Spanish Night!

A friend brought us some jamón serrano and chorizo from Spain.  Because my wife used to live in Barcelona, and I loved every moment I spent visiting her there, this was a big deal.

If you’re familiar with (good) Mexican food, but not Spanish food, I should say that Spanish chorizo is a hard, dry sausage, and nothing like the also delicious Mexican sausage of the same name.  Jamón serrano is similar to prosciutto, although it’s easy to taste the difference between the two.  If you can find a place that sells jamón ibérico in the U.S. (it is possible now), it’s is the ham of the gods.

So, I put out a plate of the sliced chorizo and jamón serrano.

Then:

Pan con tomate:

• I grated one tomato on the “fine grating” area of the cheese grater, discarding the skin.  (What do you do with tomato skins without tomato insides?)
• To that I added about a half clove of garlic, grated on a microfile style grater.
• Stirred in olive oil and a little salt, and the tomato… spread is all done.
• It goes over toast.  For whatever reason, since the price of bread has skyrocketed, now the really good quality bread at Trader Joe’s is the same price as the cheap stuff at the big box supermarket, so we have some great, chewy, stone hearth variety Italian bread.  (I toasted it.)

Patatas Bravas:

I had some of the brava sauce left over from the other night, so I wanted to use it.  And, again, the inspiration for my recipe is here: spanish-fiestas.com/recipes/patatas-bravas.htm.  Let me just say that if you come across a recipe for patatas bravas for which the sauce is basically a jazzed up thousand island, don’t do it.  Just don’t.  The basic ingredients of ketchup are all in the real recipe, true.   But, still…  Let me also repeat that I boil my potatoes then put some color on them in a minimally oiled cast iron skillet, rather than frying them.  I do it for better health, and it’s good.

Kale:

• OK, there’s nothing Spanish about Kale (at least I don’t think so), but I wanted some greens and I like Kale.  So…
• I rinsed the Kale and removed the stems.
• I made some vegetable stock from the stems.  There’s no reason to waste things.
• I heated a little olive oil.
• When it was hot, I added some chopped walnuts, maybe a ¼ cup, and 2 cloves of minced garlic.  The walnuts were raw, and needed a little flavor sauteed into them/ rawness sauteed out of them.  And, I think nutty flavors do well with cooked greens.
• I also put in a couple of pinches of red pepper flakes.
• Next, I smashed the kale into the pot and poured a some of the vegetable stock into it.
• Seasoned with salt, pepper, and a bit of ground caraway seed.
• Cooked, stirring occasionally, until it became a texture that satisfied me.

What I liked:

• Do I need to say that the chorizo and jamón serrano were delicious?  They were.
• Pan con tomate is an easy, low effort path to tastiness.  It’s goodness doesn’t have anything to do with anything I did though, it all depends on quality ingredients.
• Walnuts (or just about any nut for that matter) and caraway jive well with greens.  I don’t fight the bitterness, I just try to compliment it.  And, no, you don’t have to put in bacon or back fat to make greens good.  Although, I did eat them with two kinds of fatty pork, so…
• Oh, yeah, chorizo and jamón serrano are both fatty enough that it’s worthwhile to have some red wine with them – if you need an excuse to drink more wine…