Spring is Here - Not! A Significantly Spanish Dinner..

Of course, as soon as I post a happy little piece about spring being here, the sun shining, blah blah blah, we get a weekend where the weather turns back six weeks or so into winter.  Rain from dusk to dawn (and probably during the night too), temperature back down to the low teens, gloomy and sodden. 

On the bright side, it gave us a chance to have our dear chums Manto and Moulard around to help us experiment with one last lot of old fashioned wintry cooking, a nice slow cooked braise of beef short ribs served with baby root vegetables, and a few other yummy bits and pieces.

One of which may or may not involve walnut praline

Fried Stuffed Green Olives

We had a little nibble to start of some green olives stuffed with chorizo.  I think of fried olives as Italian, normally stuffed with a little veal forcemeat, and this was a way to Spanish them up a bit in line with the theme of this dinner.

The olives were simply stuffed with a little chorizo that I had finely chopped and sauteed for a minute or two to cook out, then rolled in flour, beaten egg and some breadcrumbs. 

Keep them in the fridge until ready to cook (this helps the coating set up) then fry in a small pan with maybe a centimetre of oil in it on a pretty high heat.  You will need to turn them to make sure all sides get crisp.  Cook until the coating is crisp and golden brown, which should take about three minutes, drain on some kitchen paper and eat.

These are just absurdly savoury, salty from both the olives and the chorizo, strong flavoured and intense.  You just want two or three per person to get the gastric juices flowing.  I think you could cut the intensity of the flavour by serving it with something a bit emollient like mayonnaise or aioli if you wanted.

On olives - I prefer to buy olives with the pit in and pit them ourselves with a little stoning device.  I think that once they've been pitted in the store and put back into brine, the inner surfaces get a bit soggy and overly infused with the brine flavour.

Grilled Quail with Romesco Sauce

First make your sauce.  This is probably two or three times as much as you need for two people but it's one of those recipes that you need a critical mass of ingredients for it to work properly

Take

• About 150g roasted, pickled red capsicum, roughly chopped
• A good shake of paprika and a small-medium shake of cayenne depending on your tastes
• About 1/3 cup of croutons (take a thick slice of bread with the crust removed, cut into cubes, fry in a little hot olive oil until brown and crispy)
• 1 tablespoon vinegar.  I used sherry vinegar which would be the classic type, but white wine or red wine vinegar will do at a pinch.  Better to seek out a bottle of sherry vinegar though, it's magical stuff.
• 1 tomato, peeled, seeded and roughly chopped (plunge the tomato into a jug of just-boiled water for about 15 seconds to loosen the skin for peeling)
• 3 cloves of peeled garlic*
• About 2 tablespoons each of hazelnuts and blanched almonds, lightly toasted in a little olive oil until they take a little bit of colour
• Olive oil.  Normally with this quantity of ingredients would want about 80ml of oil to make a pretty thick, pasty sauce that you can spread with a knife.  Which is how romesco sauce is meant to be.  But I wanted a thinner sauce that I could pour over the plate, so I used about 150ml.

Put it all in a blender or food processor and pulse until it is a smooth sauce.  That's it, you're done.

Quail - take one quail per person, par-bone them (cut out the spine with poultry scissors, then use a paring knife to cut the breasts away from the keel bone, remove the ribs from the inside of the breasts (I use my fingers) and the hips from the legs.) and break them down into quarters, i.e. two breasts, two legs.

Saute in a hot pan with a little oil for a couple of minutes on each side, then finish in a low (120 C) over for about 5 minutes

We served on a bed of mustard cress shoots, a lovely little plant that will sprout in a day, be micro-herb sized in a week and be sprout sized in a fortnight.  It has a hot peppery flavour and a light crunchiness.

The freshness of the shoots and the tanginess of the sauce balance out the richness of the quail, while the sauce also provides complexity of flavour through the roast pepper and nuts.  The leftover sauce will go beautifully on grilled fish or seafood and would probably be very nice on a pork chop too.

* I left the garlic out as poor Manto is allergic, but what would Spanish cooking be without garlic?

Braised Beef Ribs in Sherry with Baby Vegetables

Serves 6

For the beef

1.5 - 1.8 kg beef short ribs.  Try to get nice evenly sized pieces as they will take the marinade and then cook more evenly.  Also it's much easier to serve your guests if you have even pieces compared to some huge ones the size of Andre the Giant's fist and others that are just a centimetre of meat over a large rib-bone.  Is this the voice of bitter experience talking?  Yes, my attention wandered as the young lady at the butcher we selecting ribs for me.  I will not go back to that butcher.

