Watermelon marinated in honey, vinegar and mint, then sauteed. This watermelon sauteed with honey and mint is a recipe for Michelin-starred French chef Michel Trama, quoted by Spanish chef Miguel López Castanier, chef at the Madrilenian Taberna de Liria in one of his books. Alright, I can't say it is strictly a Spanish tapa, and it's not traditional at all, but it perfectly fits the modern tapa concept. You could easily find it in any posh restaurant in any Malaga holidays, for example. And it is strikingly delicious and refreshing. I'm no fan of watermelon, I find it bland (in any case, I 'm not much of a fruit lover ). But the marinade in this recipe gives the watermelon precisely the spark I'm missing.
This is a simple, refreshing and surprising way to eat a watermelon, worth trying. And when warm weather starts to come in, you crave for these quick recipes. Serve this appetizer with a chilled beer and your guests will be delighted. Cross my heart. To the point:
Ingredients
Serves 4
1/2 peeled, sliced watermelon
1 heaping tablespoon of honey
2 tablespoons Spanish Sherry vinegar (or plain white wine vinegar)
1 good bunch of mint leaves
Salt to taste
Olive oil for sauteeing
Instructions
Arrange slices of watermelon on a large dish. Wash and dry the mint, then mince finely with a knife.
In a bowl, mix honey, vinegar and chopped mint. Stir vigorously. Spread the slices of watermelon well with this marinade and let stand at least fifteen minutes.
In a nonstick skillet, pour a little oil and brush the entire surface with a kitchen brush. Put the pan on high heat and when hot, place the watermelon slices wetted in the marinade. Let the slices sautee 3 or 4 minutes per side, you'll notice them change color.
Once done, remove to a platter and cut into bite-sized pieces or the size you prefer. Serve as an appetizer on a hot day, warm or at ambient temperature.
The combination of flavors is amazing in this recipe. Especially the mint gives it a great twist. And do not think I'm overdoing the mint, the taste is diluted a bit with the heat of sauteeing, and it perfectly matches the flavor of watermelon.
Eager to know more?
During the past Easter holiday, Semana Santa in Spanish, we spent a few days in the beautiful Ansalusian town of Granada. Amazing place, I swear. It not only houses one of the most magnificent Muslim monuments in the world, the Medieval fortress of Alhambra, but it is also a great spot for eating tapas, definitely one of the best in Spain. It is views like the ones below that prompted the 20th Century Mexican poet and diplomat, Francisco Alarcón de Icaza, to exclaim: “dale limosna mujer / que no hay en la vida nada / como la pena de ser ciego en Granada” meaning “Give him alms lady, for there is nothing in life as wretched as being blind in Granada”. (Here is a good resource about the rise and fall of Islamic Spain.) This very famous quote can be found everywhere in Granada, on tiled walls, on souvenirs for tourists… Granada is the Spanish word for pomegranate and this beautiful fruit is depicted all around, in the typical pottery, the street name signs, the sewer caps…
And can you guess what I bought in Granada? A couple of cookbooks, of course. One of them is the translation of an anonymous Andalusian manuscript of the 13th Century to be exact, written somewhere in al-Andalus, the former Islamic territory in Medieval Spain, which included not only the present region of Andalusia, but at least the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. (Muslims ruled varying tracts of land in the Peninsula from year 711 to 1492, a time span of almost eight centuries.) A masterpiece of culinary history, but rather confusing when it relates to methods of preparation and quantities of ingredients, as if it had been written by… a grandmother (in Spain a “historical” phrase is attributed to grandmothers when it comes to pastry and bread: “add as much flour as it can take”… very precise). Nevertheless, I found it fascinating reading. I was delighted to verify how little some recipes have changed after a whopping 800 years. I love to imagine how al-Andalus citizens ate meatballs, escabeches and pepitorias virtually identical to those we eat now, sitting in the cool while listening to the rumour of one of the many fountains that graze Granada… Also interesting to see how some ingredients, now thought exotic but which were added to a wide variety of dishes at the time have disappeared completely and haven’t even been preserved in Andalusian cuisine, such as rue or citron leaves.
One of the recipes that caught my attention was a rice pudding sweetened with honey, predecessor of our current arroz con leche or rice pudding, an enormously popular dessert all over Spain, and closely related to it. In fact almost identical, but for the use of honey as the main sweetener instead of sugar. As my husband is a big fan of rice pudding, I got to it, though I dislike it myself… quite a lot. Yes, nobody is perfect.
