Simple Spanish Food

Pan-fried Artichokes, alcachofas a la plancha

 

 

Whenever we're in Spain early enough in the spring, we go to the old Madrid tavern La Trucha and order alcachofas a la plancha--artichokes pan-fried in olive oil.  It's the simplest way I know of to prepare fresh artichokes, and one of the best.  It does  require tender "baby" artichokes, which are rarely available here in Central Florida, but last fall a kind gardening friend gave me an artichoke seedling. I raised it in a split-barrel container, and now we're harvesting beautiful little artichokes and enjoying tapas of alcachofas a la plancha here too.

Here's how to do it.

Ingredients:

Fresh artichokes  (Small, tender artichokes are best for this.)

Olive oil

a lemon

salt

 

Heat up a pan.

Trim the artichokes minimally, removing only the hard pointed tips, if any.

Rub them with lemon juice as you work to prevent them from turning black.  The touch of lemon also brings out the full flavor of the artichokes.

Cut the artichoke into 1/4 inch slices.

Rub the slices with the lemon. If you see a fuzzy "choke" inside, cut it out, but if the artichokes are small, you usually don't have to worry about it.

Pour a little olive oil in the hot pan. Add the artichoke slices. Pan-fry them for 2 or 3 minutes per side, or until tender. If they get a bit crisp at the edges, they're even better.

Sprinkle with salt and serve hot.

 

An Elegant (and Simple) Watercress Salad: ensalada de berros

Like canónigos, watercress (berros)  is a gourmet salad green in Spain.  There are many ways of using it. This is probably the simplest.  This salad has three ingredients: olive oil (see my posts on Spanish olive oils), a dash of salt, and watercress. 

Of course it's important to start with good, fresh watercress.  If your market doesn't carry it, grow some. Nothing could be easier. Just fill a pot with potting soil, sprinkle some watercress seeds on the surface and pat them down (don't bury them).  Keep the pot's saucer filled with water, and in a couple of months you'll have watercress. 

Now for the salad.

Wash and dry the watercress. (Pat them with a clean towel or use a salad spinner: you want the leaves as dry as possible).

Remove the coarse stems.  Toss the leaves with just enough olive oil to coat them. (An hojiblanca would be perfect). Sprinkle the salad with a little salt, and there you have it: ensalada de berros.

 

A Classic Spanish Country Salad with Garlic, Cumin, and Wild Rocket--ensalada rústica con ajo, comino, rúcula, et cetera

Rustic country salads in Spain, especially in the south, are robust,  often flavored with garlic and wild greens.  In the Spanish classic Fortunata y Jacinta--one of the great novels of the 19th century, sadly little-known in the English-speaking world--several characters treat themselves to a "comfort salad" of escarole (escarola) dressed with lots of garlic, cumin, and, of course, olive oil.  Andrés, my father-in-law, loved simple salads made of escarole too. 

You could use all sorts of wild or wildish salad greens with this--old-fashioned leaf lettuces, baby mustards, watercress, lamb's lettuce or mâche (see my post on canónigos). For this post I just combined regular romaine with  a handful of wild rocket (rúcula) which re-seeds itself in our garden year after year. In any case, you want to include salad greens with some body and even pungency, to stand up to the flavors of the dressing. This is not the time for delicate Bibb or Boston lettuce.

Here's how to do it.

Ingredients

salad greens of your choice, including some full-flavored greens like escarole

4 tablespoons  virgin olive oil

1 large fresh garlic clove

1 teaspoon of toasted cumin seeds (whole)

1 tablespoon of wine vinegar

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Toast the cumin seeds in a pan over medium heat. Don't add any oil. Just give them a shake or stir now and then and make sure they don't burn. They should soon be fragrant.

Meanwhile, wash and dry the greens with a salad spinner or towels. 

Crush the  garlic clove with some salt. Add the olive oil, cumin seeds,  vinegar, and salt to taste.   Toss the salad with enough dressing so that the leaves are well-coated.

Serve this with a good, rustic Spanish-style bread, a white bean soup (alubias estofadas) or a lentil soup (sopa de lentejas), and a simple (even a coarse) Spanish red wine.    

 

 

Tips on Creating a Spanish-style Patio Garden for Entertaining

Ana and I love to go to Córdoba, in the south of Spain, for the patio garden show in May,  when many private patios of the old quarter are open to the public.   We walk the rough cobblestone streets, visiting dozens of patios, all overflowing with flowers. Afterwards we go out for tapas, such as berenjena con salmorejo--fried eggplant with a thick, gazpacho-like dipping sauce; grapes stuffed with cabrales blue cheese; ajo blanco, an almond soup (see my post on ajo blanco); fantastic olives marinated with herbs and orange zest; all with the local Montilla-Moriles wine, which tastes something like fino, and which is one of my all-time favorite wines.  I'll try to write posts about all of these in the future.

But today I'll take a break from food and focus instead on the patio.  

