Some tapas for the night

For the dinner we have been out in a bar in Estepona (Malaga) and I have to say that the food was extremely good, as you can see in some pictures I did not manage to take the picture with the iPhone before somebody tried it!!

First some fish

Then a salad

The meat

And of course the desserts!!

Paella, first meal in Spain

Hello

A few hours into my holidays in Spain and I already had the opportunity to be welcomed by a proper Paella.

I leave you the picture so you enjoy ( sorry that you cannot taste it )

Mushroom Croquettes, recipe by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Just before leaving on holidays I was watching River Cottage, a program with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It seemed fine and I watched it for a while. The recipe that called my attention today was some wild mushrooms croquettes. You can find it here.

Today, I tried it with normal mushrooms and without the oak moss. They are not easy to find in London. 😉

I found very easy to arrive to the mix of mushrooms, flour, milk and cheese. It is easy to know when to stop if you pour the milk little by little. The mixture was really tasteful and the consistency was perfect for the croquettes.

I left it rest a little bit in the fridge and then I prepared the 3 bowls, one with eggs, another with flour and the last one with the breadcrumbs.

I needed to improve my skills with giving the shapes of the croquettes. The first ones did not have the right shape and I only did a mess with my 2 left hands, but at the end, with practice, I think I managed to an ok standard. Here a picture

I fried them in hot oil, taking a lot of care not to burn them. They looked good and I think with practice, it will be easy to cook, specially for parties as you can pre-prepare just ready for frying

I don’t want to cook

As Christmas approaches, also does my annual trip to Spain to visit friends and family. Before I leave for these two weeks period I always do a ‘spring clean’ of the freezer and the cupboards. It is kind of nice to start the year with everything clean, a kind of white canvas ready to be filled with the new year resolutions.

In order to achieve this, every year I promise myself not to visit the supermarket for the last weeks and use the imagination with the left-overs in the freezer.

But on Thursday, I could not find anything in the freezer and my imagination was not going anywhere so I decided for the easy but always tasty option of the bruschetta, but with the added value of Spanish Serrano ham.

I cooked in the oven a frozen baguette, it’s a fast way to get freshly made bread. I took two tomatoes and a piece of garlic and put it through a food processor, adding extra virgin olive oil and spices to give it the required Italian taste.

I also cut mozzarella cheese and Spanish Serrano ham as thin as possible.

When the bread was done, I cut it in halves and grilled it for a few seconds.

Then in one of the halves I put the tomato sauce and the ham on top, in the other one, it was the mozzarella that was on top.

Easy and nice. A meal that makes you to travel to the Mediterranean in seconds!!!

Mushroom Risotto

It was the day of a vegetarian meal after yesterday’s beef, also I wanted something not too heavy as I am playing basketball tomorrow.

Arguiñano, as usual, gave me the response in his website, a mushroom risotto.

First I prepared the stock. I got in a pan about a litter of water with the green part of turn spring onions and leeks, together with a stock cube.

I chopped finely the spring onions and the leek, put it in a hot pan with a spoon of olive oil. When it got a golden colour, I added the mushrooms. Waited 1 minute and added the butter and the rice.
Added a bit of water and kept it stirring all the time. Every time it was closed to run out of liquid, I added another bit of the stock, always stirring!!

The rice should take a little bit more than 10 min to be ready and the litre of stock should be the right measure but I kept trying for the perfect cooking of the rice.

When it was cooked, i added the glass of wine and the cheese and continued for another two minutes. Then I removed the pan from the heat, covered it with a cloth and I left it to rest for 5 minutes.

I served it with Arguiñano’s signature, parsley.

The risotto was delicious, it had the perfect consistency and the glass of wine was the right amount.

Ingredients

400 gr of risotto rice

1 bunch of spring onions

2 leeks

175 gr of butter

400 gr of mushrooms

150 gr of Parmesan cheese

A glass of white wine

Small beef stew with potatoes

Tonight I cooked a recipe from the Spanish chef Karlos Arguiñano, a TV star from the Basque Country, like many other good chefs in Spain.

It is a beef stew that is very simple and quick.

First I prepared the sauce. I chopped irregularly 1 onion, 1 pepper, 3 cloves of garlic and 3 carrots. Put everything in hot pan till it started to get a golden colour. Then I added a glass of white wine, one spoon of tomato purée and water till the ingredients were covered. Season to taste. Cooked for another 5 minutes and blend till smooth.

I boiled 800 grams of potatoes for around 10 minutes.

