’t know much about Spanish food then, and we never figured out what gave the dish its unusual flavor. (Innocents as we were, it didn’t occur to us to ask.) As time moved on, we grew away from El Rincón (it closed long ago), and it was many years before I became seriously interested in Spanish cooking.

Fast forward to the present. The food on our recent trip to Spain had given us a taste for pimentón – smoked paprika – tins of which we’d brought back and begun experimenting with. One evening Tom concocted a marinade for some shrimp to be broiled, using olive oil, garlic, oregano, and hot pimentón. The first taste of the shrimp was a Proustian moment for us both: This had to be the way Carlos did his pulpo!

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Of course, I had to try it. I was able to buy cooked octopus in a local store, which was a great time- and labor-saver:

(That’s 2⅓ pounds of octopus – much more than I needed for the two of us, but there’s another octopus recipe, not Spanish, that I intend to try, which I’ll report on here in due time.)

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I also checked my Spanish cookbooks and found a recipe for Pulpo Encebollado (Octopus with Paprika in Simmered Onions) in Penelope Casas’s La Cocina de Mamá that used similar ingredients. It didn’t include a marinade, but the rest of the technique looked good, so I basically adopted it. Another good sign: The headnote mentioned that this was a recipe from Galicia, where octopus is enormously popular. El Rincón’s Carlos was also Galician.

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So: Tom cut up a pound of the octopus tentacles into one-inch pieces and I froze the rest. I simmered 2 minced garlic cloves, 2 teaspoons of hot pimentón, and ½ teaspoon of salt in ⅓ cup of olive oil. When it was cool I poured it over the octopus pieces and let them marinate for a couple of hours, stirring occasionally.

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In the evening I poured off that seasoned oil and in it softened ¾ cup of minced onions, slowly and covered, so they almost dissolved. Then I added the octopus, stirred in just a little water to keep it from frying, and heated it all through.

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It was simply gorgeous. Was it indeed the Pulpo a la Carlos we’d eaten so many years ago? We’re not certain, but it came as close as reminiscence allows. Maybe Carlos added a little tomato puree, to make the whole dish a bit saucier?  I can try that next time – and there will be a next time. Octopus is delicious: Low in fat, high in protein, packed with vitamins and minerals, it has to be the world’s meatiest mollusk. Its succulent flesh seemed to revel in the contrast with the lively pimentón sauce. The plain rice I served alongside absorbed that sauce with enthusiasm, too. It’s an extraordinary pleasure to rediscover – after 40 years! – such a great culinary treat.

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