lobstersquad

Portugal again

2009-07-11T10:50:00.004+02:00

We´re spending a long weekend ambling around the beaches of the costa alentejana, where we were last spring. This time around it´s sunnier and hotter (though as cool as Estonia in August, easily) and we can swim in the cold waves.

We also eat the wonderful food, and that would be a good thing, except that I´ve decided that the Portuguese are either crazy or superheroes. The portions are so huge that we leave the table staggering and dazed. And I´m usually one who can pack away enough to keep a grown man on his feet on a Polar trek.

Ask for grilled fish and you will be brought a slice carved from Moby Dick, with a whole other dish of vegetables on the side, and salad. And all this after you´ve nibbled your way through bread and butter and cheese and olives as you wait (they´re generous, but they sure ain´t fast, you see).

So all I´m saying is: if you have any intention of having enough room to have coffee and a queijada or one of those little cream cakes, which you should, be sure to work up an appetite.

More drawings here

Takeout fusion

2009-06-30T08:19:00.004+02:00

Takeout fusion of the highest order. They used to serve this as an appetizer in No-Do, which was a very happenning restaurant in the mid-90´s.

Prawn crackers, the big, white, crunchy, very artificial looking Chinese snack, with salmorejo for a dip.

It´s as easy as blending some tomatoes and bread with olive oil and vinegar, and either frying up some crackers yourself or, much better, ordering them from a convenient restaurant that delivers. We are very happy to have a new one in the neighbourhood that´s so close and so efficient that food arrives piping hot and crunchy.

People go nuts for this, I warn you.

(And yes, again, the drawing has nothing much to do with it, but I like it, and it is sort of pink, like salmorejo)

Turning Japanese

2009-06-19T17:16:00.001+02:00

How much Japanese cooking can a person do, who vows never to stuff, roll, or fry? Quite a lot, actually. Whenever I say I love to make Japanese food, people eagerly say, "oh, you do sushi and tempura?". I fix them with a stony glare, or a pitying glance, or maybe just brush an infinitesimal speck of dust from my sleeve and say "there´s a lot more to Japanese food than tempura and sushi, you know. And no, I couldn´t do either of those to save my life".

I am broadminded in my definition of Japanese, and anything that has soy sauce and mirin and wasabi and sesame oil is Japanese enough for me. A scattering of sesame seeds over some white rice, eaten with chopsticks, and I´m there.

One of our favourite lazy dinners is a bowl of white rice topped with cut up omelette (made with a dash of sugar), slices of avocado, sesame seeds and a bit of nori. Dip the egg or avocado in soy sauce and there you are. A quick, beautiful, really quite Japanese looking dinner.

I might also marinate some defrosted salmon to go along with that, or throw in some smoked salmon, which always goes so well with avocadoes.

What I had never made is real sushi rice. I found the instructions intimidating. What with the kombu, and the soaking the special wooden instruments, and the soaking then resting the rice, and all that palaver of "gently fold the vinegar into the rice with one hand while you fan it with the other"...I mean to say, what? I need two hands to fold vinegar into rice if it´s not all to end up on the floor, thankyouverymuch. Fanning, indeed. No sir, I thought.

But yesterday the crushing heat of Madrid summer brought the solution. I have an electric fan in the kitchen, and what could be easier than mixing the vinegar-sugar-salt into the rice, inside a normal baking tray, while the electric fan did its sushi job and also made me not faint from the steam?

So there you go. Ignore the punctiliousness and the ritualistic stories and don´t let that Japanese aura of perfection put you off. After all, they invented those little junky packets of ramen, so shortcuts must be quite common in Japan. Just get yourself some mirin and soy and sesame oil and sake and start playing.

Leek and potato salad

2009-06-17T12:46:00.002+02:00

Potatoes and leeks go together like Simon and Garfunkel, and it´s just a shame to limit their summer partnership to vichyssoise.
My favourite new thing is to add leeks vinaigrette to potato salad. Isn´t that somewhat brilliant? Raw onions are very popular in Spanish potato salads, but I hate to be reminded of my lunch all day long. Leeks, though, leeks are elegant and unobtrusive, and upgrade your humble potato salad.

