After the excitement of last week’s culinary adventures week 8 was always going to either a challenge or a let-down. So to kick of the week we went for a bit of a Spanish fiesta and brought out the Tapas dishes we’d smuggled all the way back from Barcelona. Now an evening of aTapas is not complete without Patatas Bravas or Chorizo in Red Wine so they were on the list without even thinking about it (and they were recipes I’d used before so don’t really count), and with a glut of eggs left over from Pancake Day an Oven-baked Tortilla seemed the way to go. Also left over from our pre-Lenten celebrations was some shredded ham so I delved into my cookbooks (namely A Passion for Tapas) in search of some sort of cold salad which might take pity on it – fully acknowledging that it wasn’t exactly Jamón Ibérico. Anyway, I spotted Broad Bean & Ham that looked spot on, somewhere in the back of my mind I could see the bag of frozen broad beans nestling in the freezer. For some reason popping the little beans out of their jackets after cooking doesn’t seem to me the chore it should be, I quite enjoy it…is that weird? The resulting salad was a lovely combination of flavours and textures, and was soon demolished. For my final dish I returned to the trusty aubergine, and marinated it simply in herbs and oil before roasting it in the oven for about an hour, while it didn’t give off as much juice as I would have liked it was very soft and went well with the other dishes. So with the Marinated Aubergine dished up we were in for quite a night, and despite there only being the two of us there weren’t many leftovers for lunch the next day – the sauce for the Patatas Bravas packed quite a punch but was washed down nicely with a tasty Rioja. OK, writing this was a mistake as I absolutely must have Tapas right now…
As always at the moment I find myself wandering over to the bookshelf and pulling off one of my Yotam Ottolenghi books and this week I decided to go for the original, Ottolenghi itself. Chickpeas & Spinach with Honeyed Sweet Potato has such an inviting photo that I couldn’t resist overloading on the carbs and tucking into this one. The tender sweet potato was such a contrast to the chickpea stew below and made for a wonderful meat-free Sunday dinner, it was incredibly filling and very easy to make (helped in part by me cheating and using tinned chickpeas…sorry!).
Following on from a very packed week seven I gave myself a slightly easy week this time (if you discount the hours of Tapas prep I put in at the beginning), but I still managed to include some new recipes and cook something fresh and tasty every day. With the horse-meat scandal currently dominating the headlines it’s rather nice to know that I haven’t touched supermarket meat for quite some time, don’t get me wrong I’m not adverse to eating horse meat, if you eat one animal why the hypocrisy over eating another? If you’re not preparing meals from scratch how can you ever hope to know exactly what’s going into your mouth?
Recipe Count: 26
Target: 52
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