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

the Spanish Croquetas recipe

The Croquetas are a symbol of Spanish gastronomy and represents a dish prepared with a speciality of iberian cuisine, like Jamon Serrano. Wa cannot think of going in a Spanish bar without the omnipresent croquetas. Potatoes are really widespread in spanish gastronomy, and in many versions potatoes are included in the mixture, even if the vast majority is made with a bechamel sauce together with a large variety of possible ingredients, everything's fine within a croqueta.

But even if the croquettes, or croquetas, are now a typical spanish dish, historical documents seems to show that the origins of this dish are not in Spain, but in France. The oldest document is from year 1691, where we can find the recipe of a croquette from the Royal chef of Louis XIV. We do not know if the cook draw inspiration from a previous traditional or oral recipe from Spain, but we can see that nowadays the croquetas from Spain are really popular and so they somehow gained success crossing the borders. We can see nowadays different versions in many Countries.

The first historical documents about spanish croquetas is to be found in a year 1867 book titled "El cocinero español y la perfecta cocinera" ( the spanish cook and the perfect lady in the kitchen), published in Malaga. We find this book to be a little bit too late to be realistically the first mention of spanish croquetas, and we are pretty sure that generation after generation, mother to daughter, the authentic & traditional spanish croquetas recipe have been invented many century earlier its formal publication.

If the origin of the recipe may be somehow controversial, the origin of the name is easy to relate to the french word "croquir", that is being crispy. In Italy, the croquetas, or croquettes, arrives through the Bourbon dinasty to Southern Italy, to the Regno delle Due Sicilie, where the croquettes were stolen from the hands of the Monzù (the french chefs of the Bourbon royal court) and transformed the tasty "crocchè", based on a potatoes and egg mixture. Later, in Sicily from the Crocchè were created the famous "arancini". A pretty glorious history isn't it?

Today we will bring you the recipe for a croquetas made up with Jamon Iberico, a dish invented by the spanish chef Alberto Chicote, who personally published his own recipe through Twitter some months ago. We changed a little bit here & there, overall for what concerns the quantities, but at the end the result is almost the same, creamy & super tasty. This is actually the first time I use heavy cream for croquetas, we'll give you many other croquetas recipe in the future.
Let's go with the recipe!

Ingredients:

• 670 ml if milk
• 330 ml approx. of heavy cream
• 95 g.of flour (I used half whole-wheat, half normal flour)
• 75 ml of olive oil aprox. (the original recipe uses butter, but I don't)
• 1 big onion
• 100 g. of Jamon Iberico
• Jamon bone (optional, but it will add much more taste to it!)
• Salt (the quantity you want)
• black pepper (to taste)
• A little bit of nutmeg
• For the battering: 2 eggs, flour & breadcrumbs

Preparation:

1º-  In a pot, we put the milk and the heavy cream together to warm a little bit. If we have the Jamon bone, put it in the pot now, it will add a lot of flavour. When the liquid starts to boil, we low the heat and keep on cooking it a little bit more.

2º- in an anti-adherent pan we pour a drizzle of oil and we put the heat on medium-low. We cut the onion à là Brunoise, or in thin slices, and we put it to fry a little bit. At this point we will add the salt to speed up the frying. When the onion starts to become transparent, we add the Jamon Serrano we previously cut in small pieces and we stir it all together for a while.

3º- We add the flour and we stir for about 10 minutes, on low heat to cook the flour, and after that we pour into the pan the mixture of the milk and the heavy cream (do not pour you jamon bone, be careful!) and keep stirring in order to avoid the creation of bulks. A little bit of salt & pepper to taste and also a little bit of zested nutmeg too! We will stir for other 10 minutes or so, or until we see the dough well mixed, not sticky and we see all ingredients well incorporated.

4º- Once we concluded the previous step, we put the dough in a platter so to let it cool, and we cover it with plastic wrap. We want the plastic wrap to touch the dough, so to avoid the forming of a crust when cooling. We pop it into the fridge for about two hours or we can let it there overnight.

