Fabada

(One thing I learned from this experience is that you get better 

pictures of your food if you cook for friends with nice cameras)

So here we go, fabada. If you asked me right now what my favourite Spanish meal was I'd probably reply with this -- though it may have something to do with the fact that I've not eaten it in over a year. Fabada Withdrawal Symptom, which currently afflicts me, is a well documented phenomenon. High profile cases include Michu himself, who relied on parental visits to give him a hit when going cold turkey proved too difficult after moving from Asturias to South Wales last summer. Recall that scene from Trainspotting but consider that is is even more agonising.

I first made this dish during the Easter week whilst in Spain when I accompanied a group of scouts with my friend Joseba as their cook for the week. The organisers, fortunately, had already planned the meals that we were to make and had bought the quantities accordingly, so all we had to do was cook it to their instructions. Taste is all I can humbly promise if you follow the instructions I'll provide, though that's more to do with how simple the dish is, like a cassoulet that doesn't take itself seriously, as Luard points out in her book, as opposed to any culinary expertise on my part.

The main ingredient in this dish are white haricot beans (fabes), though the variety best suited for fabada are called fabes de la granja, which have their own qualifying criteria related to size, humidity, and other factors resulting in a shiny, greasy bean. They need to be soaked in water for a few hours / overnight before the cooking process so they're nice and soft, and you should put a ham bone in there for good measure to add flavour.

And now we're onto the meat that decorates your cocido. There are differing names used to refer to it depending on where you are in Spain, whether you call it el compango (Asturias), los sacramentos (The Basque Country), the idea is to get your hands on the best quality meat you can. After all, it's a simple dish with few ingredients so it's definitely worth it. You'll want to get your hands on chorizo, morcilla and tocino (pork belly).

Now what is morcilla? I hear you all ask. It's effectively Spanish black pudding, made with onion and various other ingredients depending on what region you're in. Morcilla de Burgos is made with rice; for example, and Morcilla de León can contain ingredients such as garlic and pine nuts. For a fabada, as you will have guessed by now, we use Morcilla de Asturias which contains pimentón (Spanish paprika) and is smoke cured. All you need now is an onion, a head of garlic and a bottle of wine, and you're ready to go! (To clarify, the wine does not go in the fabada, it's used to feed the cook).

We put the everything except the meat in a big pot and pour in the same water we used to soak the beans in, topping up if need be so that the water covers the beans by two fingers. We then bring to the boil, removing any foam that rises once the water starts boiling. The important step here is to make sure the water temperature doesn’t get too hot, and To that end, we cook it on low for about three hours (or until the beans are soft), making sure to “shock” the fabes (‘asustar los fabes’), by pouring a little cold water into the pan, roughly 2 or 3 times during the cooking process, also doing the same if the fabada dries out too much. To make sure the fabes don’t break, avoid stirring it too much. The compango should be added after about 2 and a half hours, and once it’s finished cooking it should be left for about 15 minutes before serving. If it’s too watery at the end, you can mash up a few of the beans and stir through to thicken it up a little bit.

And there we have it, the basic recipe. As with any traditional dish, though, there’ll be as many different varieties as grandmothers in Asturias. I personally like boiling some carrots and a leek with the stew and then liquidising them at the end to give the dish a bit more thickness, flavour and colour. If you don’t manage to get through it all in one sitting, don’t worry. It tastes even better the next day.

Ingredients:
500 grams white haricot beans
2 chorizo sausages
2 morcillas
250g pork belly
1 onion
1 head of garlic
Water

Spanish Cooking. Attempt #1

So I made my first Spanish meal last night for our family's dinner. Despite my constant fretting throughout, considering how it's cooked in such an interestingly unique way, it turned out fantastic. One admission though, I didn't make the tapas and instead got them from M&S, and not all of them were Spanish. I just couldn't resist the sun-dried tomato and mozzarella salad once I'd spotted it on the shelf. Anyways, here's the meal, the main course courtesy of Jamie Oliver's Jamie Does (Thought I'd put off cooking from the Spanish one I bought the other day until I actually moved there).

Tapas: Tortilla omelette, sun-dried tomato and mozzarella salad, marinated Greek olives (which I personally didn't have, I don't like olives on their own)

Main: Pescado a la sal con alioli

As i said before, this fish was cooked in such a way I've never come across before, and was as fun to make as it was tasty. I initially did a double take when seeing a Jamie Oliver recipe calling for a kilo of rock salt, given his (arguable) culpability for the removal of salt-shakers from our school's dinner tables during his health-crusade, and the abject despair we endured every Friday at having our chips plain. But hey, I'm over that now, or at least I should be.

His recipe called for sea bass or bream (vitally, with the scales left on), of which I ended up using the latter. The salt was then mixed with two beaten eggs, some fennel and lemon rinds, and was used to completely surround the fish in the oven dish. Before you start to though, don't worry. The scales protect the fish from the salt and the skin is discarded after cooking, whilst the salt allows the fish to cook without losing any of its moisture, whilst giving a subtle infusion of the fennel and lemon. Stuffing the fish with herbs is also a good shout as well. But the best part, however, is after you take the fish out of the oven. The salt covering became rock hard in the oven and after letting it stand for a bit I gave it a few whacks on the side with a meat tenderiser (just because I had one, the back of a spoon or the like will also suffice) before removing the salt and tucking in.  You can watch this video here for a vague idea as to how the whole thing works out.