Penelope Hobhouse writes in The Story of Gardening that the patios of Córdoba are an inspiration for today's urban gardeners. They certainly have inspired me. I've been trying for years to create a patio garden here in Central Florida in a similar style. True success, I realize, is impossible: the gardens of Córdoba are inseparable from the place and culture.  At the same time, a Spanish-style patio garden isn't really too much out of place in Florida, with its Spanish colonial history and sometimes Spanish-inspired architecture.  Our little one-story ranch-style house is something of a stretch, but, hey, it's stucco. Here's a pic of my latest attempt at a Cordoba-inspired patio garden, and my most successful to date. (Don't laugh).

 

For years I made the mistake that ruins so many garden designs and tried to grow dozens of varieties of plants in pots scattered all over the patio.  It seemed to me that the patios of Córdoba were full of variety, and indeed they are, but this variety looks good only because the patio gardens in Córdoba are strongly unified by dozens, if not hundreds, of the same plant, usually ordinary geraniums, which unlike many flowers, can thrive in a small pot hung on a wall.  This unity is further strengthened by the use of identical pots, often painted the same color.  (In his mammoth  travel book Iberia--still a great, if at times dated, guide to Spain--the novelist James Michener commented on the  "cerulean blue" often used to paint the pots in Córdoba's patios ). The pots are usually spaced evenly against the stark whitewashed walls, which themselves help tie everything together.

The revelation came as I was reading Russell Page's classic The Education Of A Gardener, which together with Sylvia Crowe's masterpiece Garden Design, is one of the most important books any gardener interested in design can read. Ironically, Russell Page wasn't too crazy about hanging plants on the walls in the Córdoba style, even though he designed beautiful patio gardens in the South of Spain (See Marina Schinz and Gabrielle van Zuylen's The Gardens of Russell Page for pictures and descriptions of these). But  he makes clear the importance of finding the right plant, and using lots of it, to make a strong, bold statement that doesn't need repeating.  This is just as true for a humble garden, or maybe more so.   Because the geraniums that give so much color to Córdoba's patio gardens  just don't do well in Florida's humid summers, I instead made my "statement" with pink begonias.

It was hard making myself plant so many begonias.  Many of my friends are pretty serious gardeners, and begonias just aren't serious plants. Their biggest drawback is that they're so common.   Any old big box garden center sells them.   But because they're common, they're cheap, making it possible for me to plant lots of them for effect. They love living in pots. They don't need repotting. They look pretty good even through Florida's worst jungle weather.  They last the entire season.  They're not greatly bothered by the stark contrasts of light and shade that can make patio gardening difficult. I've enjoyed the patio this year more than ever, so in the end, the difficulty of making myself plant begonias was worth it. The hard freezes this winter have melted them away, but it looks like many of them may come back in the spring.

Decorative plates are another feature of the Córdoba style patio garden.

I hung a couple of plates  that Esperanza, my mother-in-law, gave us years ago. These are even easier to care for than the begonias.

La Tienda has a good selection of hand-painted ceramic plates from Spain many of which would be suitable for hanging on a patio wall.

Another typical feature of a Córdoba-style patio garden is a fountain. 

Maybe one day. . . For now I make do with a bird bath.

Because the floor space of a typical patio in Córdoba is relatively small, vertical space is used whenever possible. In addition to hanging plants on the walls (and from rafters, and from trees, and just about anything else), pots are arranged in pyramid formations on the pavements.

Like I said, it's not Cordoba, but it is a nice place to have drink while we're grilling.

 

Salad of Mâche (ensalada de canónigos): a Spanish delicacy

In Spain, as in much of Europe, canónigos or mâche (also known as corn salad, nut lettuce, lamb's lettuce, Valerianella locusta, etc.) is a delicacy.  It's quite unlike any other salad green. The leaves are meaty, yet melt-in-your-mouth tender and, at the same time, slightly crunchy. The flavor is mild and delicate, with a hint of raw nuts.

When Ana and I were in Granada last spring, we went to a nice restaurant called Taberna Salinas and had a salad of canónigos with fresh tuna, and we liked it so much that I made a point of planting some mâche as soon as the weather cooled here in Central Florida. 

Canónigos are extremely easy to grow, which is good, because here in the U.S. they're difficult to find unless you're lucky enough to have a really good produce market in your neighborhood, and even then they're pricey. 

A cool season veggie, it can take more cold than almost any other green.  Floridata, one of my favorite gardening websites, says it's hardy to zone 5 and can be harvested from under a blanket of snow.  Frost makes it taste sweeter.

I just scattered the seeds in pots and tubs of well-drained container mix, pressed the seeds down lightly with my palm, and kept the soil moist.  Like wild arugula, this is one of those salad greens that is totally worth it, even if you have a busy schedule.  There's really no excuse not to plant some. All you need is a sunny (or even somewhat shady) spot on the patio.  You probably won't find seeds for mâche  at local stores, but the better seed catalogs usually list several varieties, under various names, often "corn salad" or "lamb's lettuce."

We harvest the tiny heads right before the meal. We wash and dry them carefully. (See my post on Simple Spanish Salads for more information on how to wash and dry greens). I like to leave the rosettes whole because the stems add a nice crunch (they're very delicate, not at all stringy).

