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.
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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.
Some time ago I bought a book about Ancient Roman cookery, called exactly Roman Cookery, by Mark Grant, who is a British classics teacher. It includes quite a lot of interesting recipes, but the most interesting thing to me was to realize how different Mediterranean cooking was before the discovery of America and the spreading in Europe of crops that we now feel so naturally Mediterranean like tomato, pepper and many more. Take pizza for example... think about it, without tomato? Well, no problem, that's white pizza. But the dough would be made with spelt instead of white wheat. And you'd have neither red nor green pepper to add for garnish. There's a very simple and delicious pizza-like recipe in this book, cooked on a skillet instead of baked, named Staititai, coming from a book called The partying professors, by the Greek writer Athenaeus. According to Mr. Grant, this Greek book would be widely known in Rome.
The recipe calls for baker's yeast, but I used sourdough instead, because anyway that's what the Romans would have used. I'm trying to be more authentic than the author...
Staititai from Roman Cookery (tweaked for sourdough)
200g authentic spelt sourdough, 100% hydration (baker's percentage)
400g authentic spelt flour (I used whole spelt for more, you know... authenticity)
200ml authentic water
1 tsp authentic sea salt
Filling for one pizza (20cm wide)
A handful of crumbled feta cheese (to your taste)
1 tbsp sesame seeds
1 tbsp runny honey
Mix the sourdough with the flour and the water. Leave to autolyse for 15-20 minutes. Then knead around 10 minutes by hand or 7-8 minutes with a blender, until the gluten is developed. Place into an oiled bowl, turn the dough so that the oil covers all the surface, cover with a plastic shower cap and leave till double in bulk. Mine took quite long to double, at least 6 hours. Then tip the dough on the counter, make a neat roll and divide the roll in 5 pieces. These pieces make small pizzas, around 20cm diameter. You can change the size of the pieces if you like by dividing the dough in more pieces (or less). Remember the pieces must fit into a skillet.
At this point I wrapped 4 of the pieces in plastic and put them in the freezer for a rainy day. I left one to proof in my refrigerator overnight, to eat it the next day. I work at home and I eat alone (sounds like an existentialist rhyming couplet). The next day I took the dough out and left it to temper for half an hour. Then I rolled it with a rolling pin to a 20cm-disc, more or less. I put a skillet on low heat, sprinkled it with olive oil and lay the disc of dough. It started to puff up nicely. When the underside showed quite some browned spots, I brushed some oil on the upperside and turned the disc. I waited for the whole thing to brown and cook, it puffed in a similar way to a pita bread. Switch on the oven grill in the meantime.
Fine, now you have a nice browned bread base where you can put the cheese and sprinkle the sesame seeds. The recipe's direction is to add the honey at this point too, but I preferred to add it after grilling. Then put the base with the filling under a hot grill and let the cheese get soft for 5 minutes or so, to your taste. Remember that feta doesn't really melt. You'll start noticing the wonderful smell of the roasting sesame seeds. If you're anything like me, the aromas will make you feel like pouring yourself a glass of white wine... ahem (I did). When it is sufficiently grilled (keep an eye on it, otherwise the bread can brown excessively), take it out of the oven and drizzle with the honey while warm.
I must admit that I found the result stunning, much better than expected. I didn't think that such a simple combination of ingredients would make such a delicious dish. Trust me, the combination of the toasted sesame seeds with the cheese and the sweet touch of the honey makes a wonderful assembly! I could have eaten another one, no doubt. And this pizza cut in wedges and piping hot can make a very interesting appetizer... alongside some spiced olives... and a glass of wine... yes, I picture myself dressed in a tunic, sitting under a holm oak... overlooking some cliff by the sea... softly playing a lyre... don't you smell the Mediterranean? Wow, I get carried away!
This bread goes to Susan/Wild Yeast for this week's YeastSpotting.
