My first recipe: Paella!

Ingredients

• 1/2 red peper
• 1/2 green pepper
• 1 onion
• 4 garlics
• 1 tomato
• 2 soup spoons of fried tomato
• 1/2 kg of rice. Make sure this is rice for paella, so if possible go to the closest Spanish food store.
• 8 king prawns
• 400 grams of clams
• 3 squids
• 4 Chicken drumsticks
• 1 bouillon cube
• 1 One leaf of laurel
• Azafran or Coloring (azafran pulverized). If you want the rice to be really yellow, get coloring. Go to the closest Spanish food store to buy it.
• Salt
• Black pepper
• Olive oil

Getting ready the fish stock

The first thing you need to do is to start preparing the fish stock which is one of the keys of a good paella, getting a very tasty fish stock means that the rice will be delicious.

This is how the seafood looks before I get my hands on it.

 

Boil the clams until they open. Then take out the clams from the shells, put the shells in a pan in which we’ll prepare the fish stock. Don’t throw away the water used to boil the clams, this goes in the pan to make the fish stock.

    

 

Remove all the shells from the prawns. Put all the shells in the pan, this includes heads, tails and the body shell.

Clean very well the squids, from inside and from outside. Do not forget to remove the skins. Then cut the squids in slices.

Any left over from peppers, onion, tomato etc... goes in the pan to make the fish stock i.e. pepper seeds. Do not throw away anything but the garlic and onion skin.

Break into small pieces the bouillon cube and put it in the pan.

Remove the bones from the drumsticks and put them in the pan.

When everything is in the pan, fill it up with water, add the leaf of laurel, salt, pepper and a bit of olive oil, turn on the heat and put it low.

By now the pan could look something like this. Let the fish stock on the heat until it is time to use it.

Chop, chop and chop again

Chop really thin the peppers, onion, tomato and garlic. Also prepare the seafood and chicken by cutting them into pieces of the size you like.

        

Cooking

Let's start the real cooking, guess what we need first? The paellera! Paellera = frying pan only to cook paella.

Put some olive oil (be generous) into the paellera and warm it up, low heat. Add the onion, red and green pepper. Stir from time to time, it should take around 20 minutes to get this ready. It is ready when both onion and peppers are very soft.

Put away from the heat the onion, red and green pepper and onion, see pic below. Now it’s the turn for the garlic, when the garlic is getting golden then add the fresh tomato. Add a bit of salt and the same amount of sugar to keep in balance the bitterness. Then add two soup spoons of fried tomato.  Mix everything and again put away everything from the hottest part of the paellera. Add the chicken, when the chicken is well fried mix everything. Almost there...

           

Now put the rice in the pan, mixed the rice well with the other ingredientes. Distribuit everything well along the pan because once we add the fish stock we will not stir the rice even once! Filter the fish stock and add it to the paellera. Add the seafood, a bit of azafran or coloring and a bit of salt. It is very important that all the surface of the frying pan is equally hot. In my kitchen the heats I have are quite small, so I had three on and keep on moving the frying pan to make sure all rice was done at the same time. If you are not sure if the rice is ready, try it out and if it is hard and is running out of water to boil in, add more fish stock. When it is done turn off the heat (heats in my case), put some lemon slices on top of the paella, cover the paellera and let it be for ten minutes.

      

Get some wine and enjoy your paella!

I am thinking of adding more recipes but first I would like to know if these might be of any interest to you. So if you enjoyed this recipe please let me know by commenting on this post :)