Spanish Omelette Incident

It wasn't just recipes for Mojos that I picked up when we went to Fuerteventura in October; there were plenty of other dishes that inspired me during our time out there and one of these was a Spanish Omelette. It was a regular meal of choice when we dined at the hotel in Fuerteventura.

This weekend was a good one; I caught up with some good friends on Friday after I had driven to their place straight from my new job, on Saturday I had some enjoyable frames of snooker with an old workmate who now is employed in a well-deserved role at a quality organisation and the weekend was topped off today by having a walk with my travelling companion to Fuerteventura. Even though we had an enjoyable walk the weather was cold and we were hungry by the time we had finished it. Therefore we decided that to buck us up we would have something to eat that reminded us of our holidays.

As I was cooking I decided what music we should listen to while I prepared the food and I chose Steely Dan's well-produced, highly polished and perfectly sung album " Can't Buy a Thrill," which includes the jazzy funk of "Do it again," and the ever popular "Reelin' in the years,"

Spanish omelettes differ from others in that potatoes are one of their primary ingredients. For this omelette I peeled three white potatoes and sliced them length ways into circular pieces that were about 5 centimetres wide and 1 centimetre thick. I then steamed them in a steamer so that they were subsequently soft enough to fry in a frying pan without them burning. The potatoes took about fifteen minutes' steaming to be soft enough to add to the frying pan. I checked they were soft enough by putting a fork through them.

While the potatoes were steaming I topped and tailed two white onions and then sliced them up into 1 centimetre by 1 centimetre pieces. I fried them lightly in olive oil and after they had started to become translucent, which was after about ten minutes, I added the potatoes to the frying pan that I had previously steamed them. I stirred the mixture regularly to stop it getting stuck to the pan or burnt. I also added a tablespoonful of dried basil to the mixture and a pinch of black pepper.

In the meantime I whisked five eggs together in a bowl and as soon as they were properly whisked together I added them to the onions and potatoes. I tilted the pan a little to be sure that egg mixture covered all parts of the pan and fried the mixture on a medium heat for five minutes while ensuring it did not stick to the bottom of the pan by regularly thrusting a wooden spatula underneath it.

After around five minutes I placed the frying pan containing the omelette under the grill checking it regularly; once the egg yolk atop it had dried and the omelette began to brown I knew it was ready.

I served the omlette with some baked beans, another Spanish Staple Food, and it certainly revitalised us after our walk. The potatoes gave the omelette both an unexpected sweetness and made it much more substantial than many omelettes are.

The omelette in a frying pan not long after its grilling

It was delicious with baked beans.

Finding my Mojo

October this year was a month of marking time for me; it was my last month working in a job that I had been in for the last four and a half years where I had worked in the company of some wonderful people. It had also been the first time I had taken a holiday abroad for over ten years.

The destination of choice was the island of Fuerteventura which is part of the Canary Islands which are situated off the coast of sub-Saharan Africa and belong to Spain. Apart from perfect weather and relaxing surroundings the island has some excellent cuisine which although bearing some similarity to Spanish cuisine also has a style of its own peculiar to the Canary Islands.

One of the dishes that was served at each evening meal we attended at the hotel was a sauce called mojo sauce which is both spicy and flavoursome. I enjoyed it so much I purchased while in Fuerteventura a recipe book that detailed many of the mojo sauces made in the Canaries. The sauces tend to fall into two categories; red sauces or green sauces and are made using sweet peppers and any number of spices.

The weekend after we landed back from Fuerteventura I was entertaining a number of guests and decided to test out my own variation on the mojo recipes on them. I took two sweet peppers, one red and one orange, topped and tailed them and sliced them lengthways. I removed all the seeds and proceeded to cut the peppers into squares. Sweet peppers are similar in texture to the peppers that are usually found in the supermarket except that in shape they are longer and more pointed.

Next I topped and tailed five cloves of garlic and then cut them into fine pieces. I put the garlic and pepper into a bowl and mixed them with a tablespoon of cumin, two tablespoons of red wine vinegar and a tablespoon of olive oil. I then added this mixture to a blender and blended it on a medium setting until the mixture transformed into a orange paste. I removed it from the blender and served it in a bowl.

The fact I had not cooked the ingredients gave the mojo a strong taste and a lot more flavour to it. I chose to serve it with cheese and biscuits where it complimented well the range of types of cheese and the biscuits I offered to my guests.

Glowing bright; this mojo tastes as fiery as it looks.

Mock Mash

A couple of Wednesdays ago I needed some quick comfort food to perk me up after a long day at the coal face and I elected to cook a variation on the traditional sausage and mash dish that we all know and love. The reason for this variation was that I had four sage-flavoured vegetarian sausages that needed eating.

My spirits were lifted before I started cooking the meal by the arrival in the post of Demon Records' excellent reissue of Elvis Costello's 1979 album "Armed Forces". The original album is good enough on its own with tracks like "Accidents Will Happen" " Green Shirt" "Party Girl" and "Oliver's Army" but it is made even better by the bonus tracks including essential b-sides such as "Clean Money" and "Tiny Steps". Needless to say it went straight on the CD player while I cooked.

