Lentils with chorizo and wild mushrooms

I picked up some good chorizos the other day at a birdspotting fair in Tarifa (!!) and decided to cook them with lentils. I also chucked in a pack of wild mushrooms I had brought back from Scotland. (The last packet of wild mushrooms I brought back from my travels - in Italy - ended up as food for moth larvae, so I was keen to use these ones before they met the same fate.)


This is a dish that is perfect for pressure cookers, although make sure you add plenty of liquid, as the lentils soak up a surprising amount. Ideally, they should be almost soupy at the end.

Ingredients
olive oil
2 medium sized onions, peeled and chopped
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
500g brown lentils
2 litres of stock
5 fresh chorizos
50 g dried wild mushrooms, soaked in a little hot water
500 g carrots, peeled and roughly sliced
4 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of smoked paprika
1 teaspoon of cumin powder

Method

1. In a pressure cooker, gently fry the onion, adding the garlic just before the onion is done.
2. Add all the other ingredients, including the soaking water from the mushrooms, stir will, cover and close the pressure cooker and bring to a boil.
3. When the pressure has reached the correct level, turn the heat to minimum and cook for 20 minutes.
4. Turn off heat, allow to cool for a little and serve. If you like, you can season with a little vinegar at this point. (Spaniards usually add this individually at the table.)

Pasta with chick peas, tuna and lemon

This is a really quick 'store cupboard' meal. I'm a bit wary of putting things like this on the blog, but have decided to record the ones that come out well to help jog my memory and get me out of my 'tomato sauce' rut. Pasta with pulses seems like an odd combination to British (and Spanish) palates, but is actually quite common in Italy.


Ingredients
1 packet of pasta
1 large jar of cooked chickpeas
2 small tins of tuna
1 lemon
1 teaspoon of oregano leaves
1 teaspoon of salt
olive oil

Method

1. Cook the pasta in plenty of boiling water. When it is nearly done, add the strained chickpeas.
2. Once the pasta is cooked, strain the pasta and chickpeas into a colander, drain and return to the saucepan. Slosh a bit of olive oil over them, add the drained tuna, the juice of 1 lemon, the oregano leaves and salt. Mix well and serve.

Carrillada (pig's cheek stew)

Carrillada or pig's cheek is a great cut for stews. It has plenty of flavour and a lovely moist texture too. The term 'pig's cheek' puts a lot of people off, but actually it is really the jaw muscle. I don't see why eating this should be any less appealing than eating a pig's leg or back muscles. Because it has plenty of connective tissue, it needs long cooking but develops a great texture and does not dry out.


The recipe below is deliberately 'rustic', with only a bare minimum of chopping or anything else, and is therefore perfect for children to make. And it's also good because it provides a basic stew recipe which kids can than improvise around, changing the ingredients and flavours as they wish, with only the bare minimum of adult interference.

Ingredients
olive oil
2 onions
3 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of smoked paprika
1 kg of carrilada (pig's cheek) - if you can't get it, substitute with any stewing cut
500g of carrots
2 large tomatoes
200 ml of chicken stock (more if not using a pressure cooker)
1 teaspoon of salt
4 bay leaves

Method

1. Peel and roughly chop the onions. Peel and smash the garlic. If using carrillada, it comes in small 'steaks' and can be cooked whole. Peel the carrots but leave whole. Top and tail the tomatoes and cut into quarters.
2. Put plenty of olive oil in a pressure cooker or large saucepan. Add the onions to the oil and fry gently. When they are nearly done, add the garlic and continue frying for a minute or so.
3. Then add the paprika, stir and fry for a few seconds, add the meat, stir to mix, and fry for a few minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients.
4. If using a pressure cooker, put the lid on, heat until the cooker whistles, turn to minimum and cook for 20 minutes. If using a conventional pan, cover and bring to a boil, turn to minimum and simmer for about 2 hours, check the liquid level occasionally.
5. Like all stews, this is improved by being left for a day.

Pressure cooker
Like a lot of British people, I used to have a bit of a prejudice against pressure cookers. (Although oddly enough I remember a flatmate of mine at university having one - not sure that he ever used it, however.) In Spain, they are very popular, and are ideally suited to cooking pulses and wet stews.

They also have another great benefit, which I only realised when we started making this, and that is that they are perfect for use by kids. Sammy actually made this stew from scratch - my only intervention was to peel the carrots (every kid likes having his or her own personal kitchen porter), to do a bit of light supervision and to remember to turn the stew off at the end. You can make the whole dish in one pot, and don't need to worry about heat or liquid levels while cooking, or even to monitor it.

Cuttlefish and potato stew (papas con choco)

Cuttlefish stewed with potato is one of the staples of gaditano cooking. Cuttlefish isn't eaten at all in the UK (unless you're a budgerigar) but it's actually very good. It tastes quite similar to squid, with the same mild slightly sweet flavour, although the texture is different. It is more tender than squid but because the flesh is much thicker, it has a slightly meatier consistency. This dish belongs to the category of peasant and working-class food which involves stretching a little bit of meat (or in this case seafood) with vegetables, pulses or grains. I guess the nearest equivalent in the British isles would be Irish stew.


Ingredients
olive oil
150g onions, peeled and roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
50g green peppers, roughly chopped
500g of cuttlefish, cleaned and cut into chunks
250g of ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
750g potatoes, peeled and chopped into chunks
200ml white wine
salt
freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon of sweet paprika
2 bay leaves

Method

1. Put the onions in a large saucepan with plenty of olive oil and fry gently. Once they start to soften, add the garlic and green pepper and fry for another few minutes.
2. Then add the cuttlefish, tomatoes, salt, pepper, paprika and bay leaves, stir well and fry for 5 minutes.
3. Add the potatoes and white wine, bring to the boil, cover, turn heat to minimum and simmer gently until the potatoes are tender. (About 20 to 30 minutes.)

Protein vs. carbs
Perhaps inevitably, as we become richer and our diets have become more protein-heavy the tendency is to up the meat content in such dishes, and I have to admit that my version has slightly less potato than the original recipe I was working from (in Pescados y Mariscos Gaditanos by Carlos Spinola and Manuel Fernández-Trujillo).

Curried baked beans

I first had curried baked beans at a barbecue in Stirling in the 1970s. At the time, it seemed incredibly exotic, partly because it tasted of curry powder, but also because it was the kind of thing my mum would never have made. I remember eating a lot of it and I think I can probably trace my tendency to splash chilli sauce on things back to that day.


Ingredients
1 tin of baked beans
1/2 teaspoon of curry powder

Method
Open the tin of beans, pour a little of the excess sauce away, put the beans and the curry powder in a small saucepan and heat gently.

Scotland in the 70s
Apart from making curried baked beans, my barbecue hostess and her husband were "fond of a drink" as the saying goes, and it may be that the addition of curry powder to boring old beans was an alcohol-inspired act of culinary genius. My other memory of her was that she happened to come for lunch the day my mum went into labour with my sister, Clara. As a result, my brother Mark (13) and me (11) were left in her care for the rest of the afternoon. She kindly shared her cigarettes with us to help calm all of our nerves.