¡Bemsha SWING!

Chicken with paprika, oven roasted vegetables (red potatoes, garlic, onions, jalapeños, carrots, red bell peppers, parsley, olive oil), red wine. On a plate I got for my birthday, bamboo placemat.

I simply cut the vegetables to the size you see here, drizzled with olive oil, stuck in a lasagna pan in a 350 degree oven for 50 minutes. The chicken, I simply coated with paprika and based for an hour. Strangely enough, I didn't need to add salt to either dish in this meal.

The garlic was just half a head of garlic that I didn't even both to chop. Garlic roasted in its skin like this is very creamy in texture and mild tasting. Between the garlic, the jalapeños, the onions, and the parsley, and the paprika, the food was quite flavorful unsalted. The natural flavors of the food shone forth: sweetness of the carrot and onion. I was particularly proud of the balance of flavors,colors, and nutritional elements.

Of course, I made twice as much food as you see here on the plate. I will eat the rest for dinner tonight. Not bad for about 10 minutes of preparation.

Tonight I took 3/4 lb. of flank stake, cut while still half frozen against the grain into thin slices and dusted with cornstarch, stir-fried it with some snow peas (about the same volume as the meat, though weighing less), garlic, ginger, one small red bell pepper, one small hot pepper (a serrano will work), and some scallions and soy-sauce and white vinegar. Everything was perfectly cooked, nothing mushy. This was a perfect dinner for two, served with white rice. Greens, browns, reds, and greens on a white background.

If you eat this in a Chinese restaurant, it will have more sauce to it, be a bit less garlicky and spicy. Unless it is a very good restaurant outside the midwest, mine will be much tastier. Since I don't have a decent wok, I used a frying pan and cooked the meat first, then added it back to the pan when the rest of the dish was done.

I don't have exact proportions or cooking times for you. Basically you have to know how long things need to cook and when to add various ingredients. Generally I can cut up everything for the stir-fry and cook it up in about the time it takes the rice to cook.

For pastas and stirfries, the general rule is you want to have things about the same size. The strips of meat are about the size of the snow peas, for example. For a pasta primavera with penne, you want to cut up the zucchini or bell peppers about the same same size and shape as the penne or ziti or farfalle.

To make the classic Catalan dish "pa amb tomaquet"s you need the following:

A hearty bread, like a baguette, etc...

Olive oil.

Garlic.

A ripe tomato or two.

Assorted sliced cheeses and meats.

Wine.

Cut the baguette so that you get long, flat slices, of approximately a third of the length of the baguette. So you would have six pieces for each baguette. Drizzle a few drops of olive oil on the crumb side of each piece, then rub peeled gloves of garlic across the bread to spread the oil evenly over the surface. Discard the garlic. Cut the tomato in half and rub it across the bread, so that the bread turns a reddish pink from the juice. The tomato needs to be ripe enough to have enough juice to do the job, but not so ripe that the bread is soaked through. The oil, garlic, and tomato are strong flavors that don't need be used in abundant quantities to be tasted. You can also toast the bread before drizzling the oil.

Now place slices of high quality meat (jamón serrano or prosciutto, or chorizo, or whatever else you like) and cheese (gouda, manchego, or whatever else you have on hand) on the bread. Eat this with the wine. This can be a complete dinner if you have some Spanish olives and a salad.

For lunch i made an omelette by sauteeing some finely chopped onions and red bell peppers in olive oil in a frying pan, then adding some mushrooms, cooking until the mushrooms released their liquids. I removed this mixture from the pan and then put in four beaten eggs, with two of the yolks removed. I drained the extra liquid from from the mushroom mix and spread it over the cooking eggs, along with one small avocado cut into thin slices. I turned the heat down low so the egg would cook slowly without burning. When the egg was almost completely cooked through, I flipped the entire omelette over and cooked for a few more minutes. The result was a circular omelette fitting perfectly on a dinner plate. The two of us ate this with a baguette and some assorted cheeses.

An omelette of mostly whites and no cheese is lighter in texture. You won't miss the yolks at all. The avocado adds some fat back, but with a creamier texture.

You can also separate the eggs and beat the whites to a fluffy consistency, then add the yolks back. That's what I do for a chile relleno, for example.

We all know the four tastes, sweet, sour, bitter, salty. The fifth is supposed to be umami, or savory. I'm not convinced by that, because I think it is just saltiness combined with a particular mouth-feel. But let's accept that there is a fifth taste.