I first peeled and thinly sliced two white potatoes, which I steamed whilst I cooked the sausages in gravy. A steamer has the advantage over a traditional pan to boil vegetables on the hob as once the water is up to temperature the vegetables you cook get done more quickly than those that are boiled.

While the potatoes were steaming I peeled and then cut an onion in half lengthways. Next I cut into long thin slices and fried it in my Le Creseut dish in a small amount of olive oil with some white pepper until the onions turned a little translucent. When this occurred I knew it was time to add the sausages and I cooked them on a medium heat until the started to turn a dark brown. Once they had changed colour in this way I made half a pint of gravy using a vegetable stock cube and half a tablespoon full of plain flour. I was able to manage the risk of getting lumpy gravy by adding boiling water to the stock and flour a little at a time and stirring it gradually so as to get a thick gravy.

After adding the gravy to the onion and sausages I let them stew on the hob for around ten minutes so as the sausages and onion absorbed a reasonable amount of the gravy. Meanwhile the potatoes were soft enough to be mashed; the trick with getting good mashed potato in my opinion is to use no milk and instead mash the potatoes with two ounces of margarine. In this way you get mashed potato that is not too sloppy and also very rich and tasteful.

The rich gravy and mash combined with the substantial sausages made this some good quality comfort food to put me in the right frame of mind for the next working day.

The new ones are the best: a classic dish is given a new twist with the vegetarian sausages.

Treatloaf

Part two of Saturday's baking programme was to make a loaf to take to the barbecue that evening. The loaf I was to make turned out to be an orange and raisin loaf as the raisins in my cupboard needed eating more than the sultanas did. The key difference between the loaf and the cake in the previous entry on this blog is that the loaf uses slightly more drier ingredients and does not use any eggs.

I greased a loaf tin that was ten centimetres wide, sixteen long and around seven deep. Again the reason for the extensive greasing was to ensure that the loaf came out cleanly when cooked.

I first mixed eight ounces of flour with one ounce of margarine and then six ounces of raisins and four ounces of caster sugar into a bowl. The effect was to create a very dry mixture that looked colourful talcum powder. I added some further colour to the proceedings by grating an ounce of orange rind into the bowl.

I set the bowl to one side and in a measuring jug I squeezed the juice of half an orange and added enough milk to make the cocktail up to quarter of a pint. I added some much needed dampness to the to the mixture in the bowl by then adding the orange juice and milk and not stopping stirring it until all the dry ingredients had absorbed it. Once I had done this the mixture was ready and I poured it into the cake tin and cooked it for one hour on 170 degrees (180 if you don't have a fan oven). Again I used the skewer trick to be sure it was ready when I took it out of the oven.

The use of fresh orange was the key to this loaf as I find raisins a bit bland on their own when used in baking. Here the raisins provide enough texture while the oranges gave a tropical flavour to the loaf. Certainly the guests at the evening's barbecue must have agreed in some way as most of the loaf was consumed.

Glowing loaf- the loaf fresh out of the oven.

Cake Bush

Yesterday I was in preparation mode as after being on hand at a local pub on the Friday night to celebrate the birthday of one of my oldest friends I decided to cook a cake and a loaf for two other friends who were having a belated birthday celebration at a barbecue that evening.

I chose Kate Bush's super 1989 effort "The Sensual World" to listen to while I prepared the cakes. The album's strengths lie in the atmospheric use of uillean pipes on many of the songs, David Gilmour guesting on guitar on some tracks and above all some consistently top notch song writing by Kate. The song "The Fog" made the album an appropriate selection also as I had spent most of the week driving to work in fog and latterly walking in it with my dog that morning.

The first cake I made was a Madeira Cake. I started by greasing with margarine a twenty centimetre wide cake tin that was around five centimetres deep. I cannot overstate the importance of greasing a cake tin thoroughly so as to stop the cake sticking in it after it has been cooked.

I broke three eggs, after first getting them to room temperature, and whisked them together in a bowl. Next in a separate bowl I creamed together five ounces of margarine and five ounces of caster sugar. I made sure that the ingredients were mixed together by mixing them so thoroughly that very few of the grains of sugar were left loose in the bowl.

After the margarine and sugar were mixed together I added the beaten eggs and two ounces of self-raising floor into the bowl and mixed the ingredients together until there was no loose egg yolk or flour showing in the bowl.

Some variations on this recipe use lemon essence in the cake mixture but I prefer the real thing and with this in mind I squeezed the juice of half a lemon into the mixture and then added the remaining flour to it which I folded into the mixture leaving it with the consistency of a thick paste.

I added the mixture to the cake tin and then cooked it on170 degrees (180 for non-fan ovens) for one hour. I knew the cake was ready when I took it out of the oven, pierced it with a skewer and the skewer came out clean.

I took the cake to the barbecue that night where it was able to compliment the excellent Spanish Food and delicious barbecue prepared by my friends. The light sponge and lemon certainly in my mind helped provide good support to the tasty pork belly, flavoursome chorizo and the sausages that I consumed.

The next instalment of this blog will cover the orange and sultana loaf so watch this space...

Golden Brown: fresh out of the oven.

