Prawns and garlic stewed in olive oil

This is a really simple dish. There is only one trick to it, which is to start with cold oil so that the prawns stew slowly, rather than frying quickly.

Ingredients
olive oil
200g of peeled prawns
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely sliced
salt
parsley

Method
Put plenty of olive oil in a medium sized saucepan. Add the prawns and the garlic and cook over a medium heat until the prawns are cooked. (Don't overcook them; they should be juicy, not tough.)
Sprinkle with a little salt and some parsley and serve.

Clam and potato stew

I'm always intrigued by how certain combinations of food become fixed. It's more obvious in Spain, where there is both a more extensive repertoire of traditional dishes and a more conservative approach to cooking (facts which I guess are related).



I was in the market today shopping for fish and, as usual, not quite sure what to buy when I spotted some nice-looking clams at 6 euros a kilo. I usually just cook clams a la marinera, with paprika and sherry, but I wanted something that would turn them into a one-pot meal. At first, I thought about doing them with rice, but then it struck me that they would be good in a potato stew. In Cadiz, the usual thing to combine with potatoes like this is cuttlefish (papas con choco) but it worked very well with the clams and I will definitely be repeating this one. I think I might also try to work out a curried version with coconut milk and turmeric at some point.

Ingredients

1 head of celery
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil
2 teaspoons of smoked paprika
1 teaspoon of cumin
2 kg of potatoes
1/2 kg of green beans
4 ripe tomatoes
1 teaspoon of salt
1 glass of white wine
1 glass of chicken stock (or replace with fish stock or water)
2 bay leaves
1 kg of clams


Method

1. Clean and chop the celery and garlic, and fry gently in plenty of olive oil.
2. Peel the potatoes and cut them into large chunks. Cut the green beans into 2-inch segments. Cut the tomatoes into large chunks. Wash the clams thorough in plenty of cold water.
3. Once the celery begins to soften, add the paprika and cumin and fry for 30 seconds or so before adding the potatoes, beans, tomatoes, wine, stock, bay leaves and salt.
4. Bring to a boil, turn heat to low, cover and simmer gently until the potatoes are just done.
5. Add the clams, stir well, cover and continue cooking for a few minutes until all of the clams have opened.

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).

Scallops stir-fried with ginger, garlic and spring onion

I was in Islay last week, visiting my friend Angus, and just before I left he gave me a big tub of really fresh scallops.


Ingredients
12 large scallops
small piece of ginger
1 clove of garlic
4 spring onions
butter or olive oil

Method

1. Remove the orange corals from the scallops. Peel and mince the ginger and garlic. Slice the spring onion.
2. Fry the ginger, garlic and spring onion in the butter or olive oil for 30 seconds, add the scallops and fry for another 2 minutes or so.

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.

Stuffed squid with tomato sauce

Small tender squid seem to have been designed for the purpose of being stuffed. You just chop of the head, tentacles and fins, pull out the inside bits, wash them under the tap and you have nature’s perfect stuffing container.




Ingredients
8 small squid (or 4 larger ones)
Plenty of homemade tomato sauce
2 slices of good white bread
olive oil
1 glass of red wine

Method

1. Remove and discard the squid’s purple external membrane. Chop off the tentacles and fins, and set them aside. Chop off the head, discard, and remove the insides, including the fibrous quill. Wash well, then pat dry with kitchen paper.
2. Remove the crusts from the bread, break into small pieces, mix with some of the tomato sauce and whizz in a food processor. Chop the tentacles and fins, and mix in with the breadcrumb and sauce mixture.
3. Fill the squid bodies with the sauce and breadcrumb mixture, then seal with a wooden toothpick. (See picture below.) Heat some olive oil in a frying pan, fry the squid for a minute or so until browned.
4. In a saucepan, simmer the squid in the rest of the tomato sauce, to which you have added a glass of red wine. Leave the lid off for first 10 minutes or so, to allow the alcohol to evaporate from the wine, then cover and continue simmering until done. (Around 20 minutes if your squid are small, 30-40 minutes if they are larger.)

Clams with paprika and sherry (almejas a la marinera)

My mother-in-law, Isabel, makes this dish of clams seasoned with paprika. (This is a standard way of cooking clams in Cadiz, and I imagine elsewhere in Spain, too). I’m not sure if she uses sherry or not – I shall have to ask her. If you don’t have a bottle of sherry to hand, just use some dry white wine instead.



Ingredients
1 kg of clams, washed
6 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of sweet paprika
1 small glass of dry sherry (fino or manzanilla)
olive oil
salt

Method
Slice the garlic thinly, and heat it gently in a saucepan with plenty of olive oil. After a couple of minutes, add the paprika, stir well and continue to fry for 10 seconds or so, then add the clams, the sherry and a little salt. Cover the pan with a lid, bring to the boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook until all the clams have opened. Serve with plenty of good crusty bread, to dip into the sauce.

Shrimp pancakes (tortillas de camarón)

These crispy little shrimp pancakes are a Cadiz speciality. They’re very easy to make (and the homemade versions are much better than anything you can buy in a restaurant). They’re made with tiny live shrimps, which are sold by the cupful from a wooden crate by old-timers in the market. You put the shrimps whole into the batter mix, where they wriggle around for a bit before slowly expiring (and what better way to go). If you can’t get hold of live shrimps, then substitute them with small peeled prawns.



Ingredients
250 g chickpea flour
200 g plain flour
salt
parsley
6 spring onions
water (about 500 ml)
250 g of live shrimps (or small peeled prawns)
olive oil for frying

Method

1. Mix the flour in a large bowl, season with salt, a handful of chopped parsley, and the finely chopped spring onions. Add water until you have a smooth batter – neither too runny nor too thick. Add the shrimps and mix.
2. Heat a good quantity of oil in a large frying pan (the oil should be about 1 cm deep). When the oil is hot (but not smoking), add large spoonfuls of the mixture. (The mixture should spread to form a roundish pancake; if it breaks up, then the mixture is too runny; if it fails to spread properly, then it is too thick.) Fry the pancakes for about 30 seconds, then turn carefully and cook for another 30 seconds before removing from the oil.

Don't play with your food







Street food
As far as I can tell, Spain (or at least Andalucia) doesn't have a big tradition of street food. I'm not sure why this is. Anyway, one exception in Cadiz is el Media Barba and his shrimp pancake cart, which appears in the centre of town on Sundays and during Carnival. To see how the pancakes are made (and why he is called Media Barba [Half Beard]) click on this video link.