The sixth taste, then, would be piquancy, the effect of mustards, horseradish, and hot peppers on the tongue. You can't argue that this culinary heat is olfactory, a smell. It is very much felt in the mouth, not the nose. You could argue that it is a tactile sensation, not a true taste. But you could irritate the inside of your elbow with hot pepper juice, and that wouldn't be quite the same as "tasting" the peppers, right? There is something qualitatively "taste-like" about eating peppers that you couldn't reproduce on other parts of the body, where the heat of hot peppers would merely be an irritant.

I'm not necessarily convinced by my own argument, but I don't know quite where it goes wrong either. If I am right and have discovered the sixth taste, then i have made an amazing insight, just like the Japanese chemist who discovered the fifth one.

Am I boring you with my recipes? For this one you should make two hard boiled eggs, and blend in blender with 1/2 cup olive oil, lemon or lime juice, (juice of one large lemon or iime) a small t. of dijon mustard, and a clove of garlic or two. That's the dressing. The salad itself is just romaine lettuce, croutons, and a little parmesan cheese. I usually just bake a big piece of salmon filet in the toaster oven for 20 minutes while the eggs are boiling, and put big chunks of salmon in the salad, tossing the whole salad gently once after adding the salmon. With the hundred-degree heat I don't feel like making hot meals, but the eggs and salmon do have to cook for this one. I am not crazy about anchovies, so the salmon fulfills the traditional role of that fish. Whatever you do don't use bottled dressing for this. Make your own.

I made a roasted corn salad. The texture of the corn was not quite right, but it tasted good, with cilantro, hot peppers, hot pepper flakes, lime juice, and some grated cheese. The recipe called for manchego, but that was 19 a pound so I found a good substitute. It was good with the leftover ceviche and potato salad.

I am going to make ceviche again, but mixing tilapia with scallops and marinating it an entire day. I really like strong flavors, garlic, hot peppers, intense lime, wasabi, but used with fresh ingredients. I like foods that are grilled, marinated, smoked, or cured. I eat everything common to Western diets. All kinds of meats, fish and shellfish, every vegetable or fruit, many varieties of cheeses, grains, etc... I like every kind of "ethnic" food I've tried, when it is high quality, especially Indian and Thai. I also like most kinds of wines, beers, and many other spirits, coffees, and teas. Desserts are a chore. Cold sandwiches are difficult to get down. I find when I don't eat well it is almost like a punishment I inflict on myself, even when I imagine that I am deriving comfort from the food, like mid-western style deep-fried General Tso's Chicken. Somehow the two parts of my brain are not connecting when I order something like that.

I like to cook and can so a half-way decent job of it, but I get strangely depressed when something does not turn out well.

I marinated a pound of tilapia, cut up in 1/2 inch pieces, in lime juice and salt all day. The ceviche also had olive oil, cilantro, hot peppers, onions, tomatillos, and avocados, among other things. For a first try it was quite good. Next time I'll cut the fish smaller and use slightly less salt. (I eat sashimi, so why not raw fish Latin American style?) We ate it with bread, corn on the cob, and potato salad, which I made with garlic mayonnaise, fresh parsley, and cucumbers. Of course the advantage of a mostly cold meal should be obvious to anyone in the midwest during this extreme heat wave. Even at night it doesn't drop below 80.

Orange juice in Spain, even at the corner bar, will usually be fresh squeezed. I have been eating a lot of pimientos de Padrón (I actually ate some in Padrón itself), octopus, empanadas, vino de Albariño, and jamón serrano. Here in Spain someone defending a dissertation has to invite the committee out to eat, so on Friday I had an elaborate multi-course banquet, beginning with a raw-salmon appetizer and culminating in a filet of beef and some exquisite desserts and a local coffee liqueur. There was a shell-fish course (navajas?), and a fish course as well.

Tonight I'll be trying something similar: salmon filets marinated in a paste made of cilantro, ginger, lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, and various Indian spices (coriander, cinnamon, cardomon).

[UPDATE: good but rather intense.]

I made a marinade out of red wine vinegar, salt, olive oil, shallots, garlic, fresh oregano, parsley, cilantro in abundant quantities, and marinated some boneless chicken thighs in it all day. (Recipe from Bon Appetit.) I barbecued the thighs and we ate it with corn-on-the-cob and salad for a perfect 4th of July dinner.

I love eating well in the summer. Everything fresh, nothing out of a can or bottle.