There was not much of the cake or the loaf left by the end of the barbecue- a good sign :-)

New Jerusalem

The last four days have been good ones; the sun has shone, I've played a round of golf, seen plenty of good friends in super surroundings, enjoyed some relaxing walks and been away from the office. The generally sunny weather has meant a lot stickiness and mugginess hanging in the air as well, not good weather you would think for making soup however the soup I prepared on today was an exception to the rule.

I had been a long walk in a sun that had succeeded in burning my neck and making my dog collapse with exhaustion in a meadow at various points but we made it back by mid-afternoon even though I could have stayed out all day.

One of David Bowie's slightly weaker efforts, 1984's "Tonight" was on the media player and it contained some summery music in the form of a slightly tired cover of the Beach Boys' song "God Only Knows".

The key ingredient of the soup was a selection of six Jerusalem Artichokes that I had picked up  from the local market the previous week. You will be hard pressed to find this vegetable at your local supermarket and I would certainly recommend looking at your local market stall to pick it up, one good reason why you should not always rely on the big supermarkets for your food.

Before starting work on the artichokes I topped and tailed two white onions and then diced them. The onions were so strong that I had to put on a pair of goggles while preparing them! Next I topped and tailed six cloves of garlic but I did not cut them up in any other way. After melting four ounces of low fat margarine in a large pan on the hob I added the onions and garlic and let them stew for around fifteen minutes until the onions became soft and translucent.

While the onions and garlic cooked I prepared the Jerusalem Artichokes by peeling the dark brown skin from them and then cutting them up into small rectangles. I added them to the pan of onions and garlic with a pint and a half of chicken stock and a quarter of a pint of milk. I let the ingredients simmer away for around half an hour before taking them off the heat and then blending them when cooled.

After the blending I added half a pint of plain, low fat Greek Yoghurt to the pan and stirred it in thoroughly with the rest of the soup. Once I had warmed the soup through I served it with some chives to garnish that I put on top of each bowl of soup.

The margarine and the garlic gave the soup a real tangy and sweet taste that offset the strong flavour of the Jerusalem Artichoke, which tasted much like watercress. Despite it being a warm dish I found it to be very refreshing especially when consumed sat in the garden as the evening sun beat down.

Ready to eat and garnished with chives freshly cut from the back garden.

Salmon Saturday

The second part of our eve of Tour De France meal was a dish that I had not cooked for a while and was long overdue pride of place on my menu- roast salmon. This was a dish that had first came to my attention as a young child when I saw an advert on the TV which extolled the virtues of roasted Salmon Steaks with a side helping of watercress mixed with yoghurt.

For my dish however I substituted salmon steaks with salmon fillets. The reason for this was that salmon steaks tend to be festooned with bones and you spend half your time picking the bones out of the steaks which in turn detracts from the taste experience of the salmon.

The album of choice for cooking which I had earlier in the day picked up second hand from Poundland, ironically for the sum of £2.00, was Radiohead's patchy 1993 debut "Pablo Honey". Although some of the tracks clearly illustrate that the band was still finding its feet before having a tilt at greatness, the melodic singing and biting guitar of "You", the evergreen "Creep" and the confident, surging "Anyone Can Play Guitar," show that some of the ingredients of their classic second album "The Bends" were already in place. Funnily the enough the album was released around the same time that I saw the advert for the salmon steaks.

I prepared the fillets by putting them on a foil sheet and sprinkling fresh Thyme on them and thick circular slices of red onion as well as the juice from a whole lemon. I then wrapped the salmon in a foil parcel and left it to one side while I prepared some new potatoes. The trick with new potatoes is not to peel them fully but instead to cut out any black or brown bits and then wash them thoroughly. Once the potatoes had been prepared I boiled them on the hob with fresh mint to give them a fresh flavour of summer.

While the potatoes were cooking on the hob I cooked the salmon in the oven for twenty minutes at 180 degrees,or more like 170 degrees with a fan oven. I also prepared the watercress by first washing it thoroughly and then adding it to a bowl with a tub of low fat, plain Greek Yoghurt. In readiness for the meal I put the bowl of watercress on the dining table next to the bottle of Bordeaux red wine.

Next I sliced finely five shallots, after first topping and tailing them, and cooked them lightly in five ounces of melted margarine. After the shallots had softened slightly I sliced thinly two ounces of spinach leaves and added them to the margarine and shallots. The spinach soon shrank and became part of the mixture which meant the spinach butter sauce, as I dubbed it, was ready.

I served the salmon with red onions and the lemon by splitting it between two dinner plates. I then added the sauce exclusively to the salmon and kept the potatoes and spinach on a separate part of the plate. The reason for this was that the spinach and potatoes, as a result of the mint, had a very fresh taste which contrasted with the rich taste of the salmon and the sauce. Certainly the mint and spinach helped us cool down from the high temperature caused by the Mediterranean- like weather while we were consuming the delicious salmon.

Together with the French Onion Soup this meal served to set us up well for the following day's unique opportunity to see the Tour De France first hand as it passed through a nearby village and got us in the mood for the Tour De France themed barbeque afterwards.

Just like on TV twenty years ago but without although the bones in the fish