5º- We prepare three dishes, and we put flour in the first, beated eggs in the second and breadcrumbs in the last one. We create little balls with the dough of the size we prefer, and we dip the balls first in the flour, then in the beated eggs and then again in the breacrumbs, all in sequence. Fry it in very hot oil.

We can freeze the croquetas we don't eat them right away. To do so, a trick is to put them in a tray each one separated from the others and we put them in the freezer for about an hour, or until they are completely freezed. Then, once freezed, we remove them from the tray and we put them into freeze bags or Tupperwares. In this way they won't stick to each other when they will freeze, and will be easy to get them ready to eat!

Saludos!

AnGie

Canary Island's Vilana Cake

In the month of May we celebrate the day of Canary Islands, and therefore we want to share with you regional recipes from the rich gastronomy of these islands.

Today we start with a traditional sweet dish from the Gomera Island, the Vilana Cake!
It is called vilana because it is named after the rectangular tinpot called vilana or milana. This sweet dish looks like a traditional cake, but its peculiarity is that its dough has potatoes as the main ingredient, and in addition almonds and currants. Canary islands have a huge variety of potatoes, as we previously mentioned in other posts, and the almonds and dried fruits are very presents in the islands, and therefore those products are often used in the gastronomy of Canary islands.

Blossoming almond flowers. Tenerife Island.

The vilana cake is a traditional cake with a very smooth taste and texture that we can find in every typical Canary feast, like feasts of artisans, school's feasts, family celebrations, romerias...this delicious dish is also so easy to do! Today I bring to you the vilana recipe of my mother.

ingredients

Ingredients:

• 250 g.of flour
• 200 g. of sugar (or according to your taste) 
• 500 g. of potatoes
• 30 g.  of royal yeast
• 6 eggs
• 150 g. of butter
• 200 g. of almonds
• 200 g. of currants
• 1 spoonful of cinnamon
• 1 lemon zest

Preparation:

1º- We peel the potatoes and we put them to cook. Once they're ready, we mash them with a fork.

2º- In a bowl, we put the mashed potatoes with sugar, the butter, the eggs, the cinnamon and we mix it all well.

3º. Add the sifted flour, the yeast, the almonds (that we previously peeled and minced in not so small pieces), the currant and the lemon zest. Mix it all well.

4º-  Put some butter on the interiors of a rectangular baking pan in order to not let stick our cake to the pan and we put our dough inside of it, and decorate the surface with almonds (no need to peel or mince them here).

5º- Bake it in a preheated oven at 150° Celsius for about an hour. We will keep an eye to the oven every time, because as we all know every oven it's a world of its own. If we see that it's getting too much golden brown on the surface, we can cover it with an alluminium foil or a baking sheet, and we'll just keep baking. To be sure that our cake is ready, we'll put a kitchen needle of a knife inside of the cake, and if it get out of it clean, then the cake's ready!

6º- Let it cool until it's warm, then put it out of the baking pan, and let it cool completely on a rack, and if you can, try to resist the urge to eat it until it's cool!

Enjoy it!

AnGie

Canary Islands Stuffed potatoes

Today we'll bring you a family recipe, a recipe from Canary Islands. This one is very versatile and can be adopted to a lot of versions, according everyone's taste, but these ones I'm gonna show you aren't the usual stuffed potatoes you can find anywhere. I have never find this kind of stuffed potatoes outside of the Canary Islands. In the many, many versions of stuffed potatoes you may find that potatoes are bread-crumbed , fried or gratinated, but this one's special. Other kinds of this recipe are from countries like Perù, Colombia or Cuba, between the others, and we'll talk about them in others occasions. Canary Islands have a really great culinary tradition with potatoes, or "papas", as they call them. We have seen for exemple the recipe about "papas arrugadas".

As for the quantity I'm gonna tell you, they are for three to four people (and their appetite!). Just vary the quantity according your guests.

