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

Carrot lemon juice

Today we bring you a different and delicious lemonade: the Carrot lemon juice! Lemonade are not just made with lemons, and we encourage you to try this one!
It's super healthy! Ideal for breakfast, for a morning or an afternoon snack, this drink  is perfect for this season of springtime!
 

It's known how healthy are carrots, and in our version we bring you today the carrots will be even healthier, because we do not cook them, preserving their nutritional richness.
Carrots are healthy for so many things that I don't even know where to start! They clean our liver, they help our immune system, help our skin, help keeping the correct levels of sugar in our blood, they brings lots of calcium (ideal for teeth or bones), helps with breast milk, it's a natural counter measure for acne and literally other thousands of things! And now that summertime is getting closer, helps us tanning faster! Start with carrot juice a couple of week before sunbathing, and you'll see how tanned you'll get! Yes, carrots are really helpful for a lot of things!

Ingredients: 

5 o 6 carrots
2 lemons
500 ml of water
Honey, you choose the how much (optional)

Preparation:


1º- Peel the carrots and the lemons.

2º- With a food processor, get the carrot and lemon juice. Add water and/or ice cubes, if you want a densier juice, then add less water.

3º- I usually drink it as it is, without adding any sweetener, but if you don't dig sour and the lemons you've choosen are actually sour, then I would advice you to add some sugar or some honey, according to your taste. I recommend for example sunflower honey, that can sweeten your juice with just a little amount of it. It's a very dense honey, but we can melt it easily warming it up a little bit. In this way, we would sweeten our juice in a much more natural way than we would using sugar. It's preferable to always choose the purest and the most ecological of all honeys. We can have also an orange juice, adding oranges instead of lemons, of course! ;).
Furthermore, adding lemon or oranges, we will retard the oxidation of the carrot juice.


This kind of juices or lemonades are really healthy, and it's very recommendable to change often the kind of fruit we choose, in order to have a larger variety of nutrients. The more coloured is our food, the best!

Angie