Here follows the recipe as it appears in the book (translation extracted from this web):
Take rice and soak it in fresh water, enough to cover it, for a day or overnight. Then wash it and put it on the fire in a pot or kettle. Cook it with water or fresh milk, then add four or five ratls of clean honey from which you have skimmed the foam. Cook it carefully on a gentle fire. Moisten it, while cooking, with fresh milk until it sticks together, coagulates and becomes a paste. Pour it onto a platter and macerate it with a spoon. Make a hole in the center which you fill with fresh, melted butter and dust it with ground sugar and cinnamon and use it.
And here goes my version:
Medieval arroz con leche
Prep time: 12 hours
Cook time: 1 hour 5 mins
Total time: 13 hours 5 mins
Serves: 8
A lusciously creamy rice pudding, arroz con leche, is a hugely popular dessert all over Spain, originated during the Medieval Muslim rule of Spain. Here is a 13th century version, sweetened with honey instead of sugar.
Ingredients:
1 cup (200g) round grain rice
6 cup (150dl) whole milk
1/2 cup (175g) good quality honey*
1 stick cinnamon
Melted butter to taste
Ground cinnamon for sprinkling
Instructions:
Put the rice in a bowl, add water and let it soak overnight.
The next day let the rice drain thoroughly in a colander. Then transfer it to a pot, add the milk and the cinnamon stick.
Bring it to a very soft boil and cook for 45 minutes, stirring often and scratching the bottom of the pot to prevent the rice from sticking.
Add whatever sweetener you prefer, either honey, sugar or both (see note below) and keep cooking another 20 minutes, stirring till you have a soft and sticky mass.
Once the rice is cooked and it has achieved a creamy consistency, test for sweetness and correct if desired. Take into account that it will further thicken on cooling.
Tip the rice on a platter and let it cool covered, or better still covered with plastic foil touching the surface, so that it develops no skin (unless you like the skin of course).
To serve, sprinkle with cinnamon and drizzle with a little melted butter.
*For those who are not honey lovers, you can substitute half the honey with plain sugar, then the ratio is approximately 1/4 cup (90g) honey/1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp (110g) sugar; 1 cup plus 2 tbsp (230g) if you only use sugar. The sweetness of sugar is about 3/4 of honey.
I admit it: I didn’t taste it. I told you I don’t like it at all, though I am quite alone in this. Anyway, I’m such a sweet and loving wife that I gladly made it for my husband… ahem. And as a true “connoisseur” of rice pudding varieties, his verdict was that it was truly delicious. Although maybe he tells me so not to ruin our relationship. How am I to know? ;)
And by the way, the Spanish version of my blog was recently included in a list of recommended blogs for Spanish majors at this web of online college courses... I am so honored that anyone considers my blog is a good resource for Spanish culture! Well, namely cooking... they say "Bonus if you can make recipes published in Spanish"... fun.
All relevant religious holidays in Spain have a reflection in the food. Spain was a strictly Catholic country for centuries with the liturgical periods tightly marking the habits, and with food rules that had to be obeyed. Though nowadays the religious rules regarding food, like fasting on certain days during Easter, are largely overlooked, funnily enough the food traditions remain and making torrijas for the Easter celebration, usually a labor holiday lasting four days, is one of them. Also you can find them in pastry shops, restaurants and bars all over the country during this period. Torrijas are apparently a rather ancient recipe, as they first appear quoted by a Spanish author in the 15th Century. Now... listen to yours truly pronouncing this funny word here.
Torrijas are a very simple dish, very similar to French toast and pain perdu, most often made by soaking slices of stale bread in sugared milk, also flavoured with cinnamon or vanilla, then bathed in beaten egg, fried in oil and sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and powdered cinnamon. In fact, another one of the many ways developed by the not so well-off to use up bread leftovers. Though today bread especially baked for the purpose of making torrijas can be bought. As it usually happens with most traditional dishes, the perfect ingredients and method are controversial matters, torrijas made with sweet wine instead of milk and others bathed in syrup after frying being also popular. And of course, the best torrijas are always one's mother's, no discussion about it!
Homemade torrijas
By Miriam García
Published: April 23, 2011 Torrijas are a very simple dish, similar to French toast and pain perdu, most often made by soaking slices of stale bread in sugared milk, then bathed in beaten egg, fried in oil and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. 4.0 stars based on 35 reviews
Cut the bread into 1 inch (2.5cm) slices. Arrange them on a shallow dish that can hold the milk.
Put all the milk in a saucepan with the sugar and the cinnamon stick, bring to a boil. Turn off the heat the moment it starts to boil and leave to infuse for 5 minutes.
Pour the milk on the bread and let soak for one hour.
Beat the eggs in a plate large enough to hold at least one torrija.
Heat the oil to medium in a large frying pan that can hold several torrijas at the same time. With a spatula (the bread might be overly soft), carefully transfer the soaked slices one by one into the egg and turn them to coat. Then transfer the slices to the hot oil.
Fry for a couple of minutes on each side, until brown.
