Puchero Canario Recipe

Feliz Día de Canarias! Happy Canary Islands' Day!

Today we bring you a typical recipe from Canary Islands, the puchero.

We can say that the Canary islands' puchero is the local version of the Spanish cocido. It is a very complete and heavy, that you can eat in a cold winter day (of course, even if there is no a freezing winter in Canary Islands, there are areas that are colder that the rest, that is, every corner has its own climate, we call it "microclima"). It is ideal when shared with the family, and it's just great with a good old mojo and a escaldon de gofio (we'll talk about it in another occasion) to have a super typical dish.

It's a recipe where we'll see lots of different kinds of meats tossed together (pork, ribs, veal or chicken), and different kinds of veggies (zucchini, chayotas, pumpkin, , cabbage, beans, etc.), chickpeas, potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize heaps and so on. In some hamlet, they add a pear to this cooking mix. Of course, you can decide whether an ingredient will go or not in the pot, according to your taste or the availability of it. I remember that when I was a child I didn't like it at all, y'know, the little ones and the veggies, but what I did expect most when was time for a puchero in our family was the soup! It was, and still is, delighful! Made with all those ingredients altogether...yum!


As for the quantities of the ingredients for a good puchero, much of it depends on how many and how hungry your guests are. We use to weigh a little bit of every ingredient, veggies, meat, everything, for every guest, more or less. In this case, we made a puchero for 3 or 4 people.


Ingredients:

• 1/2 kg. of veal meat
• 1/2 kg. of chicken meat
• 200 g. of pork ribs
• 1/2 morcilla
• 1/2 chorizo
• 150 g.of chickpeas
• 2 or 3 carrots
• 1 middle size onion
• 1/4 red pepper
• 300 g. aprox. of beans
• half cabbage (cut into four pieces)
• 300 g. of pumpkin
• 8 potatoes (some 2 potatoes per guest)
• 2 corncobs
• 2 or 3 garlic fingers
• saffron
• parsley
• comino 
• sweet pepper
• Salt
• 2 spoonful of olive oil

Preparation: 

1- In a pot, put the water on heat until it starts boiling, then we toss the meat inside. Put it on middle heat.

2- After some 20 minutes, toss in the pot the chickpeas and the carrots.

3- After some others 15 minutes put inside the pot the harder veggies, like for example the beans (that traditionally were tight together with a cooking string, a "package" for each guest), the cabbage, etc. and little by little we'll add the rest of the veggies.

4- In our house, we fry with oil the minced onion and the pepper, along with smashed garlic, comino, salt and saffron all mixed together, adding the pimenton in order not to let it burn and ruin its taste. That will add to our puchero a lot of flavour! If you prefer, you can jump to the next step and add it all without cooking it.

5- When the veggies are half baked, we'll add the potatoes and the sweet potato (batata), because we don't want them to break. In this phase, we'll add the morcilla and the chorizo too.

6- When all is well cooked, turn off the heat and get ready to eat!

7- If you prefer it, you can use the stock where our puchero was cooked and prepare with it a great soup with all the taste of the veggies we've used. To do so, we pass the stock to another pot, we'll toss the small pasta and there you have it! With that stock you can preare an "escaldon de gofio" too, that is an all time favourite in Canary Islands! (We'll talk about the Gofio in another occasion, a really healthy and nutritive food).

8- To serve the puchero, put in the dish a piece of everything you've cooked, of course according each one's taste, and at the end dress it with olive oil and vinegar. That's all! Si down and eat it with a traditional red wine del pais.

Enjoy it, or Que aprovechen!

A puchero dish with Escaldon de Gofio and red mojo

With the leftover puchero, we can prepare some delicious croquetas. Furthermore, this dish is perfect for every kinds of diets, choosing only the veggies and not the meat for the vegetarians or the vegans, and perfect for the coeliacs.

Greetings!

AnGie

Roasted chicken with aromatic herbs recipe

Today chicken is one of the most used food worldwide, and everyone seems to like it, from children to grandparents, and its affordable price, its versatility, its nutritional value together with low fats makes him the king of gastronomy in many households. But like every other food, even chicken food had a begin.


Historically, we can say that man began the chicken breeding in the Indus Valley, some 4500 years ago. When commercial exchanges began, chicken started to being used as a food in also in Persia, and from there to Europe through German populations and then the Roman Empire. In that age, anyway, chicken was an exotic food, and it wasn't exactly a food for everyone.

In the Middle Ages, chicken was used in noblemen's banquets and celebrations, where they were cooked in many different ways but never divided into pieces: it was the host that divided it with his own hands for the guests to demonstrate his power and his strenght. In the tenth century in Europe chicken meat was still considered a food for noblemen, and vassals had to pay tributw with chickens to their feudal lords.

It was in the XV centuty, after the Spanish colonization, that chicken reached the newly discovered American continent, becoming a cornerstone of their gastronomy. But even in that period chicked was a food for celebrations and special occasions. Thanks to the technological and scientifical advances about hygiene, the chicken food consumption grew. After 1940s, chicked was no longer a luxury food and started being the everyday food we all know.

Today we want to share with you a very simple recipe, ideal for any occasion. Baked chicken is a classic, served with potatoes becomes an all time favourite!
You can use the aromatic herbs you prefer, I just tell you how we cooked it this time.

Ingredients:

- 2 kg of chicken aprox. (legs or thighs) 
- small potatoes
- 1 spoonful ( 15 g. aprox.) of:

• sweet pimenton
• dehydrated garlic
• dehydrated onion
• Oregano
• Lemon Thyme
• Rosemary
• Dijon Mustard
• Honey

- Olive oil (5 spoonful aprox.)

- 1 lemon

- Salt (to taste)

- Black pepper (to taste)
- a clove of garlic ( optional)

Preparation:

1º- In a bowl put all spices together, aromatic herbs, honey and Dijon mustard. Then we squeeze the lemon juice inside (we can add the squeezed lemon to the bowl, just cut it into four pieces), we add a little bit of salt and pepper and we stir it all together, making a good dressing out of it.

2º- We add the pieces of the chicken to the bowl with the dressing and we dip it into the sauce. In the same bowl, we let it macerate covered with a plastic wrap in the fridge for between 30 minutes and an hour.

3º-  Then wash carefully the potatoes, since we bake them with their skin on. We cut them in halves or into four pieces, we put them in a bowl and we put a little bit of salt and pepper, we add a little bit of rosemary and a drizzle of olive oil (two spoonful approx.), we stir it all well and we put it aside.

4º- Preheat the oven at 200°C. Put the chicken pieces, the lemon and the potatoes together in an oven tray. If we prefer we can add a whole garlic with its skin on. We bake the chicked for some 50 minutes or an hour. If we prefer, halfway throught the baking we can turn the chicken on the other side so that it will be uniformly cooked.

Do not worry if it the chicken seems to becomes dark, it's not burned, that colour is given by the dressing. make a hole inside the potatoes to see if they're cooked, they will develop a sort of a tasty and toasted crust, and with all the flavour of our dressing.
These quantities are for some 4 or 5 people, we did not mention the quantity of potatoes, since it depends on everyone's choices and wishes. Together with chicken legs and chicken thighs, we can add chicken breast too, even if the latter becomes somewhat dry when baked. To help it to become more moist we can open it a drizzle lemon in it, or cut it into thinner pieces to bake it better.
This recipe is very versatile and we can adapt it to other kinds of meat dish, like rabbit  meat, lamb meat, pork rib, veal rib and so on. We warmly advise you to try it!

Enjoy it!

AnGie