I took 800 grams of beef, chopped it in bite sizes. Then I dredged the meat with flour, salt and peppers and added it to a hot pan till it got a really nice brown colour.

I poured the sauce on top and cooked for 25-30 minutes at a low heat. 5 minutes before it was ready, i added the potatoes and before serving the parsley ( I have it in my window shell so no carbon footprint here).

Ready to serve!!

It was delicious!! Another easy meal that tastes really nice!!

Mental note don’t over boil the potatoes or add them too early to the stew, it will become a mash!!

Recipe (in Spanish) with pictures and video

My kitchen hero, Jose Mari Arzak

I guess we all have a ‘somebody’ that we find an inspiration, a ‘somebody’ that is living the life that we want to live, an image to guide us.

Well, for me, in the kitchen, the man is called Arzak, Jose Mari Arzak.

The fellow Spaniard is the chef of the restaurant that his family had for generations and the front is decorated with three starts given a guide Michelin.

I felt in love with him long time ago. He was invited to the culinary programme of the fellow basque chef Arguiñano. He was sitting in a wooden chair, I remember like it was yesterday, in his left hand, he had a glass of wine, probably a Txacoli. He was talking about his journeys to the local market to choose the ingredients for his restaurant, how he knows everybody, how he drinks a glass of wine with most of them, how he knows the ins and outs of their families and how sometimes he hears about the local gossips.

It was like a fairy tale, a man telling his grand children with daily routine with all the unnecessary detail.

By the time the finished this story he had cooked an amazing fish soup. No effort, nobody noticed, but it just looked amazing.

This is the type of food that I would like to cook, the one you can prepare talking to a friend with a smile in your face. The one that people will think it was easy, if they knew the recipe and thry have watched you prepare it but that just melts in your mouth.

Juan Mari Arzak in Wikipedia

Jose Mari Arzak cookbook (in Spanish)

Paprika chicken breast

Again with the inspiration of the Jamie Oliver’s programme on 15 minutes meals from channel 4, I cooked Paprika Chicken Breasts.

The idea is a quick meal, simple and nice with some kind of Mexican hint to eat informally with friends or family.

The first thing I did was to place the chicken breast in baking paper and spread a good quantity of paprika over them. For a better absorption of the paprika, I did it in the morning, 10 hours before cooking it. The chicken gets this red colour that brings it into life

Place them in a really hot pan trying to get a BBQ colour in the outside and a perfect tenderness in the inside

It looked really nice and I could not wait to try it, but to improve the presentation, I cut it in pieces of around 1 inch each, place it in a wooden board next to a salad with lots of colour ( lettuce, tomatoes and stuffed olives with simple dressing of olive oil). The sauces to go with ketchup and mayo.

Look at the outcome

You have to agree that for something so quick and easy, it looks really delicious!!

Sun dried tomato bread

Hello

As I told you in the last post, I tried the sun dried tomato bread that I saw in the Jamie Oliver’s Channel 4 tv programme during the weekend.

What called me the attention was that there was no need of an oven, something rather important for me as mine is broken at the moment!!!!

With no recipe and no quantities, with only my memory and improvisation I started cooking:

I started with 200 gr of self raising flour, that proved, very soon, not to be enough, so I added another 200 gr. This is a picture of the first set.

Then I chopped in small pieces around 100 gr of sun dried tomatoes or around one third of the little jar that I had

Mix it together with a little bit of salt. then little by little I added warm water till it looked like the perfect dough. Covered with a little bit more of flour to make it easy to pick it up.

Then I put in a hot pan with a little bit of olive oil. I flattered the bread to have a shape similar to the rounded one of pizza dough.

5 minutes in each side was enough, in a medium temperature to have the colour that I wanted!!

Look at the beauty!!

It may only take 15 minutes to cook, but it took me less to eat it!!

I will definitely try again I may try adding olives or peppers. Also I will add a little bit more of salt.

Jamie Oliver’s sun dried tomatoes’ bread

I was watching Channel 4 this morning while having my delicious coffee with toast. Jamie Olivier’s 15 Minute Meal was on.

I have to say that Jamie manages to take you in your side in seconds, he is just fun to watch. Not the best technically but an inspiration to avoid the frozen food section of the supermarkets.

There were several recipes in the programme but I picked up the sun dried tomatoes bread as the one to choose. Please note that I did not write the recipe as I wanted to absolve what he was doing and when the moment arrives, to add my own imagination to improve it.

The thing that called my attention was that it is not baked but fried for around 5 minutes each side in a pan.

I will try this week and I will let you know!!

Jamie Oliver