So here it is:

Boil your potatoes as you would, and in another pan boil whole leek whites until tender but still with a bite.
Cut the warm leeks in shorter segments, mix them with the warm potatoes and add vinaigrette thinned down with a little water. Chopped boiled eggs and parsley can never go amiss.

Closed for the week

2009-06-08T11:25:00.004+02:00

This is a post intended solely to turn everyone green with envy.
I am packing my brushes, pens, watercolour box, bottles, jars, papers and easel and setting off. I will be in La Granja, a beautiful place in the mountains. I am officially going to be working on a book about the gardens, but it will feel more like a picnic holiday.

The exhibition last month

2009-06-07T11:04:00.002+02:00

For those kind souls who asked how it went, here are pictures of the opening, thronged, as you can see. The subject was culinary, as you might expect, and the portraits of famous brand names of the pantry bottled in gallon jars sold like churros. It was all perfectly loverly.

Making home made yogurt

2009-05-27T13:31:00.001+02:00

It is well known that I am very lazy and refuse to cook croquetas or tortilla, am more than glad to buy roast chickens, would not dream of making my own jam and feel faint at the mere thought of cleaning anchovies for boquerones en vinagre. So severe is the case that I won´t go near most recipes that call for sepparating eggs or browning meat. I don´t fry, I don´t roll and I don´t stuff, and am constantly plugged to my freezer, Thermomix and rice cooker.

So you see that when I say that making yogurt is well worth your while, it´s true, and not the kind of annoying off-the-cuff remark of someone who can take apart a car and put it back together. The basic elemental yogurt you buy costs ten times more than what you´ll make and tastes nowhere nearly as good. And if you buy good milk, even organic, the economics of the thing really start to make sense. And it´s so so easy.

Back when Abba were still together, my mother owned a yogurt making machine, and I´d always assumed that it was necessary for making yogurt, as a waffle iron is for making waffles. But like so many of my late seventies beliefs, this isn´t true. All you need is milk and yogurt and a bowl and time and a blanket.

To further convince you of my laziness I won´t even bother to type the recipe, but instead direct you here. Though I´ll warn you that Heidi makes it sound much more complicated than it is (really, you just boil some milk, wait for it to cool down a bit, mix in yogurt, leave it to set somewhere warm). Just one piece of important advice given by my friend Cristina, dairy expert of Malasaña: to retain the heat the best thing is to put the yogurt bowl inside one of those insulated coolers one takes to the beach. Much better than blankets or shawls, whatever Ms Roden or Ms Colwin may say.

Make your yogurt int he evening in five minutes, shut it inside the cooler and awake next morning to thick, creamy, sweet tasting yogurt you got for pennies.

Strawberry gazpacho

2009-05-21T11:08:00.003+02:00

Gazpacho is such a great soup that some people just can´t hold themselves in and wait for tomatoes to be good. The minute the thermometer flirts with 30ºC they´re off, and the resulting gazpachos can be a little bit boring and somewhat pale.
This is a version I was taught last week by Isabela Muro. Throwing strawberries in with tomatoes and olive oil into a blender may seem a little bit wacky, but it works very well. The strawberries give it sweetness and colour, and the whole thing is fruity and light and satisfying. The normal gazpacho is much much better, but this makes for a fun little change, and good sense if you must have gazpacho right now.

All you do is mix 1 kg. strawberries, 1 kg. tomatoes, 300 ml. olive oil, 4 tablespoons of vinegar and 1 garlic clove (seedling out and blanched beforehand). Blitz it in a stong blender, strain it with a chinoise and you´re good to go.

Strawberries

2009-05-19T12:54:00.004+02:00

We had a strawberry discussion this weekend, and all agreed that the best we´ve had came from Aranjuez, and were grown in the open air. The great whopping plastic-raised fresón from Huelva is no love of ours. But. Apart from nísperos, it´s all there is, so we eat it very happily in all its possibilities:

plain
with sugar and yogurt
with chunks of pineapple
with whipped cream and meringues
crushed with whipped cream and sandwiched between two sponge cakes
with pancakes and caramelized apples

doubtless we´ll think up a few more before cherries begin to claim all the love.