You can make all sorts of salads out of canónigos.  Today I'll focus on one of the easiest: a simple green salad of canónigos with a flavorful vinaigrette.  This recipe for vinaigrette is based on one given by Jacques Pepin in Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home.

For the dressing (makes about a half cup)

1 small clove of garlic, minced and mashed with a little salt

1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard

1/4 teaspoon of Kosher salt or sea salt

a dash of freshly ground black pepper

1-2 teaspoons of sherry vinegar

1/2 cup of virgin olive oil

whisk all of the ingredients in a bowl.  

Carefully wash and dry as many canónigos as you want.  Place them in a large salad bowl.  Pour a little of the dressing over them and toss.  Continue adding dressing and tossing until the leaves are just coated. Serve immediately.

 

Pimientos de Padrón, Spain's Frying Pepper

Pimiento de Padrón is an heirloom frying pepper from the town of Padrón in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain.  Pimientos de Padrón are now enjoyed all over Spain, usually as a tapa.  They are so popular that they are now grown in the south of the country and even imported from Morocco.

Eating these peppers is often described as a form of "Spanish Roulette." While most of the peppers are sweet, occasionally you will come across a spicy hot one.   When we eat a plate of fried pimientos de Padrón with friends and family in Spain, the conversation often goes something like this:

"Pica?" ("Does it burn?")

"No pica." ("It doesn't burn.")

"Pica?"

And so on, until someone finally bites into a spicy one and says, "Pica! Pica! Pica!"

When they burn, they really burn.  The pain can create a sense of hyper-reality.  Colors seem brighter.

It's tempting to wonder what all of this says about the Spanish national character. What kind of culture would embrace a pepper as mild as a bell most of the time, but which on occasion--and when you least expect it--has an almost habanero-like heat? 

But the main reason Spaniards eat so many pimientos de Padrón is simply that they taste fantastic. Enjoying them is well worth the risk of getting burned now and then.  I prefer them to any other pepper for frying, even after growing many Italian varieties of frying peppers in the garden.

In Spain, early in the season--late spring, early summer--is the best time to eat pimientos de Padrón. The percentage of spicy peppers increases as the summer goes on, and by autumn a tapa of pimientos de Padrón will often have more hot peppers than mild.  To order them in October is an act of masochism--if, that is, they are truly pimientos de Padrón.

There are impostors out there. They look like pimientos de Padrón, and will often be presented as such, but the tendency to random heat has been bred out of them--and along with it, the unique flavor of the true pimiento de Padrón.  The ones grown in Morocco can be almost insipid.

Andrés, my father-in-law, used to say pimientos de Padrón grown outside of Galicia simply didn't taste as good, but I grow pimientos de Padrón here in Central Florida--a very different climate than Galicia's--and find the flavor is the same. The key is that the pepper must be the true pimiento de Padrón, grown from true seed.

It is increasingly possible to obtain true pimientos de Padrón here in the U.S. La Tienda sells pimientos de Padrón by the pound when they're in season.  Or you can grow your own. They're fairly easy, as far as peppers go.  Tomato Growers Supply Company sells true seed.

A pack of seed will last for years in the fridge, if you keep them sealed and dry in a zip lock bag. Just sow however many you need 8 weeks or so before you put out the seedlings. The garden website Floridata has a good article called  Start Your Own Tomato and Pepper Plants which could be helpful for beginners. 

I grow pimientos de Padrón in pots.

The main advantage to growing pimientos de Padrón in containers is that it allows you to give them exactly what they need.  You can give them the perfect soil--a light, fast-draining mix is best. You can put them in a protected area if there's an unexpected freeze.  You can also put them in shade in the summer.

The last point is especially important. Like all hot peppers, pimientos de Padrón become spicier when the plant is stressed by drought or heat.  We have mostly mild pimientos de Padrón well into July, despite the intense heat of Central Florida summers, because I place the pots under the north eave of the house, where they're in shade much of the day. In early spring and fall, I put them back in the sunshine.

Even when the plants have perfect growing conditions, it's important to pick the peppers when they're small--usually between 1 and 2 inches long.   If you wait until they grow larger, the percentage of hot peppers will increase dramatically. If you wait until they turn red, you might as well make hot sauce out of them. 

I repeat: PICK THEM WHEN THEY'RE SMALL.  Put them in the fridge if you can't eat them right away, but pick them when they're small.  

Look again at this picture:

Several of these peppers were really too large--and they were hot. The smaller ones were all mild and delicious.

Once you have pimientos de Padrón, nothing could be easier or simpler than preparing them.  Just wash them and pat them dry with a clean towel. Heat up about an inch of olive oil in a pan.  Don't skimp on the oil or the peppers will splatter everywhere when you fry them.  When the oil is hot but not smoking, carefully put in the peppers.

Fry them quickly, turning them, until they're just charred, but not black. If the oil is hot, this should take a only a few minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon. Serve them sprinkled with kosher or sea salt. They're great with bread and a glass of cold beer.