Make a marinade of

• 1 carrot, peeled and chopped
• 1 onion (any type except green), peeled and chopped
• A couple of bay leaves
• 1 small bottle of dry cider
• 1 cup dry sherry (I used amontillado, but anything between oloroso and fino would be fine)
• 1 teaspoon dry thyme or equivalent fresh if you have it
• 1 teaspoon dry rosemary or one sprig fresh, roughly broken up
• 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
• A pinch of black peppercorns, roughly crushed
• A couple of pinches of salt

Mix that all up and marinate the ribs, turning occasionally, preferably overnight but 6 hours is better than nothing.

Take the ribs out, dry them thoroughly, then sear them on all sides in a hot pan.  You could flour them before searing - the flour will crust the ribs a bit more and will thicken the sauce slightly when cooking - but I didn't bother.

Meanwhile strain the marinade to remove the solids and reserve the liquid.

Put the ribs in a big solid casserole dish with a lid (we use a Dutch oven), and add a cup of the marinade, a half litre of stock (beef or veal) and half a cup of sherry.  If the ribs aren't covered, make up the volume with water (we'll reduce that out later).  Bring to the boil on the stovetop then cook in a low (120 C) oven for three and a half hours.  At that stage the beef will be soft, unctuous and will have retracted a fair bit from the bones.

Take the ribs out of the liquid and put some place warm, maybe covered with foil to keep moist.  They don't need to rest but you will be reducing the sauce which takes a bit of time.  You can always reheat the  ribs in a warm oven for 5 minutes or so if they have got a bit cool.

Strain the fat off the braising liquid with your trusty separating jug.

Not too much this time, but that's 75g of fat that's not going into my body.

Reduce the braising liquid until there's about two cups left, then add another half cup of sherry and reduce briskly until you have about a cup and a half left.  This reinforces the sherry flavour in the sauce but gives it time to cook out the rawness.  Check seasoning and serve.

You could monte au beurre if you want a really rich, glossy sauce,  but to me it's perfectly good to go as it is.  It's not Maxim's, for crying out loud.

For the Vegetables

I was lucky to find some lovely baby root vegetables at the market (thank you to the people at Fresh Generation , a great place to go for out-of-the-ordinary vegges, and the only place I know that always has at least six types of potato at all times), some baby turnips, heirloom carrots in a lovely shade of purple, and baby beetroots. 

We poached them in some veal stock (for extra flavour), the turnips for about 5 minutes, the carrots for about 7 or 8, and the beetroots for about 15.  Turnips first, then the carrots (the stick went a little purple), then the beetroots (the stock went very purple).  This was in the middle of the afternoon.

Finally we tossed them all in a tiny amount of oil and put them in a hot oven for about 5 minutes to reheat and get a little caramelisation on.  You can't see them too well in the main photo above, but here's one as I was assembling the plates.

For the bean puree

Take about 700g of cooked white beans (cannellini, navy, Great Northern, whatever) (that would be about 200g of dried beans, cooked).  Put them in a pot with about 1/2 cup of water and just go beresk with your stick blender until they are a smooth paste.  Add a little more water if the paste is too thick.  Heat in the pot.

Beans on plate, veg on plate, beef on beans, sauce on beef and around the plate, garnish, serve.

What do we like about this dish?  The rich, juicy, fork-tender beef is an aspect of any good braise.  The flavour from the marinade, with its aromatics and acid components, and the repeated infusions of sherry at different stages, made the sauce a dark, complex beast with the sherry being a clear flavour note that influenced but did not dominate.

Frozen Walnut Turron with coffee syrup

But what about that praline? I hear you ask.  The Perigueuxse used it in a recipe from the excellent Cocina Nueva by Jane Lawson, which I encourage you to go and purchase immediately after reading this post.

First make your caramel.  Dissolve some sugar in a little water and then cook it without stirring over a medium heat until it is a dark golden brown.  How brown?

Much browner than this.

That's only slightly brown.

I will give you golden, perhaps, but brown?  I do not think so.

Yep.  That's the business.

Pour your toffee over a cup of toasted walnuts on some non-stick cooking paper and let set. 

The remainder of the recipe is Ms Lawson's, but I will tell you that it involves crushing the praline into little crumbs and incorporating them into a mixture of beaten egg yolks, cream, egg whites and nut-flavoured liqueur.  The whole is then frozen as a loaf and served with a bitter coffee syrup. 

Forgive my heavy-handed saucing.  The dish itself was a fabulously light sweet frozen mousse, with exciting little shards of crisp, bitter-sweet, nutty praline detonating against your tongue and teeth and a dark tone of coffee around the edges.  It deserved better than my sloppy garnishing.

So that was a night of somewhat Spanish food.  We ate, we laughed, and we learned a little bit too.  Like don't try to open a Stelvin-capped riesling with a corkscrew.  There's something in that for everyone, I think.

Happy braising,

Ecumer