Marion

2009-05-06T09:17:00.003+02:00

It works! It really does. Yesterday´s pancake batter looked a bit dodgy in its plastic container, a bit more alive than yesterday, but the minute it hit the pan it made fluffy, perfect pancakes just the same.
I had two plates of pancakes with caramelized pear and a pot of tea ready in less time than it took J to change Pía and install her in a highchair. Mind you, he´s not fast, and has some issues with the straps in the highchair, but still, this was a lightning fast operation, and possibly the only way to make Mr.No-Breakfast go out into the world with a full stomach in the morming. Now I know.

Exhibition

2009-05-05T10:57:00.004+02:00

Tomorrow is the opening of my show, and I am in that marvelous state where I am either staring blankly at the wall or snapping at whoever has the misfortune to speak to me. I can´t eat, or I am ravenous. I feel there are a million things I must do, but can´t think of any. Very much like pre-wedding nerves, except on that day I knew what I was going to wear, and had only to make sure I fit into it.
Since I have no idea what I will be looking like tomorrow, I have instead cooked myself a beautiful, decadent breakfast: pancakes with sauteed pears.
I´d never made pancakes for one, because one egg makes too much batter, and if I make the whole batch intending to freeze some it´s more than likely that I will eat all the pancakes anyway. But Marion Cunningham says you can keep batter in the fridge, and if that is true, well then, we´re home free.
I made three panckaes from this batter and sauteed a pear in butter and brown sugar in another pan, and it all took fifteen minutes, including one phone call to J to apologize for having snapped before, and another to my mother to schedule Pía´s morning.
Why don´t we make pancakes every morning?

Sauteed cherry tomatoes

2009-05-01T11:39:00.002+02:00

One of my rules is: no tomatoes between October and June. There are enough dissappointments going around to add mushy, mealy, pale, tastless toms to the list.

And yet. Sometimes, I really, really want a tomato. Or big bags of them are on sale, and, well, I´m not made of iron. The rule that ammends the broken rule is: cook them. Slow roasting makes up for their sins pretty well, but it takes forever. My new favourite thing is to achieve a similar result within minutes.

All you need is a handful of those accomodating little things, cherry tomatoes, and a bit of balsamic vinegar.

Sauteeing the cherries at high heat brings out all the things you want in a tomato: juiciness, flavour, tartness, sweetness. A drizzle of vinegar at the end makes them caramelize, or look caramelized, dark and long cooked. And it all happens while you get a sandwich ready!

Over the past week I´ve used these in a salad with fresh mozzarella and anchovies, as a side vegetable, and as a garnish to perk up a bland sqash soup from a carton.

Brilliant.

Peanut slaw

2009-04-25T14:51:00.003+02:00

Oh the joy of French onion soup. Not only the queen of soups, but probably top of my list of all time top ten grilled cheese greats, and high up there in any top ten list I ever make.
We had that on Thursday at the knife skills class, which was great, because I´ve always had some caramelization issues and I think now I know how to do it properly.
Also, I learnt this great tip: add vanilla right at the end of whatever you do with it because it tends to lose its perfume with long cooking. The reduced red wine sauce the chef made to prove this point was like hitting a brick wall of vanilla. Except, you know, nice.

All the stuff we did was classic bistro cooking and as such way beyond my usual scope, so instead I´ll link to this cabbage slaw, and just say I do it without the cilantro.
It´s a perfect thing to make when you´re distracted and kind of hungry but not really, because you had a heavy lunch, yet want some kind of a healthy yet not boring dinner. Or when you´re on a diet (but don´t go wild with the peanuts). Or when you want to serve vegetables but can´t be bothered to peel carrots or wash and dry lettuce. Or when cabbage is all you have, since it can last forever, unassumingly lurking in the fridge until called for.
So you see, most of the time, really.
It´s a good one for trying out new found knife skills, too, as chopping cabbage has to be one of the easiest, most rewarding chicken tasks. No matter how inept or slow you are, in no time you have a mound of crunchy leaves to be proud of.