Now onto the alioli, and I guess you could say the frustration involved in making this compensated for how fun the fish was to prepare, given the amount of sheer patience it calls for. After mashing up three cloves of garlic garlic with a pinch of saffron and salt in the pestle and mortar I borrowed off my neighbour, the olive oil was added very slowly and mixed into the puree -- done in this manner with the intention of it staying as a single emulsion. This was, annoyingly, until I got a little hasty and the mixture split -- so I got my sister to take over that part whilst I tended to the fish. We poured it into another bowl, mashed up a another clove with some salt and added our previous mixture to that. One thing we discovered right at the end was that adding lemon juice helped the emulsion stay together somehow -- probably by some means of some chemical reaction that took place in the mixture I'd hazard.

I'd never tried alioli before, and I must say was a wonderful revelation. Technically a sort of garlic mayonnaise made without eggs, I'd best describe it (as it turned out, at least. I'm not sure if it's always meant to be like that) as the Spanish equivalent of wasabi; due to it's yellow/green hue and that kick it had to it. Complemented the fish very well. Muchas Gracias Jamie


ps: I'd really love to, but I can't exactly reproduce his recipe in full here methinks. He does have a slightly different recipe for this on the web you can have a look at, however.

Alright Lizzy, you're on.

So today, after a little gander in Waterstones, I eventually chose the book which I'll spend the net year tackling. There were many Spanish cookbooks in the section actually, giving me a little bit of a headache before deciding on this one. Partly what pushed me towards choosing it was that it just seemed a little more elegant than the other ones on the shelf -- a small little book devoid of massive pictures and the like, dotted with the occasional little painting by the author when she lived in Andalusia. A nice personal touch I thought.

I do currently have some Spanish recipes not form this book, however, which I'll attempt before I leave. My mum got me Jamie Oliver's Jamie Does book for my birthday (something I've not actually cooked from yet) which has a section on Spanish cuisine in it -- and I intend to have a crack at this one fish dish when I can.


ps: I don't know from where I managed to pull it out, but I myself was surprised by the self-restraint I exhibited in that bookshop. Reading is one of my loves, and the act of compulsively buying books has somehow manifested itself as an incurable affliction on my part. I thought I'd succumb on seeing all those shiny "3 for 2" stickers on all the books -- but it seems the effect on me of a low bank balance is not to be underestimated.

I've more than enough on my to-read bookshelf, after all.

A little on cupcakes and my rosewater fetish

I thought a little rambling would do very nicely to fill the time between now and the actual commencement of this 'project,' if we can call it that. So that's just what this is -- a little ramble. Sorry for the possible incoherence; it's late, I'm jet-lagged and in that annoying state of mind where I'm exhausted yet can't get to sleep. But anyways, here I go.

I happened to randomly discover one day, on the internet, this little place called The Love Bakery very close by to where I was living last year. I eventually ventured down there, and my everlasting loyalty and fidelity to this place was secured by a delicious rose cupcake. I've always loved rose as a flavour, and enjoy using it as a subtle flavour when baking or making deserts in general -- taste aside, it's got this wonderful cooling feel about it and the nostalgia it evokes (childhood summer holidays with my grandparents) is an added bonus.

So it was finding this place (which I go on about to my friends far too much) the discovery of this brilliant blog and getting my life back after having survived the exam period that led to me buying one of those muffin baking tray things, and the creation of Yoga-Cupcake Thursdays. That went on for three weeks until Yoga went on hiatus and work picked up again, but was good fun whilst it lasted. Definitely much more enjoyable than making normal cakes, and I'll be packing the tin when I move.

The first one I tried was #29, vanilla cupcakes with strawberry jam filling, with strawberry rose icing instead of the milk chocolate one. The sponge was fine, but only had the rather weak, dilute essence of rosewater as opposed to the slightly more concentrated syrup -- hence the former flavour coming through. Next to follow was #6. The actual banana cupcakes turned out sublime, but I ran out of icing sugar halfway through making the icing and took a little gamble as to whether I could get away with using normal granulated sugar instead to finish off instead of running down to the supermarket. If ever you nonexistent readers one day wonder whether you too can get away with that little cheat, don't do it. It tasted, well, okay, but it didn't thicken as it should have and looked a little like something you'd chuck up after a night out (somehow) -- so ended up having to bin it. Very much a rookie error there.

Finally, was #19, the blueberry muffins. Though I opted not to make icing, given that I was still traumatised from my previous attempt at making it. I'm dying to tackle his Lemon meringue ones at some point actually, they look stunning. And oh, I did eventually conquer my icing demons at a later date in case you were wondering.

Hello World

Given how I wasn't really planning on watching it at all (and I'd declined the possibility when it was available as an in flight movie two weeks earlier), it's surprising that it ended up inspiring me to the extent that it did when I ended up watching it. It just happened to be on the telly, and were it not focusing on the absolutely stunning Amy Adams when I flicked onto it then I'd have probably not watched it at all. But here I am. And oh, since I forgot to mention, the movie in question is Julie and Julia.

Yes, that's right. I imagine food blogs inspired by that movie are pretty ubiquitous these days so no brownie points for me in terms of, I don't know, creativity or whatever. But this is, in a nutshell, what's going on. In a few weeks, I'll be moving to Spain for 9 months, so what's left for me to do is the following:

1. Find a Traditional Spanish cookbook. I'd ask for suggestions but I can't imagine I actually have any readers at this point.
2. Cook my way through as much of it as I can during the year.

Given that I am a student, and I don't exactly want this thing to comprehensively take over my life, I'm not going to attempt something suicidal like 1+ recipes per day as in the movie, especially considering that as a student, I can't imagine I'll be able to afford to cook fancy meals every day (Side note: The 33p tin of Sainsbury's basics chopped tomatoes were an absolute lifesaver last year when my account was running dry at one point). Perhaps one three-course meal per week? I'll figure it out.