Arbroath smokies

I was at the Foodies Festival in Edinburgh and was lucky enough to see Iain Spink smoking his haddock on site. The process itself is pretty simple: the fish have their heads removed and are gutted and cleaned, before being tied in pairs and hung over a stick.


Next, the stick itself is placed over a half barrel, with a fire of beech and oak burning inside it.


Then the barrel is covered with a few layers of damp hessian.


After half an hour or so, the Arbroath smokies are ready.


Arbroath smokies keep for a while, and perhaps the most famous dish in which they feature is Cullen skink. They are also good in a potato salado. However, the best way to serve them is definitely hot from the barrel.

Spanish olives

One of the big changes is moving away from the old town is that I no longer have the central market next door. However, there is a smaller market about 15 minutes up the road, which in some ways I prefer. Partly because I had spread myself too thin at the old one, and found myself sneaking around between different butcher's stalls trying to convince them all that I was a regular customer who deserved the best treatment, like a 19th century French politician who has taken on more mistresses than he can handle. (And I will still be going back into town for Antonio's retinto beef. "Nobody beats my meat".)



I was worried that the olives in the new market would not be up to the ones Matías sells in the town centre, which unfailingly came with the comment "bien despachado" (a generous serving) and the advice to keep them in the fridge. Fortunately there is a good olive stall in the new market, too, and my favourites are these "verdiales gordas". I don't know why, but Spanish olives don't really seem to make it to the UK, where most olives are either Greek or Italian. I guess, also, that this kind of light treatment is less well-suited to transport and extended shelf-life.

Islay seafood

No recipes as such in this post, just a paean of praise to the fresh seafood on Islay.



This is the second year that we've gone across to Islay to spend some time with Angus and his son Joseph (pictured below fishing for crabs). We stayed at the house they have had built there, across the bay from Port Ellen. I was at school and then at university with Angus, and also at university with his partner (and Joseph's mum) Penny, who sadly died three years ago.



For me, there is something magical about the place. A mix, I guess, of the island, the house and its setting, and spending time with people I love.

And, of course, you can also get great seafood there. We bought some live lobsters from a fisherman, and he threw in a bag of crab claws and some velvet crabs for free. Earlier on we had bought some scallops from a little processing plant set up in what I think used to be Port Ellen's schoolhouse, and I also had some magnificent oysters at the Islay Fair.



The scallops were great (and about half the price of what I would normally pay), although the scene was a bit 21st-century Dickensian: a large worksurface surrounded by half a dozen eastern Europeans shucking away frantically. The sort of thing which makes me thankful to have landed myself the relatively cushy job of being a translator.

We took the meat out of the crab claws and Angus used it to make crab linguini. The lobsters were boiled then grilled and eaten with some homemade mayonnaise, the scallops were pan-fried with a bit of garlic, and the velvet crabs were just boiled and eaten plain.





There's not a lot of meat in the velvet crabs, but if you approach them as a large prawn rather than a small crab then you shouldn't be disappointed. (I searched the web for recipes, but mostly came across long and complicated procedures for making velvet crab bisque - crema de nécoras in Spanish - which involved moulis and muslin sieves.)

To dye for
In Britain there's a tendency to think of the work done retrieving meat from shellfish as an inconvenience which may or may not be justified by the prize at the end. In Spain, there are lots of snacky seafoods which involve quite a bit of cracking, biting, poking or sucking. These include crab claws (bocas), winkles (burgaillos) eaten with a pin, and cañaillas, a type of sea snail whose shell ends in a long spike, which provides a handly implement for removing the flesh. (An example of evolution backfiring, if ever there was one!) The scientific name is bolinus brandaris, but their common name in English is spiny dye murex, because their mucus was extracted and used by the Phoenicians to produce Tyrian purple. The dye was one of the ancient and medieval world's most expensive commodities and was used to dye the togas of triumphant generals and of emperors in Ancient Rome. Production eventually ceased with the fall of the Byzantine Empire (1453) and was replaced with vegetable and then modern chemical dyes.

Roasted garlic puree

One slightly frustrating feature of food shopping in Spain is the way many products are treated as commodities. While a British supermarket allows you to choose coffee on the basis of country of origin, strength of roast, fineness of grounds and quality, the Spanish equivalent gives you a choice of three or four almost identical brands, and the only other choice is decaff or normal.



This is true even of garlic. In Edinburgh, I can choose between ‘normal’ garlic, smoked garlic, top grade Highland garlic (or its Patagonian replacement during the winter), jars of crushed and chopped garlic and tubes of garlic puree. In Cadiz there is just garlic, and the occasional appearance of fresh garlic in the spring.

I don’t always feel like peeling and chopping garlic, particularly if I’m making something quick, and that's where ready-crushed garlic comes in handy. The method below is a great way of producing homemade garlic puree. It also has the advantage of being much milder than the raw version, so I prefer to use it in dips and other dishes where the garlic isn’t going to be cooked any further. Once you've cooked the garlic, it will keep for a few days in the fridge, and you can just squeeze it straight into your cooking.

Ingredients4 heads of garlic
salt
4 bay leaves
olive oil

Method

1. Drizzle the heads of garlic olive oil, sprinkle with salt, wrap in tinfoil with the bay leaves, and roast in a hot oven for 45 minutes or so.
2. Remove the tinfoil parcel from the oven, allow to cool, cut each head of garlic in half, and squeeze out the roast garlic into a small bowl.
3. Mix with a little salt and some more olive oil, and store in a jar in the fridge.

You obviously don’t want to turn the oven on just for this, so the best thing to do is bung some garlic in the oven when you are already baking something else.