Knife skills course, part 1

2009-04-23T09:14:00.002+02:00

Yesterday we had the first leg of the knife skills course at Alambique with Alonso Roche. I really enjoyed it. I will never peel an onion the same way. My chopping might not change so much, because all those nifty little shapes professionals make come at the cost of a huge amount of scraps. And I don´t make stock every day, and I don´t mind irregularity in my soup at all.
But it was a lot of fun to chop carrots into tiny dice for a delicious soupe au pistou, and to watch an expert going through the motions of sole meuniere. A fillet of which I cut myself, a very impressive feat I don´t think I´ll repeat much, since my market is brimming with stalwart guys who are only to happy to do that, but still, very useful to know how in case I´m ever confronted with a whole flat fish.
Today, chicken, and how to sharpen. Fun.

Back in Spain, oh dear

2009-04-20T08:57:00.003+02:00

Yes, we had withdrawal symptoms and really wanted to get back to our baby. But it was very hard to tear ourselves away from the coast yesterday, because as usually happens after a rainy weekend, the minute you pack your bags in the car, the sun shines merrily.
It was a very long drive, and we stopped in Elvas for lunch. J thought we might as well have the bacalhau dourada, and we did, and it was pretty good, considering we chose a nondescript touristy little bar in the square.
Elvas looked very beautiful but we couldn´t explore. That´s the problem with Madrid; it´s just too far from everything else.
J´s mother is coming for lunch, so cure the saudade I´ll make octopus salad to start with, and I´ll crush the meringues I bought in Evora to scatter over strawberries and cream.
As far as I can make out, the salada de polvo goes like this:

Octopus, boiled and cut thin (you can buy boiled octopus at the market here, so that´s easy)
Parsley, chopped
Onion, cut very thin and marinated in vinegar (?)
A generous dose of extra virgin olive oil

Just the thing with the so excellent bread we´ve also brought back from the Alentejo.

Portugal and chocolate mousse

2009-04-18T19:17:00.004+02:00

J and I, when in Portugal, could bore anyone to death as we talk about the same thing, all the time, over and over; why is it that their coast is perfectly beautiful, while ours is a total mess of concrete apartment blocks?
Right now we´re on the Costa Vicentina, which is a string of sandy coves and dramatic cliffs where storks nest on jutting rocks and the surf pounds.
Also, the food is great. Not just the grilled fish, which is of course excellent, but the boiled vegetables that come with it, which are so sweet and fresh that we eat them outright, no oil, no salt, nothing. The fish soup, the cuttlefish stew, the octopus salad. All great.
One thing I find particulary charming is the chocolate mousse. In Spain, chocolate mousse is over. Trendy restaurants have banished it from their menus, and serve instead brownies, or carrot cake, or cheesecake. You might, perhaps, be treated to some foamy thing featuring local cheeses or honey, or a molecular rendition of some traditional nunnery pastry.
As for the basic elemental roadhouse restaurants, if they have mousse, you can be sure it comes in a little clay pot, straight from a factory who knows where.
These Portuguese, though, they know their way around a carton of eggs, and see no problem at all in dishing up such a classic.
It comes in fluted glasses, or little metal cups, maybe with a dollop of whipped cream, maybe not, but it is that homely type that is more creamy than moussy, having been too thoroughly beaten, perhaps, and is just chocolatey enough, being blissfuly free of any 70% cocoa conceits.
In fact, as J and I simultaneously mumbled through our first mouthful of the stuff, it is exactly the same mousse we had at our grandmothers´houses.
Brilliant. Next time I have people over for dinner, I´m giving them chocolate mousse, and I bet they´ll say wow this is great we haven´t had this in ages.

In Portugal

2009-04-17T12:32:00.002+02:00

J and I have left baby Pía with her Fan Club, and headed off to Porgual. J for work, moi, tailing along in the feckless fashion that being a freelance illustrator sometimes allows.
This here in the drawing is my very bad rendering of one of the main jewels in Evora: a Roman temple flanked by Baroque palaces.
We have been very dutiful and eaten just as we should: José "porco a la alentejana", which is pork with clams, cooked with lots of garlic and topped with fried potatoes. I chose the salt cod, like the locals did: boiled, with boiled potatoes and chickpeas. A very monastic looking dish, which one tops with the garnishes brought to the table: raw garlic, mince raw onion and parsley, vinegar and olive oil.
It´s proving very difficult not to stop at every "pastelaria" for a cup of the perfect coffee and one of their egg-laden, almondy pastries. I´m particulary smitten with the "quejadas", and in fact, about to go to Café Arcada to buy a cartload to take home.