Take out to a dish lined with a paper towel and thoroughly sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Enjoy warm or cold.
Tips for superb torrijas: I find the result is best when you let the bread go very stale before soaking, so that the slices can soak as much milk as possible and yield a very creamy inside afterwards. So what I do sometimes is to slice the bread before letting it dry overnight, to assure that the loaf dries thoroughly (and because slicing is a lot easier while the bread is soft). And I recommend you make sure that the slices soak as much milk as feasible, so it is best to check how they are doing within say 20 minutes after pouring the warm milk on them, because you can always add a little more if the slices have soaked up all the liquid in the dish, say another cup. For me these are indeed the secrets for a lusciuosly creamy interior that looks and tastes more like pastry cream than like plain milk-soaked bread. Because that is what I really love about torrijas, that the alchemy of soaking and frying metamorphoses the simplest ingredients into something different and truly delicious.
I have wonderful news to share: I will be a contributor to the new online food magazine Honest Cooking! I am soooo excited! And I am in great company there, with colleagues like Nancy from Spicie Foodie, Simone from Junglefrog Cooking, Joan from Foodalogue, Asha from Fork Spoon Knife or Maria Laitinen from Scandi Foodie among many outstanding bloggers. You can check my published articles anytime by clicking on the cute Honest Cooking logo on my sidebar. For my debut at Honest Cooking I have chosen a very typical dish of my hometown, Madrid, the capital city of Spain. I have lived there most of my life and though in fact I live outside Madrid since 2000, in a small town 40km to the Northwest, I am still in the same province... it feels almost the same. Choosing a dish that is representative of Madrid is not an easy task. Madrid builds upon thousands of immigrants coming from all over Spain through time, so there are not many dishes that are actually exclusively from Madrid. Just take into account that Madrid had around 1 million inhabitants in 1940, after the Spanish Civil War, and it already had 3.1 millions 30 years later, in 1970. More than triple! Everything is mixed.
Soldaditos de Pavía, meaning Pavía soldiers, are strips of desalted codfish, marinated in a mixture of lemon juice and Spanish sweet pimentón, then either coated first in flour then in egg, or in a frying batter, deep-fried in olive oil and served with a strip of roasted red pepper around them. About the origin of this funny name there are two theories: the first relates to the color of the soldier uniforms at the time of the battle of Pavia, in 1525. The second relates to the color of the Spanish hussar uniforms during the 19th Century. (Flag image by courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)
But all this lore is not as important as the recipe for this simple, tasty and healthy appetizer or tapa, found in a lot of bars and tabernas in the old quarters of Madrid. So here it comes:
Soldaditos de Pavía
Yields 4 tapa-sized servings
1.1 pound (500g) good quality salted codfish
Juice of 1-2 lemons
1 1/2 tsp sweet pimentón (or more if you like)
A dash of white pepper
3 tbsp olive oil
First option - simple beignet coating:
1 beaten egg
AP flour or chickpea flour
Second option - somewhat-time-consuming beignet frying batter:
2/3 cup (100g) flour
1/4 cup eau-de-vie or similar spirit
3/4 tsp (5g) baker's yeast
1 tbsp olive oil
1 pinch of saffron
1 pinch salt
Virgin olive oil for deep-frying (essential for real soldaditos)
1 large roasted red pepper, in strips
Cut the codfish in strips, put them in a large bowl with cold water and leave them to desalt 24 hours. Better if you can change the water at least 3 times during this period. Believe me, you’d rather have to add some salt to the final fried fish than getting a bunch of unbearably salty and inedible soldaditos.
Prepare the marinade in a shallow dish or container, mix the lemon juice with the pimentón.
Pat dry the fish strips with a paper towel and dip them in the marinade. Toss them to coat. Then drizzle the olive oil on the fish. Marinade for 3 hours.
Rinse the fish strips. You won't normally need to salt the strips, as the fish will still retain some saltiness.
Now you can use one of two methods for making the beignets:
The most simple is to coat the strips first in plain flour (I use chickpea flour like in many places of Andalusia), then bathe them in beaten egg and put the strips straight into the hot olive oil.
The second method, a bit more elaborate, is to prepare a batter for coating the fish. Sift the flour and mix it with the tablespoon of oil, the saffron, the spirit, the salt and the yeast. Leave to rest in a warm place for the yeast to act. When the mixture has risen slightly and it's bubbly on the surface, dip the fish strips and fry them on medium-hot olive oil. Place the fried fish on a paper towel.
Serve while still warm with a strip of roasted red pepper across them. I have used piquillo peppers here instead, as they are pretty good with anything. Enjoy the juicy, lemony, flaky goodness of the fish inside the soft crust. The perfect appetizer for a warm Spring noon with a glass of beer or Fino. Better sitting on a patio.
