Chicken Paella

I got a clay paella dish for christmas and had yet to use it for paella. I figured it was time.

Clay pots are great for cooking because you can soak them in water beforehand. As it cooks, the water evaporates up into the food.

Usually I'd write my recipes here, but the one i found online is too good to pass up. Thank goodness for poor translations!

Chicken Paella
This is the real Chicken Paella recipe, an alternate way of tasting authentic Spanish recipes.

Serves: 6
Difficulty: Intermediate
Preparation time: 60-90 minutes

Ingredients
1/2 pint of oil
1 chicken, cut to 8 pieces
2 bowls of rice (1lb. 5 oz. approximately)
5 bowls of meat broth
1 green pepper
1 red pepper
1 small can of peas
1 small onion
2 tomatoes
Saffron
1 clove of garlic (optional)
Parsley
Salt

Preparation
Start by heating half of the oil and once warm add the cut chicken and let it cook for 15 min. Once it's brown, reserve it in a dish. Add the chopped onion. After 5 minutes, add diced tomatoes, without seeds and peeled.

Let it braise about 5 minutes more, mashing the tomatoes with a skimmer. Strain it and throw it in the paella pan.

Add the rest of the oil to the paella pan. Throw the green pepper, cut to square pieces of half inch. Add the fried chicken.

Keep stirring with a wooden tablespoon, without letting it go brown. Throw salt, and the meat broth, hot but not boiling. This is completed with the 5 broth bowls.

Shake the paella pan a little taking it by the handles so that it is broth flows all over. All this should be made to medium fire.
Meanwhile, in a mortar mash a little bit of garlic (optional), the parsley and the saffron, with a little bit of salt so that it doesn't slip, and it wet it with a couple of soup spoonfuls of temperate water. Spill this mixture on the rice and shake again the paella pan.

When the broth has reduced to the half decorate the paella with the red pepper cut to ribbons, and the peas.
Let it cook about 20 minutes.

Once the rice is cooked and the broth has reduced, retire the paella pan from the fire, on a wet cloth, leaving it rest for about 5 minutes.

Serve it with some big clusters of lemon without peeling like decoration.


I took 2 in focus and one out of focus pictures to make up for the lack of pictures recently.

Just added the peppers:


Halfway through cooking the rice:


Viola! This might be my new favorite dish:

Turkey Pepper Sandwich

Disappointed by my pesto chicken sandwich, I had to make a good sandwich. This is one of my favorite sandwich recipes.

Get a fresh made roll, or better yet focaccia bread.
Next get a bag of frozen bell pepper strips. Make sure it has green, yellow and red.
You'll need some deli turkey (also can use shrimp)
And some cheese (parmesan, cheddar, feta, are my favorites.)
Salt and pepper

Saute the frozen peppers in a bit of olive oil. Add a bit of salt, and a lot of pepper. When soft, add turkey. (If using raw shrimp, add earlier). Continue to cook until meat is nice and hot. When close to being done, add cheese to melt. Remove from heat and add to bread. Eat. Enjoy.

Something about this sandwich tastes way better than it should. I crave it regularly.

Pesto Chicken Sandwich

A pesto chicken sandwich done right is one of the best sandwiches you can eat. Not in a cooking mood I decided to buy stuff to make them. They were not very good. Hamburger buns (the local market didn't have any real bread), grilled chicken breast, pesto and feta cheese. Sounds great on paper, but in practice not good. First off, you need real bread. Secondly, you need some arugula or other mustard leaf in there. Thirdly, store bought pesto sauce is never very good (though deli stuff sometimes is okay).

This was my first attempt at making pesto chicken sandwiches. I thought it would be easy, it wasn't. I did eat 4 of them though, so they weren't all that bad. Next free weekend I'll have to try making my own focaccia bread and pesto sauce and give it another go.

Irish Roast Beef, Boxty and Veggies

Felt like cooking some Irish food yesterday randomly. Specifically, I really wanted to cook Boxty which is an Irish potato pancake. It pairs well with a nice hunk of roast beef. Now I'm not normally one to make roast beef, or any type of beef, but when you want a nice hearty meal it does the trick.

Roast Beef
Making roast beef is easy. I like to trim off as much fat as possible instead of letting it drip down into the meet. So, after that's trimmed, cut small slits and put in 2-5 cloves of garlic, depending on how much you like garlic. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and fresh ground pepper. Drizzle with olive oil. Put in oven at 375 for 20 minutes. Then 250 until it reaches internal temp of 130-140, about 1-2 hours.

Boxty
Take one russet potato, boil. Take another russet potato, skin and grate. After boiled potato is done, mash and mix with grated raw potato. Add 3-4 cups flour & 2 beaten eggs. MIx well. Then add just enough milk to make the mixture runny enough to be spooned into a pan. Thicker mixture equals thicker pancakes and vice-versa. Take a pan, put just enough olive oil in it to coat the bottom. Spoon mixture onto pan and let cook for 3-5 minutes each side depending on thickness.

Sauteed Cabbage
Shred one green cabbage. Put in large frying pan with olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and other desired spices. Cook al dente. I like extra vinegar.

Steamed Veggies
Take zucchini, yellow zucchini, broccoli and carrots. Slice and put in steamer. Cook until al dente. Mix with salt, pepper and the thinnest slice of butter you can muster. You should not be able to taste the butter, but it provides some richness.

I have enough of this to last me all week.

Cheese Ravioli

I'm not even sure this counts as a recipe.

Didn't much feel like cooking tonight, so I picked up a bag of frozen ravioli (cheeper than the refrigerated and better tasting) and a bag of spinach.

For the ravioli, simple sauce of fresh grated parmesan, olive oil, salt and lots of fresh ground pepper.

For the spinach, saute till just wilted in about 1 tsp olive oil per half a bag. Halfway through add creole seasoning. This salts and flavors spinach like no other. This can be started when the timer goes off for the ravioli.


I gotta find some new backgrounds for my food.