Apple and pear sauce

2009-04-12T11:36:00.005+02:00

Life is pretty hectic, and my kitchen is bubbling with all sorts of new things. I tote "The Zuni Café Cookbook" around, and make it bristle with post-it notes, even as I tell myself to ignore its higher flights ( use pecorino sardo for this dish, as pecorino romano would be way out of line. really?).
The markets are all closed for Semana Santa, so I can´t go wild with tubs of sardines. Instead, I boil vats of bones for ramen broth, after Hiroko Shimbo´s instructions.
Also, I mourn the loss of the shop where I bought the flakiest, crispest dough for turnovers. Will I find those Argentine beauties ever again?
Then there is Pía. Every day she has a lunch consisting of a bunch of vegetables and a few scraps of chicken or beef, simmered and pureed until they lose all identity and interest. She is very welcome to this.
Her tea, now, that´s different. That´s a world-class smoothie of several fruits, and there are always several vultures lurking around to finish off whatever she doesn´t eat.
I also make batches of applesauce to freeze, and to give her when we´re out of the house, as we were last Thursday, when she came with us to see the Bacon exhibition at the Prado (no, it didn´t seem to scare her or give her nightmares).
It´s a mushy, velvety, not overly sweet and very good apple and pear sauce. I´m not above stealing a few spoonfuls myself.

All you do is peel and core three apples and three pears, toss them into the Thermomix bowl, add a cup of water or so, and program 15 minutes at 90ºC, speed one. When it´s done, puree it at speed 7 until it´s very very smooth.

Salad or soup?

2009-03-31T18:23:00.005+02:00

March was ablaze with sunshine; cotton jackets emerged from under heavy coats, cherry tomatoes covered the breakfast toast, creamy avocadoes turned up for almost every meal,
and it seemed that the jellied chicken stock would not go the way of onion soup but of asparagus risotto.
Except that now we´re firmly back in midwinter. With a fridge full of stuff bought with different weather in mind.
It seems too springy, despite everything, to make soup, and yet we can´t live on a few leaves and some silly white wine.
My favourite in between solution is lentil salad. Robust, yet sprightly enough.

All you need is lamb´s lettuce , topped with lentils that you´ve boiled yourself. THe reason for this is that the cooking liquid is full of flavour, and will help you to avoid dressing them with tons of oil. With a few spoonfuls of the liquid, a bit of oil, lots of lemon juice, some of the zest, and the garlic from boiling lentils squished in, you have a pretty wonderful combo.
If you have some bacon on hand, that can never hurt, and goat´s cheese is always good. A poached egg is heavenly. And for a gold medal, add a spoonful of onion jam.

I´m a huge fan of bottled beans, but lentils don´t seem to make it past the process so well, and they´re not such a bother to make, with the no soaking, no taking forever thing. So I definitely recommend making your own, specially if you can find the little black exquisite caviar lentils from León.

More sprouts

2009-03-21T10:09:00.004+01:00

J and I received another sprouty present yesterday. More mustard, which is sitting pretty until it goes into another avocado salad; and fennel seed sprouts, which I´d never seen in my life and which are so gorgeous.

At first I didn´t quite know what to do with them (except munch them out of hand, which I did with gusto). Fennel isn´t very common in Spanish food, that I know of. I toyed with the idea of a Provençal fish soup, but it felt like too much work. And it was J who provided the anser. "That Sicilian pasta with sardines and fennel", he said. What a jewel of a man!

These shoots are tender little things, and I feel won´t stand up to actual heat. So what I did was mash a tin of sardines with some butter and lots of pepper and a dash of orange juice and the merest shaving of zest. This, spread on those Nordic dark crackers, and topped with fennel sprouts, made me feel utterly sophisticated and springlike and healthy and ready for anything.

I daresay thinly sliced fennel bulb might do the trick, but these little tendrils are so pretty, I´m almost tempted to start up a jar of sprouts myself. We´ll see. For now, I still have a few left, enough for another sandwich.

The illustration will be in next mont´s "Viajar" magazine.

Sprouts

2009-03-11T15:59:00.004+01:00

Here´s the banner I´ve made for Mary, aka Breadchick. It´s up just in time for the tentative beginning of spring. In Madrid chairs and tables are already beginning to sprout on sidewalks, and one can enjoy frothy little cañas in the sun.

