España

Hola Amigos!

Today we cooked food from Spain, making gazpacho, paella and crema catalana.

We started the day by making a grocery list, and trust me, it was exciting. The picture below is all of the ingredients that we used today minus the cucumber and not in total. For instance, while we used 7 or 8 tomatoes, only 3 are in the picture representin'.


We got our three recipes from three different cookbooks because we are crazy like that. They are, from left to right in the picture below, Spanish Home Cooking by Miriam Kelen, Mediterranean Cooking from Reader's Digest and Paella!: Spectacular Rice Dishes from Spain by Penelope Casas.

We bought our non-seafood ingredients from Byerly's and our seafood from a really cool seafood store called Coastal Seafood. The one we visited was in Minneapolis off of East Franklin Street but there is another one located in St. Paul if that's how you roll.


Onto the gazpacho! Gazpacho is a traditional Andalusian cold soup. It's made with lots of tomatoes, cucumber, red bell pepper, a hard-boiled egg, olive oil, sherry wine vinegar, garlic and, oddly enough, bread. The bread is the part that kind of weirded me out as it is supposed to be soaked in the olive oil and sherry wine vinegar and then pureed with everything else. We served it with a little parsley garnish and croûtons. It was okay, but I think that we added to much bread so, while it tasted really good, it had a rather strange texture. It was also a lot lighter and more salmon-colored than the gazpacho in the cookbook. Nonetheless, it was definitely something that I would make again.

The paella was by far the coolest part. The two reasons that I had really wanted to make Spanish would were 1) Yo hablo español and 2) I really wanted to make paella. We chose a seafood paella that had monkfish (which we replaced with swordfish), grouper, shrimp and mussels. We did leave out the squid because some of our group members would not have even tried the dish if squid was involved and nobody wanted to touch it. The cool thing about paella (pronounced pie-eh-uh) is that it isn't simply one dish, but rather, a name for a lot of dishes that contain a wide variety of ingredients. The only necessary parts are rice, water and olive oil. I thought that this turned out really well. The flavors in the paella are amazing and the smell while cooking is simply incredible. My nose was very happy.


Finally, we made Crema Catalana which tasted so so so so so good. Seriously. Yum. It is a Catalan custard with burnt sugar topping made of whole milk, sugar, vanilla bean, lemon peel, cornstarch, egg yolks and sugar. It's not exactly the healthiest dish in the world, but it's taste makes any thought of calories or arterial health disappear in a mouthful of pure bliss. I cannot possibly understate how insanely delicious this was. Unfortunately, it came out a little runnier than it's probably supposed to so it had a consistency more appropriate for the gazpacho. In fact, we probably could have served it in glasses but then we wouldn't have been able to use the blow torch. Which we did. Don't worry though, we had a responsible adult in the kitchen. Actually, this aforementioned adult actually did the torching so I guess we aren't as cool as we thought we were. Anyways, this was my favorite dish by far, though it is a dessert so it had a rather unfair advantage.

¡Adios y buenos suerte en sus cocinas!