Ingredients:

- Middle sized potatoes (dependig to how many guests, in my case 1,300 kg)

Pimentón y curcuma

- little zucchini (a Canary Island variety called "bubango")
- 200 g. of tomatoes
- 150 g. of red pepper
- Onions ( aprox. 200-250 g)
- 1/4 kg. of minced veal meat
- 1/2 cup of white wine
- 2 teeth of garlic
- olive oil
- 1 spoonful of pimenton (or sweet paprika)
- 1 pinch of curcuma (natural dye)
- 2 leaves of laurel
- thyme ( optional)
- Salt
- 1/2 liter of water
- 2 spoonful of flour (optional)

Preparation:

1º- Start with prepping the filling of our potatoes. In a pan, we put two spoonful of olive oil, we put it on heat and we add the half of the minced onion, some 100-150 grams and a garlic. Add fine salt to fasten the cooking, and when the onion start frying add the minced red pepper. Fry a little bit and add the minced tomatoes (some 100 grams). Add the meat to our pan and a little bit of salt too. When the meat is ready, take it out of the heat and put it aside.

 2º- Start preparing the potatoes, in my case I also used bubangoes, that are a Canary Island variety of the classical zucchini. You can in the same way have even stuffed peppers. Peel and wash the potatoes, then punch a hole inside the potatoes with a spoon or a parisien spoon scoop. In this step be careful not to break the potato, you don't want the hole to be big. Do not throw to the garbage the parts of the potatoes you've removed! You can do a spanish tortilla, fry or cook them, and you can put the parts of the zucchini you've removed inside your filling to add a lot of flavour...you can use it all!

3º- With the help of a coffee spoon, fill the potatoes or the veggies you've chosen. To close the hole to be sure our filling won't get out during the cooking time, you have many options. I usually put in a bowl 2 spoonful of flour and I keep adding some water and stirring, until I obtained a sort of thick cream. Then I put some of this thick cream above the hole, and then in a very hot pan I put the potato with the hole on the botto, so that it cook perfectly closing the hole. Another option is to use the removed parts of the potatoes to use them as a sort of cap, but with this option you shall be careful, because not many stuffed potatoes can cook at once, otherwise they would open and the filling will go out.

4º- In another pan we do another sautée, this time with onion, pepper, and the remaining tomato. Add the wine, the aromatich herbs, (laurel and thyme in my case), and put the potatoes with the hole side up. Add water, but not that much water to cover the potatoes. Add the quantity of salt you desire, cover the pan, put it on medium heat and let it cook...blub blub blub!
This step will last half an hour, but it  depends on the variety of potatoes you used, so give them an eye while cooking, and try once in a while if they are ready with a fork: if the fork enter the potato, the potatoes are ready. If potatoes are still not cooked, add water so that the sauce will not dry. Try the salt, you can adjust it while cooking.

resultado final de la cocción

5º- And now your stuffed potatoes are ready to eat! I prefer to eat it as a single course, given that here we have the veggies, the proteines and the hydrates. Eat it with a good wine and enjoy it! Sometimes I use veggies or champignon mushroom filling only, sautéed tuna, chicken or turkey or even with corned beef...you choose! I hope you'll like this dish that's thought for all the family and all year round!

Enjoy it!

saludos

Angie

The Papas Arrugadas

The wrinkled Papas negras yema de huevo and the mojo de cilantro

Today we'll bring you a typical Canary Island recipe, where you can find a whole lot of variety of potatoes, or, as we call it in Canary Islands, "papas". Expecially in the island of Tenerife (where one of us two, Angie, was born) potatoes are being cultivated since the XIV century. Some of the variety of potatoes cultivated in the Canary Island are simply unique in the World.

Potatoes were brought here from America, specifically from Perù, where they are cultivated since more than 7000 years. Spanish "conquistadores" thought to bring this peculiar product back to Europe ad a sort of botanical curiosity, rather than a culinary delight. Canary Island, infact, as Admiral Nelson well knew, were a sort of strategical link between the Old and the New World. It is said that potatoes arrived well before in Canary islands than in Europe, and, thanks to the warm climate, the cultivation of this new product spread around the islands and created many unique varieties. Some kind of potatoes, infact, just exists in the Peruan Andes and in Tenerife. One of them, perhaps the most famous of all, is known as the Papa Negra, the Black Potato. Today we'll talk about it!

