Today is the most important day of the year in our neighborhood because all the houses illuminate their sidewalks and porches with luminarias and people come from far and near I see the ocean of light.
So starting at 9:30 it was all hands on deck working like crazy to prepare the food and luminarias for tonight’s open house.
Eating was of little importance. We snatched food as if in a force nine gale.
I ate a bowl of granola, with ½ of a fresh mango diced, yogurt, and milk at 10:30 after helping Suzette with the salad and I ate the PPI Donburi rice, chicken, salmon, and egg dish from last night at 2:30.
Suzette did most of the cooking this year, because she uses the Cuisinart so efficiently. I am still a hand slicer. For example, she sliced the potatoes and Nixon’s for two large Tortillas Espanol in about two minutes. She then put the potato and onion slices into a large bowl of cold water until she was ready to make the Large omelets at 4:00. I mixed the 10 eggs and she filled the two copper clad sauté pans with potato and onion slices and coked them to soften but not brown the onion and potato slices and then covered them with egg and cooked them to set them on the stove and then baked them in the oven to cook the egg on top. Here is a picture of the result. It tasted exactly as a tortilla should taste to me.
I remember when I first traveled with Suzette. I drove with her to the lake house she and Harold owned on Lake Chapala with their household goods. We arrived late in the evening after a long drive from Aquacalientes and there were only eggs, onions, and potatoes so I made us a tortilla Espanol, a heart warming dish made with the simplest of ingredients. This dish makes you understand why it is so loved by the Spanish, it perfectly expresses the soul of Spain.
After the tortillas were made Suzette combined the three elements of the Paella, the poached seafood, the sautéed chorizo and pimiento, and the onion risottoed rice cooked in seafood stock with saffron in the large blue roasting pan in the oven. At 5:00 she put a large portion of the paella in the paella pan on the large chafing dish platform and Willy brought five or six votive candles and Suzette put them in dishes under the pan and lit them to keep the paella warm.
Here is a Simply recipe similar to the one we used, except we steamed our shellfish in a medium of butter, white wine and water. We then used the poaching medium to cook the rice with Knorr dehydrated tomato and chicken stock instead of tomatoes and sofrito. We also sautéed the onion and rice separately before cooking it with the dehydrated tomato and chicken stock in the seafood stock. We also separately sautéed the pimiento and 1 1/2 lb. of chorizo. We used 5 lb. each of mussels and clams, a 15 oz. can of Spanish pimiento, and 3 lb. of shrimp and a 2.2 lb. bag of Bomba rice.
Prep time: 30 minutesCook time: 35 minutesYield: 6 servings
If you have trouble finding Spanish chorizo, substitute another kind of cooked sausage along with 1 teaspoon of smoked paprika (for the smoky flavor).
No grill? Cook this inside! Cook the paella through step 6 on top of the stove. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Add the seafood (step 7), cover the pan tightly with foil and finish cooking in the oven for 6 to 10 minutes or until the rice and shrimp are both cooked through and the mussels and clams are open. Check to see if the bottom has browned and, if not, set the pan over medium heat for a minute or two to allow the bottom layer of rice to caramelize.
INGREDIENTS
4 1/2 cups chicken stock
1/2 teaspoon saffron threads, crumbled and then loosely measured
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 yellow onion, finely chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
6 ounces mild dried chorizo sausage, sliced into thin half-moons (See Recipe Note)
3 cups short-grain rice, such as Spanish Bomba rice or Italian Arborio
1 (14-ounce) can fire-roasted diced tomatoes
1 cup frozen green peas
1 pound large (21-24 per pound) shrimp, peeled and deveined, with tails left on
1 pound mussels, rinsed and scrubbed
1 pound littleneck clams, rinsed and scrubbed
1/4 cup chopped parsley, for garnish
She then tossed the salad with the pomegranate dressing she had made in the Cuisinart with pomegranate juice and olive oil and apple cider vinegar. The salad was the gourmet greens from Costco and cherry tomatoes cut in half, plus jicama, Persian cucumbers, and carrots Suzette sliced in the Cuisinart.
The boys were filling the 250 bags we had folded with sand Willy had fetched from Kit Carson Park. They set the bags up in the garage ready to set out along the sidewalks surrounding the house, but the weather reports forecast rain, so they did not put the bags out. It did start raining at 5:00, which destroyed most of the luminarias set by our neighbors. Sandy and Tim, our across the street neighbors, came over with her mom, daughter, Grace, and cousin, at around 6:30 and told s that only about 1 in 20 of their luminarias had survived. His was the same throughout the neighborhood, making for a dark and wet night. Willy and Luke devised a strategy to overcome effects of the rain. They only placed about 80 luminarias along the walkway to our house which is largely shaded by two large cottonwoods and on the large porch facing the street so the path to our front door was illuminated by luminarias protected from the rain.
At 3:00 I started slicing and toasting slices of Trader Joe’s ciabatta baguette and putting them in a large basket for cheese. Suzette has wrapped the Hawaiian rolls and dinner rolls in aluminum and heated them in the oven after we served the paella.
I then decided to use the Spanish 2011 Origon Gran Reserva (60% Tempranillo and 40% Syrah bought at Trader Joe’s for $5.99 per bottle) instead of the French Patch Block Pinot Noir, so I fetched six bottles of and put back the three pinots.
I transferred the nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon sticks to another pot and Suzette poured in one of the 128 oz. bottles of freshly pressed apple cider (Costco). I then poured four bottles of Origon and a bottle of Italian Volcanic Lemon juice into the remaining negrus syrup and lemon and orange zest. I stirred and heated the two cauldrons and later tasted and they were both fabulous. I am so glad Costco has ceased selling Concha y Toro Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon magnums.
The mulled wine tasted cleaner and fresher and went perfectly with our Spanish food. Actually the menu for this year was a rather simple SpanisH meal instead of the extravagant spread that we usually produce that features dishes from Scandinavia to China toMexico and New . I liked the simplicity and unity of this menu.
It was great to see all the usual folks, the Kassams, the Turners, Mark and Carol, Jill and Marty, Mellisa and Ruth, Davida and Josefo, Mike and Karen, Sandy from Cynthia and Ricardo, our neighbors from across the street, and Willy’s friends, Will and Rachel, plus Sandy from my meditation group.
I felt happy to be alive and semi mobile and among friends and family.
This about about as close as I can get to Christmas spirit.
My chocolate dessert with crème anglais was a complete success, gobbled up quickly. I should have made two or three because only two extra desserts were brought although I opened the box of chocolate covered cherries.
People also liked the vast array of cheeses expanded this year by a newly available cheeses at Sprouts, a Rustique Camembert, and a Spanish hard cheese, Cinco Lanzas and one of my favorite cheeses, Beaufort from the French Haute Savoie.
I recall Fifteen years ago when we had to divert our route to Turin, Italy from Annecy because the Simplot Tunnel had collapsed, we drove through the small alpine town of Beaufort at the top of the Alps near the pass that Hannibal used to invade the Roman Empire. The pass was one of those deeply historic places that makes you realize you are standing in a fortified position that dates back 60,000 years, like the high hill overlooking the Danube River on the Boda side of Budapest or the castle on the sharp edge of the rock pinnacle separated from the town of Segovia by a wide deep crevasse, on which Isabella’s castle sits.
Bon Appetit
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