International Night – Spain

Continuing with our European theme, our International Night this week was centered on the rich cuisine of Spain. When I first started researching Spanish cuisine, I had fully intended to prepare paella as our main dish. Paella is one of those things that I’ve never had, but I see pictures of it in cookbooks and magazines quite often. It always looks very appealing, thanks in large part to the colorful nature of the dish.

I found some recipes for it and discovered that traditional paella usually has both mussels and clams in addition to other forms of seafood. Nobody in our house it very fond of mussels or clams, and they can’t really be purchased in our local stores. I would have had to make a trip to Jonesboro to get them from Kroger, and I decided that it just wasn’t going to happen this week. Even though I found some recipes using just shrimp and chicken, I decided when we started our International Nights that I would prepare the meals with the traditional recipe that is most often used in their respective countries. So I ditched the idea of preparing paella and looked for another typical Spanish meal.

I soon came across a recipe for fabada asturiana, and I was immediately drawn to it. The thing that most attracted me to the dish was the inclusion of chorizo in this rich soup. My family and I have grown to enjoy chorizo at the local Mexican restaurants, so I knew that any recipe featuring chorizo was bound to be good. The recipe called for dried fava beans, but those weren’t available here, so I used large lima beans instead. I also couldn’t find morcilla, a Spanish blood sausage, and there really wasn’t anything that compared to substitute for it. It was good, but, to be honest, I felt it was a little bland. I think it would have been better with a little more spice.

After hearing so much about tapas recently, I also thought briefly about making a variety of the popular Spanish bar foods to go along with our fabada. My husband went to a tapas restaurant at Indianapolis recently, and he raved about it. However, I soon realized that preparing a variety of tapas was going to be too much work for me to whip up after getting home from school, so I decided just to make one of Spain’s most popular tapas, tortilla de patatas. It is essentially a potato omelet, and it was very good and easy to prepare.

Here are the recipes for our Spanish fare:

Fabada asturiana

2 pounds dried fava beans or large lima beans

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Pinch of saffron threads (I left this out because it’s so expensive)

1 tablespoon paprika

10 cloves of garlic, minced

1 smoked ham hock

1 pound slab bacon, chopped

1 pound chorizo, sliced

1 pound morcilla (I couldn’t find this)

1 onion, chopped

Soak the beans overnight then drain and rinse. Place in a large pot, add water to cover by 2 inches, and bring to a boil. Skim off any foam, lower the heat to a simmer, and add the olive oil, saffron, paprika, garlic, ham hock, and bacon. Simmer for 1 hour, adding more water as necessary to keep the beans covered.

Add the chorizo, morcilla, and onion and simmer for another 2 hours, or until the beans are very soft; add water as necessary to keep the beans and meats covered. Remove the ham hock and pull off the meat. Tear into bite size pieces and return to the pot. Serve with crusty bread.

Tortilla de Patatas

1 cup olive oil

4 large potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced

salt to taste

1 large onion, chopped

6 large eggs

Heat the oil in a 9-inch skillet, add potato pieces and onion. Cook slowly over medium flame, being careful not to brown potatoes. Turn occasionally until potatoes are tender and still loose.

Beat eggs in a large bowl with a fork and add desired amount of salt. Drain potatoes. Add potatoes to beaten eggs, pressing them so that eggs cover them completely. Let sit for 15 minutes. Heat 2 T. oil in a large skillet. Add potato-egg mixture, spreading quickly. Lower the heat to medium-high. Shake pan to prevent sticking. When potatoes start to brown, put a plate on top skillet and flip to cook other side, adding another T. of oil. Brown on the other side and serve.

Our first “International Night” – the full English breakfast

During the lazy days of summer I come up with a lot of brilliant ideas. Most of these ideas never materialize once I get back to work in the fall, but ones involving food somehow seem to have the best chance of survival! International Night came about when I was looking at an online forum back in the early part of the summer. I’ll admit that I blatantly stole the idea from some creative poster who was planning on making a meal from a different country one night each week for her family. I thought that sounded pretty cool, so I put the concept in the back of my mind to try sometime. This week I finally started what I plan to be a family tradition with food, facts and fun stuff from merry old England!

When I asked my oldest son what he wanted to be our first country for International Night, he quickly responded with Germany. After a little online research I decided to prepare sauerbraten as the main course. However, since I only decided to do this on Tuesday of this week and all the recipes I found required three days of marinating, German night had to be postponed until next week. In an effort to find a quick substitute, I came across the full English breakfast.

I’ve eaten at some British themed restaurants, but I’ve never heard of this delicacy. I’m familiar with fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash and other well known British culinary fare, but the full English breakfast (or full Monty as some seem to call it) has eluded me all these years. If you can’t tell from the picture above, it consists of fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms, toast and baked beans. Apparently another item often served with it is a slice of fried black pudding. I’m pretty sure you can’t find black pudding in our area, but even if it I could have found it, I doubt I would have included it because I think that would have been a little more than we could handle! We tried to remain true to the British classic, but I think they serve their fried eggs considerably softer cooked than we like ours.

To go along with our night of all things British, we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’ve been waiting for the right time to introduce my 12 year-old son to the finer things like Monty Python, and this was the perfect opportunity. I also printed some information about British cuisine for him to read. His current career goal is to become a chef, so International Night could be more than just a tasty meal for him each week!

I plan to post each week’s International Night along with the recipes for the meal. However, this week there really isn’t a recipe. I just fried up some bacon and sausage and then fried the eggs in the same pan. I cooked the tomatoes and mushrooms in another skillet for a few minutes, toasted some bread and heated up a can of pork and beans on the stove. I was a very filling meal, even though we ate it for dinner instead of breakfast.