Eating to learn

One of the questions that Spaniards ask me, from time to time, is "Have you ever tried.......?" The dots represent some typical, local food. It's a question that makes me feel unloved. They obviously suspect that I sit at home listening to the BBC wearing my Union Flag socks and eating Chicken Tikka Masala.

It might, I suppose, be a reasonable question at times. Imagine we have a Spaniard who has lived in Notting Hill for fifteen years. I say, "Have you ever tried Parkin?" or "Have you ever tried bubble 'n' squeak?" They are not common foods. On the other hand were my question to be, "Have you ever tried roast beef and Yorkshire pudding?" the question verges on the insulting. I do understand where a Spaniard might get the BBC and socks idea though. The Spanish TV News has been full of Brexit the last couple of days and the cameras went in search of the British immigrant response. They went to places like San Fulgencio where they filmed immigrant Britons reading the Daily Mail as they tucked into a Full English at outside tables in the sun.

I don't eat in Spanish homes very often but the last twice that I have the food has been spectacular. It was Arroz al Horno, oven baked rice, in the first and Cocido in the second. Arroz al Horno translates easily but Cocido doesn't; the verb simply means cooked and the noun is a stew. Neither convey the complexity of Cocido.

I've had Cocido in restaurants only a couple of times in all the years that I've been here. On the plate it usually looks like a sort of half stew; lots of thin gravy with a selection of chickpeas, vegetables and potatoes that have been cooked until they are very soft alongside some cheap cuts of meat cooked for ages to make them tender. I thought that was what the real thing looked like and that I knew two factual things about Cocido. As it turns out both were wrong. The first was that it's a dish linked with Madrid. Our hosts were very firm that it is typical of Valencia too.  The second was that the home-made version produced two courses from one pot cooking. I had it in my head that the chickpeas, meat and other veg, were cooked inside a muslin bag, so that their flavours seeped into the water producing a broth which was then used to produce a noodle soup, whilst the meat and veg were served as the second course.

It's not that I was far off in my idea but it's a bit like making tea in a microwave. It might work but it's just not right. In fact, traditionally, the chickpeas go inside the muslin bag but not the meat. The veg, things like cabbage, potatoes, turnips and carrots are cooked apart. The broth is used to make the soup (photo at left) but some is kept back to serve with the meat. Then again I also suspect that originally Cocido was a dish designed to use up left overs and that there are as many versions of Cocido as there are people who make it. Google certainly presented me with a wide variety of recipes. The one we had yesterday had the pelotas -the meat balls I talked about when I went to the Cuadrillas in Patiño - and black pudding sausages and turkey legs as well as knee joints and ham-bone. To be fair it's not an attractive looking dish but it tasted great. The cook said that the whole lot had taken hours to prepare. Her effort was my gain both culturally and weight wise.

A couple of days after eating the Arroz al Horno I had a go at making one at home. I thought my effort was OK and Maggie didn't complain as she ate it all up. I don't think I'll be having a go at the Cocido though. Far too complicated.

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The photos are just from somewhere on the Internet.

Kiko makes me wonder about local honey

We've just been to the presentation of something called la Mostra de la Cuina which is a sort of gastronomic showcase  for the food local to Pinoso in a selection of local restaurants. The title is in Valencià and Google translate says it means Cooking Show which doesn't quite have the same ring as the original.

Pinoso, like all of Spain, is proud of its traditional food particularly the dishes based around local produce. The star of the show around here is a rice dish with rabbit and snails cooked over sheaves of twigs. Unlike the paella from a bit further North in Valencia, the local rice dish is much thinner, usually only a grain or two of thick, it's a lot drier, often verging on burned, and it's a muddy browny green colour instead of that saffron yellow and, of course, it doesn't have chicken or seafood or whatever it is that Valencia paella has in it. Locals often make the difference in the name, ours is just arroz, rice, and the Valencia dish is paella named for the pan that it's cooked in. I much prefer the Pinoso rice.

The idea of the Mostra de la Cuina is that participating restaurants cook a full meal built around the same main dish on the same day at a fixed price of 30€ - rice one day, the rabbit stew, gazpachos, on another, gachamiga (a garlic, oil and flour pancake), ajos pinoseros (rabbit and wild garlic) and fassegures (meatballs in broth) on the others. Each day there are a couple of common starters - local sausage and a pepper and fish dish called pipirrana - with each restaurant having free rein over the other starters on the different days. The puddings, including a typical cake called perusas, and the drink are included. It also looks like there is a strangely anachronistic  gin and tonic included in the line up this year.

So we went to the launch. It was due to start at 7.30. This is Spain, one expects things to start late and the late start is excused with something called courtesy time. I always bridle at the thought that something so discourteous, to the people who turn up on time, is called courtesy time. I think we were nearly half an hour late in starting. At least there was an apology for the "slight delay".

This time the local Town Hall has gone to town on the publicity. Being the 21st century and all, a bunch of social media pundits, bloggers and the like, were invited to come for a day out in Pinoso. They've been given the grand tour - the bodega, a sausage maker, a baker, the clock tower, the marble quarry, the local wine and marble museum and of course, they've been eating all day. They also got the front two rows at this evenings presentation. And the godfather, the padrino, for the launch was a two star Michelin chef Kiko Moya from the nearby town of Cocentaina. His restaurant is called L'Escaleta and he seemed like a very personable chap. He probably took less time to talk about his food philosophy, about the qualities of the food he'd seen today and about his restaurant than it did our Mayor to do the introductions. Kiko's video was nice too.

We'll be out for a couple of meals I'm sure. I fancied the ajos or the gachamiga but they are both on workdays so it will probably be fassegures and arroz. But which of the five restaurants we still have to decide.

14th to 19th and 24,25 and 26 February.