Cooking Spanish Food – Part
1 - with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I
volunteered to cook a Spanish anniversary meal for Laurent with little Florence
as a guest one year when we lived in Wisconsin.
Spanish food is similar to what is made in Languedoc and the Pays
Basque, which share the Pyrenées mountain region between them.
I
took out my copy of Penelope Casas’ cookbook The Food and Wine of Spain to look up recipes. This cookbook always makes me think of love
as Casas described how she and her Spanish boyfriend sampled tapas (appetizers)
in the “tasca” bars of Madrid.
That
sweet story made me think of eating in Chicago’s many ethnic restaurants with
Laurent when we first dated.
I
read through Casas’ recipes and came up with my basic menu:
-Ensalada
San Isidro
-Gambas
al ajillo (garlic shrimp)
-Roast
lamb with white beans
-Brownies
(These are not Spanish, but Laurent and Florence both like them.)
I
looked through our wines and wrote out our menu on a piece of bordered
stationery with a rose on it.
This
menu replaced the one that I had in a frame by the dining room table from our
last meal. I pasted the old menu in our
menu journal of festive family meals.
Now
all I had to do was deliver on my gourmet promises as I taught Florence how to
do some things in the kitchen like mixing brownie batter.
The
Ensalada San Isidro required marinating canned tuna (packed in oil) with red
wine vinegar, minced onion, chopped parsley, and pepper overnight. Casas’ recipe called for sour capers, but I
did not use them, because Laurent does not like sour food. Even without the capers, this marinated tuna
salad was delicious and can also be used for sandwiches.
I
liked rolling around the sound of “atún escabechado” for marinated tuna on my
tongue. I added this savory concoction
to hand torn romaine lettuce that Florence helped tear after I washed it. She added sliced tomatoes, chopped cooked
white asparagus (from France), and sliced onion that we had soaked in warm
water to mellow the taste. Green olives
with red pimiento peppers made the salad colorful.
Ensalada
San Isidro is basically a tuna salad, but it has flair. The flair, of course, came from telling
Florence that San Isidro is the patron saint of farmers and shepherds in Spain
and that God sent him to help with plowing.
It
may be tuna salad, but it has a college education as we say in the United
States. The hagiography required a
little research, but it let me add some “spin” to my food offerings in addition
to nice bread to soak up the dressing, which we only do at home not in
restaurants.
The
gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp) needed no spin; everyone who lives in the
Midwest starves for fresh seafood. Most
shrimp in Wisconsin is frozen, which is fine if it is frozen raw shrimp that
you can thaw and cook like fresh seafood.
End
of Part 1.
To
be continued…
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