Papas negras de yema de huevo

Within the papa negra's world exists just so many sub-varieties, and the most peculiar is the papa negra yema de huevo, that is "black potato egg yolk". This kind of papa negra it's well known for being very small, despite existing many exceptions, and because of the colour of its interior, very yellow, just like egg yolks.

In today's cuisine, with the fashion of modern and innovative dishes, this papa is being somehow rediscovered by famous chefs worldwide. This gourmet potato is known also as the "black truffle of Canary Islands". But this exquisite product is far from being a luxury delicatessen in Canary Island cuisine: it has been used infact in the Island's traditional cuisine for centuries, for example in our recipe of the Canary Islands Stuffed Potatoes. Many different kind of dishes can be prepared with this gorgeous kind of potato, but its own quality allows the papa negra to being the auhentical solo queen of the table. Often the papas negras are served together with the Mojos Canarios sauces (we'll talk about them in another post) but there are an infinite list of dishes that really screams for having beside the papas negras! There are modern dishes where you can find the black potatoes, but the most traditional one, the most fascinating and the most historical too is without a doubt the recipe known as the Papas Arrugadas (or in english, "wrinkled potatoes")

An old potato farmer in Canary Island

Logically, you can use whatever kind of potatoes in order to obtain papas arrugadas, Today's recipe is just an attempt to get you inside the faboulous world of Canary Island potatoes. The only things you'll really need to obtain papas arrugadas is to look in your local shop for the smallest round shaped and high quality potatoes you can find, since the papas arrugadas are to be eaten without taking of their skin.

Ingredients:

• Potatoes
• Sea Salt
• Water

The ingredients

You'll never hear someone from Canary islands telling you exact quantities of ingredients, since this recipe is somehow "instinctive", since no one never measure the quantity of salt that the water needs and the quantity of potatoes used depends on how many people we'll have eating with us, but we'll give you some rough measure in order to obtain good papas arrugadas. For each kilogram of potatoes, we'll add 250 grams of salt. Don't be afraid of tossing too much salt to the water, since the papas negras will absorb just the exact quantity of salt they'll need, and the rest will remain in the skin or in the pot. It may be interesting to notice that in some places near the shore it was used directly the salted water of the sea, and today this practice is still in use in some case. In the past people used also to conserve the salted water used to cook the potatoes, so that the water was ready for the next use even without adding more salt, but this practice has almost disappeared.

Procedure:

We'll toss the potatoes well washed without peeling their skins in a pot, and we remember that we'll eat the papas arrugadas with their skins, so wash them very well. We add water without covering the potatoes completely and we add salt.

the potatoes semi-covered with water

the potatoes and the salt

Put te pot over high heat until you'll see the water boiling, and then pinch a potato with a fork until you see it's cooked. Please be careful of not pinching too much the potatoes in this step, otherwise too much salted water would enter your papas negras and they would be too salted. You could choose a potato that we think is ready and pinch it in order to see if it's soft enough, or simply pinch a potato in the upper part of our pot.
The exact timing of this phase it depends on the kind of potato you're using. With the papas negras yema de huevo, since they're extremely small, they will be ready in a matter of minutes, between five and ten minutes after the water starts boiling to be more precise. If the potatoes are bigger, you'll need more time, and you'll see lowering the level of the water. This is normal and helps the process.

When you'll have your potatoes are soft enough, we pour the water off the pot without taking off the papas negras. This is the crucial part, since you'll then put the potatoes again on the heat without the water. In this way you'll see the papas dry and wrinkled. Move the pot in order not to burn the potatoes, and you'll see them getting whiter and whiter: this is the salt of the water. After few minutes, we'll be ready to eat them! s Papas arrugadas are always to be eaten hot, that's how they taste best. Try them with sauces, mojos canarios, with fish dishes or meat dishes, they're simply unique...enjoy them!

ready to eat them!

Saludos!

Angie