I sautéed two zucchini in small but not tiny pieces, a small chopped shallot, three chopped cloves of garlic, a handful of green beans (steamed first for 5 minutes) in some olive oil. I added a really good tomato from the farmer's market and a handful of baby spinach leaves. A little bit of dried basil (fresh would have been better). I tossed this with 1/2 pound of ziti and some parmesan and freshly ground black pepper. It tasted really good. The liquid from the oil, spinach, and tomato was just enough to coat the pasta but without a heavy tomato-sauce feel. It was lucky that I didn't happen to have any onions, because the shallot, which I had left over from something else I made last week, did the job much better.

Last night I bought two rainbow trout at my favorite fish store. I covered them with ample amount of freshly grated ginger, then dipped them in a sauce made from white wine, soy sauce, lemon juice, a pinch of cayenne. I steamed them in a bamboo steamer for about 10 minutes. I washed some baby bok choy and sauteed it with chopped garlic and more ginger, adding a pinch of soy sauce at the last minute. We ate the fish and bok choy with some white rice, then Akiko made a salad of greens from the farmers market, really good tomatoes also from farmers market, cucumbers, avocados, carrots, and fresh mozzarella.

I've been making a lot of this recently, a small batch every few days. I chop up a couple of tomatoes, with cilantro, onion, salt, pepper, tabasco sauce, a splash of white wine vinegar. I don't even put hot peppers in it though it would be much better. We eat it on blue corn tortillas and tacos.

I make a few soups quite well:

A Boatman's stew: cod, various vegetables (onion, garlic, tomatoes, celery, potatoes), parsley, white wine, olive oil, salt, a dash of cayenne.

Caldo Gallego: a beef soup bone, a smoked ham hock, potatoes, turnip greens.

Polenta and spinach: Chicken broth, polenta, garlic, spinach.

Squash: butternut or acorn, pureed with potatoes, salt and pepper and a few other things.

Once you know how to make a soup, there is no recipe. There is just soup.

I made a half-way decent pico de gallo last week by chopping up four smallish tomatoes with finely chopped onion (one half of a medium), a tiny bit of garlic, a mess of cilantro, two small green serrano chiles, and salt, with a bit of lemon juice.

To make Kung Pao Chicken for three people I usually take 1 1/2 lbs of boneless chicken breast and slice very thin, soaking it in a mixture of white wine and cornstarch just to coat. I stir fry that separately in small batches and set aside. Then I throw some dried red hot peppers in the wok and stir fry some carrots and celery, diced, and add a onion and red pepper, along with garlic and ginger, when the carrots and celery are almost done. Then I re-add the chicken along with a little more white wine and cornstarch mixture, with a little soy sauce and vinegar. I mix in everything together. Somewhere along the way I will have tossed in a handful of unsalted, roasted peanuts, and made sure the rice is cooking. I drizzle a little sesame oil on top and we're ready to eat.

Since one of the three people doesn't eat very spicy food, I leave the peppers whole. For the spicy version break open the peppers at the beginning.

Last night I took about a dozen small red potatoes, cut them into halves or quarters, and boiled them (without peeling them) in lightly salted water to make a potato salad with 1/2 tsp of capers, a small quantity of diced red onion and shredded carrots. The dressing was 2 T of mayo with a clove of garlic crushed into it and some paprika, a negigible amount of vinegar. This accompanied bbq chicken thighs skinned and marinated in pineapple juice, garlic, ginger, and soy sauce--and basted with whole foods chipotle citrus bbq sauce.

I made an awesome soup yesterday. The lime and ginger seem to complement each other and the spinach. The lentils had a creamy texture. It's a Madhur Jaffrey recipe, with a few "improvements": red lentils for the normal green-brown ones. Lime in place of lemon. I added the coriander and cumin too, because the original recipe didn't have any spices in it. A pinch of a few other spices wouldn't hurt it, but why gild the lily? This is one of the best tasting things I've made in a long while.

It's vegetarian (vegan actually) if you lean that way.

Spinach-Lime-Cilantro-Ginger-Red Lentil Soup

1 cup red lentils.
3 cups water
1 lb. chopped fresh spinach
1 t. fresh grated ginger
1 small green hot pepper, diced
1/2 t. ground coriander
1/2 t. ground cumin
1/2 cup fresh cilantro
Juice of one half a lime
Canola oil

salt / black pepper

Boil the lentils for an hour in the water and spices (coriander / cumin).

Heat a few T's of oil in a large frying pan and add the ginger and hot pepper, then the spinach and cilantro. Cook until these are wilted. After the lentils have cooked for an hour, add the spinach mixture and lime juice to the lentil pot and simmer for 20 minutes. Season with black pepper to taste. Makes about 4 servings.