Irish girl here loves her potatoes, so whenever I go to a tapas restaurant I am sure to order a traditional Spanish tortilla. Other than its name, the Spanish tortilla has nothing in common with the Mexican corn or flour tortilla. It’s more like a thick potato-filled omelet. Layer upon tender layer of potato with fluffy egg to hold it all together. Slice it like pie and serve it plain, with a little dollop of aioli (garlic mayo), or with a bit of carmelized onions.

Put me in a dark corner of a tapas restaurant and I could eat the whole skillet-full myself.

Tortilla Española
Spanish Potato Omelet

2 1/4 cups sunflower oil
2 1/2 pounds potatoes, halved lengthwise and thinly sliced
8 eggs
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt

Serves 6

Heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the potato slices and cook until softened and lightly browned. Season with salt, remove from the skillet, and drain well.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs and a pinch of salt for about 1 minute. Add the potatoes and gently sir with a fork.

Heat the olive oil in the same large skillet. Pour in the egg and potato mixture into the skillet and spread the potatoes out evenly. Cook until the underside is set and lightly brown. Occasionally give the skillet a gentle shake to move the tortilla around. Invert the tortilla onto a plate, then gently slide back into the skillet. Cook until the underside is also set and browned, also occasionally shaking the skillet.

Serve immediately.

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Categories:	Cooking tips • Latin • Mediterranean • Veggies	2 Comments
Tags:	egg • Food • foodista • omelet • potato • Spain • spanish omelet • tortilla

Not long ago I posted a recipe for a chunky California-style gazpacho. It was such a hit that I thought I’d share with you a more traditional, but just as delicious, recipe.

Allow me to take you on a little trip to Spain…

Gazpacho
The following recipe is adapted from the famous Spanish cookbook 1080 Recipes.

2 1/4 pounds ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and coarsely chopped
1/4 onion, coarsely chopped
1 small cucumber, peeled and coarsely chopped
1/2 small green bell pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped, plus a little extra for garnish
4 1/2 cups bread crumbs
3/4 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
Salt and fresh ground pepper

Put the tomato, onion, cucumber, bell pepper, bread crumbs, oil, and vinegar into a food processor or blender and process until smooth. If the mixture is too thick, then add a bit of cold water. Transfer to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until fully chilled (about 2 hours).

Season to taste with salt and pepper, and garnish with a bit of diced green bell peppers and tomato. A drizzle of a good quality extra virgin olive oil is quite nice too.

Serves 4-6

How easy was that! Enjoy!

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Categories:	Fruit • Latin • Uncategorized	2 Comments
Tags:	Food • foodista • gazpacho • Soup • Spain • Spanish • tomato

You can’t have tapas without having a good sausage or two, and the two that top my list are cantipalitos and morcilla.

Cantipalitos are little red sausages with smoked paprika – an essential ingredient in Spanish cooking – and garlic (among a few other things). They are smoky sweet with a nice garlic tang, and are wonderful grilled over an open flame or stewed in red wine.

Morcilla is blood sausage (known as blood pudding in the UK). Yes, it is a blood-based food – and I know the prospect of dining on blood sounds a bit vampiric – but I promise, it will knock your socks off, and in a good way. I really don’t recommend you read too deeply the history or preparation of this deliciously rich and tender food as I’m afraid you won’t eat it! But trust me, it’s worth the mystery.

We grilled both sausages and served with green olives, (smashed, drizzled with olive oil, and tossed with lemon zest and sliced garlic), roasted and marinated zucchini and a simple green salad.

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Categories:	Latin • Meat & Poultry • Salads • Seasoning & Spices • Spanish • Veggies	5 Comments
Tags:	cantipalitos • Food • foodista • morcilla • sausage • Spain • Spanish • tapas

After graduating from high school I went to Madrid, Spain. I’d studied Spanish for 4 years and spent a summer living with a family in Mexico. When I arrived to attend the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, I had a great language base, but was totally unprepared for a whole new food world that greeted me. At that time, tapas were relatively unknown in the U.S. and there were no Spanish cheeses to be found here. Even today, I feel that Spanish food is one of the least understood European cuisines in America.

When I landed in the late summer of 1986, I went directly to a pensión (an inexpensive hotel) suggested by a friend and couldn’t believe how alien everything felt. School wasn’t scheduled to start for a few weeks and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. My first mistake was to go straight to sleep and stay on New York time…it took me several days to get my internal clock in order….I felt very strange. My salvation was the “bar” across the street from the pensión.

It’s worth mentioning that bars in Spain are very different. Rather than dark places designed for drowning your sorrows, Spanish bars are brightly lit, community gathering places to grab a light supper or snack throughout the day. They usually feature a broad selection of tapas, served in small portions, and at the time a very low price. If you ordered a draft beer, the most common size was a caña, which cost 50 pesetas (about $0.35) for roughly 4 ounces….but here’s the kicker, every beer was served with a little tapa. For me, it was like a Crackerjack prize or toy in a McDonald’s Happy Meal. The best thing about getting all these little bites was that I could taste and learn without needing to know any of the names of the 30-40 new foods.