Also, in a suitable springly mode , my friend Mariana, aka MariaGodzilla, gave me a bunch of mustard shoots (sprouts?) on Monday. They´re beatiful, grassy and fresh, with a hot mustardy aftertaste. They´re impossible to find around here, and these were home grown. The first I munched straight out, but after a while I decided to do them justice, with:

a salad- cherry tomatoes, perfect avocadoes, the mustard shoots, a few drops of olive oil, a slosh of sherry vinegar and salt.

and also, a sandwich- very dark rye bread, mashed avocado (they´re all over the place now, fresh from Granada), smoked salmon. Topped with a straggly mess of, yes, mustard shoots.

Lovely.

Knife skills course

2009-03-01T12:28:00.001+01:00

The index finger of my left hand is missing a small chunk. Are we downhearted? No. I´ve signed up for a knife skills course.

I can slice and dice with more panache than precision, and pretty quickly, but there comes a time when one must be able to tackle brunoise, julienne, baton, batonets, chiffonades. In order to never do them, probably, but what fun.

Venison and escabeche salad

2009-02-25T18:48:00.002+01:00

I´m not very used to eating game, never mind cooking it. Even thouh my father is a keen hunter who feels that Bambi´s mother had it coming, he´s never been allowed to bring back meat that he´s shot.
So the piece of venison I was given yesterday has had me fairly flummoxed all day. Now it´s in the oven, simmering in a basic stewy sauce made the usual way, with bacon fat added. I figure if I can get the meat to go as tender as I like, the sauce will still be pretty terrific, which is good enough. One should never look at a gift of deer, etc.

In the meantime, dinner is done, leftovers from yesterday´s dinner party escabeche: a salad of lamb´s lettuce and avocado, dressed in the escabeche, with pieces of pickled mackerel and salmon, and a smattering of bacon on top. A winner, I feel.
And the pie crust from yesterday´s dried apricot crostata was too big, so I left a piece in the fridge and it´s yielded thirteen cookies (ok, I ate one, so fourteen) that we can have after dinner. Doubly thrifty, as I cooked them as the oven warmed up for the stew. I´m so proud of my green, responsible way with puddings.

The drawing is one I´ve done for a good friend, and has nothing to do with anything much, but I like it.

The Oscar slumber party

2009-02-22T17:15:00.002+01:00

Starry starry night of the Oscars for us on this side of the Atlantic really means night. We stay up, in varying stages of wakefulness, and hope that a rush of sugar will make up for the Academy´s upsetting us, as they usually do.

Always on the menu: chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and this year also oatmeal-raisin, all done by the new exciting method of the giant squidgy cookie. And by the way, that stuff of letting the dough rest for days: it really works.

And now, fingers crossed for Kate Winslet, and let´s hope we don´t wake up baby Pía with the groans.

Giant cookies

2009-02-14T11:27:00.001+01:00

Cookie eaters are divided between the squidgy cookie lovers and the ones who must have a snap.
Cookie bakers fall into two camps: those who have a reliable oven, thick baking sheets, a timer, concentration on the timer and a quick wrist inside the oven mitt - and the others.
Me, I just have the oven mitt. Which hasn´t prevented me from turning out some pretty darn great cookies in my time, but at the expense of years of life, I fear. Stress, burns, carbonized cookies, warped cookie sheets.

All that is over. I have found that if you bake all the dough at once, making one big cookie, you have the maximum squidge for the minimum fuss. No baking in batches, no anxiety. Not much in the way of looks, either, but who cares? These aren´t pretty golden cookies, but wedges of a massive golden cookie. They are crisp and golden only on a small portion of their surface.
I love them.

All you do is take a recipe for a favourite drop cookie, like this, and make one big cookie, 30 cm in diameter or so. You simply let it bake for longer, say, 17 minutes or so, always depending on your own particular oven.
Once it´s out quickly cut it as you would pizza, into triangular wedges. And that´s it.
If you must gild lilies, dribble some icing over it, as is suggested in that wonderful book, Big fat cookies. Otherwise, just go for them. They may not be pretty but they are seriously good.