Sensing how lost I was, the owners of Bar El Aguila sort of adopted me and patiently walked me through their entire selection of bits and bites. I ate oreja a la plancha (griddled pigs ear), mejillones en escabeche (pickled mussels), queso manchego (sheep’s milk cheese from La Mancha), and jamón de pata negra (dry cured “blackfoot” Iberian ham). My absolute favorites were boquerones en vinagre, literally “anchovies in vinegar,” now available here in many places labeled “white anchovies.”

If you’ve had a bad anchovy experience, perhaps accidentally eaten on a pizza, put those canned-dark-bony-fishy-super-salty little guys out of your mind! Boquerones are served boneless, fresh and tangy, kept refrigerated with only a bit of salt. They are wonderful as an appetizer on crusty bread, pairing well with a crisp white or dry red wine. Look for boquerones and check out what became a comfort food for me in a foreign land.

To prepare your own, check out El Mundo de las Tapas

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Categories:	Beverages • Cheese • Fish & Seafood • Travel	4 Comments
Tags:	Anchovies • boquerones • fish • Food • foodista • Spain • Spanish • tapas

I recently had the opportunity to interview Craig Boreth, author of The Hemingway Cookbook. Here’s a bit of our discussion…

When I first traveled to France and Spain about ten years ago, I thought following a Hemingway itinerary — from his Paris haunts, through San Sebastian and Pamplona and down to Madrid — would be a great way to really dig into the terrain. Of course, while doing so I found myself bar- and restaurant-hopping all day and night, and I began to realize that Hemingway wrote often (and, in my opinion, brilliantly) about food, and the idea of a cookbook began to take shape.

The greatest character I met was definitely Forrest “Duke” MacMullen, a hunting buddy of Hemingway’s from the Idaho days who provided the recipe for Cornish Pasties. He loved talking about those old days, and his letters always smelled of pipe smoke.

Of all the people I spoke with, I only had one bad experience. I called a rather famous photographer to inquire about buying the rights to use a photo of Hemingway. I don’t know if he was off his meds that day, but when I told him that $10,000 was way beyond my budget, he told me to “stop playing games and call back with a real offer,” and he hung up on me.

My favorite is the lime ice with gin and crème de menthe. Having visited Hemingway’s home in Cuba in summertime, I can imagine how this refreshing dessert could cut through the sweltering heat. It’s really easy to make, it’s got a great fresh lime tartness and a nice kick of booze.

Craig gracefully gave us permission to share this recipe with you here…

I’ve prepared most of them myself, but I enlisted many friends to help test them all.

That’s one of the things that makes the book so interesting. It’s a (hopefully) very accurate representation of Hemingway’s culinary biography. He had a huge personality and an appetite to match, and the recipes in the book reflect them.

I was surprised to learn how sophisticated Hemingway was in his use of food within his stories. I assumed it would all be boozing and gluttony. As an artist, he didn’t just use food symbolically in his writing, but he also brought in his expertise to make sure that the foods were local, in season, and perfectly-suited to the character in that particular time and place. It’s a deliberate and painstaking process that adds depth and richness to what is often mistaken for being sparse prose.

————————————————————————-

Check out Craig’s other fun books:

How to Feel Manly in a Minivan

How to Iron Your Own Damn Shirt: The Perfect Husband Handbook

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Categories:	Interview • Travel	3 Comments
Tags:	Author • Cuba • Ernest Hemingway • France • Hemingway Cookbook • Literature • Papa • Spain

Now I know what you’re thinking. “When would I ever want to eat octopus, let alone tenderize it?” Octopus is a highly under-rated and under-appreciated seafood here in the States. Its diminutive cousin, calamari, is popular, so why not octopus? If properly prepared octopus is delicious, if not, then it’s like you’re chewing on an eraser.

We’ve always slowly simmered octopus for a long period until it becomes soft and tender, but I just found this unique method of tenderizing using wine corks. Apparently cork contains an enzyme that helps tenderize the octopus and reduce the cooking time. You can use the corks from red or white wine – no need to clean them. Here’s how (this is based on a 2 1/2 lb octopus and you want one cork per quart of liquid):

• Heat your oven to 350 degrees F
• In a large saucepan bring 4 quarts of water to a simmer
• Brace yourself now, you need to clean your little sea critter. To do this grab a couple handfuls of coarse kosher salt and rub into the octopus as if you were applying moisturizer. (I find it helps to sing the theme song to the Little Mermaid to get you through this process. I never said they were cute, just delicious). Once it gets frothy rinse in cold water. Pound with a meat tenderizer (a few good swats in each place) and rinse again.
• Add 4 wine corks to your simmering water and lower your octopus into the pot. Once the tentacles begin to curl remove from the stove and place in your heated oven for 1 – 1 1/2 hours, or until tender.

For a Spanish tapas-style dish called Pulpo a la Gallega (as in photo) we cut the octopus into about 1″ pieces, place on top of 1/4″ slices of boiled potato, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with smoked paprika and course sea salt.

Give octopus a chance!

For more recipes check out:

The Gourmet Headhunter’s Baby Octopus in Red Sauce
Cooking Diva’s Pulpo Asado (Grilled Baby Octopus)
Over a Tuscan Stove’s Octopus Salad

I’d love to know what you think. Click the Comments link below and share your thoughts.

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Categories:	Cooking tips	3 Comments
Tags:	Food • foodista • Octopus • Pulpo • recipe • recipes • seafood • smoked paprika • Spain • Spanish • tapas