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~ culinary and horticultural life on a Spanish farm

Tag Archives: Onions

Patatas a lo Pobre – Poor Mans Potatoes – with Broken Eggs – con Huevos Rotos

17 Friday Dec 2021

Posted by Nevenka in breakfast, Food for One, Main Courses, Vegan, Vegetable Dishes

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Eggs, Garlic, green peppers, Onions, Potatoes

This is a very common dish down here in Andalucia, especially at this time of year when, in the old days, the ingredients for it were pretty well all that was in the larder. Potatoes, good olive oil, onions, garlic and green peppers. It can then be fortified with whatever you have, chorizo, fresh sausages, a slice of pork, or my favourite, eggs, or if you are really hungry, all of those.
All sorts of other ingredients can be added to this basic recipe to vary it. Mushrooms work well, red peppers of course, olives for a different flavour.
Per person you want

150 grams more or less of waxy potatoes – scrubbed and cut into thickish slices

1/4 of a large onion – cut into slices

2 cloves of garlic – cut into thin slices

1 green horn shaped pepper – cut into bite sized pieces

extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper

one or two free range eggs

Traditionally the potatoes are fried with the rest of the ingredients from raw, but as you have to use a generous amount of olive oil to ensure that they don’t stick in the pan, I prefer to par boil them for five to seven minutes until half cooked, then I drain them and put them to one side while I cook the rest of the ingredients. You can do this or go the traditional method, the choice is yours.

Put two tablespoons of oil into a shallow pan, add the onions, garlic and green peppers. Fry on a low heat stirring regularly, until lightly browned at the edges.

Add the potatoes and continue frying and stirring, adding more oil if you think you need to.

Season well, and continue cooking until the potatoes are cooked.

Either poach or fry the eggs.

Serve the potatoes with the eggs on top cutting into the eggs so that the lovely warm yellow yolks dribble into them.

Enjoy!




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Malaysian Turmeric Chicken Curry

09 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by Nevenka in Main Courses

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chicken, curry, Malaysian, Onions, turmeric

This is one of those dishes with few ingredients where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, in other words, the depth of flavour achieved with the ingredients is wonderfully surprisingly rich. The sauce is just lots of onion and garlic, slowly fried with the chicken to make a slightly sweet rich moistness which contrasts perfectly with the spiciness of the chilli.

A good chicken is essential for making this successfully. You want a big free range one. You can get the butcher to chop up the whole chicken and cook it all in the curry, but I only use the legs and the plump bits of the wings, saving the more tender breast for another dish.

For 4 servings

legs and wings of a large free range chicken – cut into large pieces leaving the skin on

olive or peanut oil for frying

6 sweet onions

2 bulbs garlic

salt

2 teaspoons ground turmeric

2 teaspoons smoked pimenton picante/ paprika

1 or 2 fresh chillis – finely chopped – it’s hard to be precise about chillis as there are so many different types and strengths, you want the curry to be pretty spicy

freshly ground black pepper

Juice of a fresh lemon

Peel the onions, cut in half and slice them

Peel the garlics – a tip, if you soakthe garlic cloves in water for half an hour the skins become soft and are much easier to peel

crush the garlics in a pestle and mortar with 1/2 teaspoon of salt

Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons of oil in a shallow thick based pan. Add half the onions and all the garlic.

Fry gently for about ten to fifteen minutes until slightly browned.

Add the chicken pieces and cook for ten minutes each side to seal.

Add the turmeric, pimenton and chilli. Stir in well to mix.

Continue cooking the dish slowly uncovered, turn the heat to the lowest possible. Turn the chicken from time to time and stir the onions.

Every half hour add a third of the remaining onions to the pan to continue to moisten the curry, and mix in well.

Half an hour after the last of the onions go in, add the lemon juice and check the seasoning adding freshly ground black pepper and salt as needed.

Leave to cook for another half hour when the curry will be done. Your total cooking time is 2 1/2 to 3 hours.

Serve with plain basmati rice and a vegetable dish like broccoli in garlic sauce, the recipe for which I will post tomorrow.

Gratin of Onions & Potatoes

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by Nevenka in Vegetable Dishes

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Anchovoes, Gratin, Onions, Potatoes

IMG_1223
I am afraid I have been side tracked and this post as you possibly already have noticed is not featuring the promised Ajo Blanco soup.

I have been today at one of Doris’s book exchange lunches where each of the participants contribute part of the meal. As I have had a very good crop of red onions and a similarly good one of potatoes, I offered to concoct a dish from these. The girls were asking at the end of the meal if the recipe was on the blog, which I think means that they liked it. So here it is on the blog.
IMG_1305

1 kilo onions
1 tablespoon olive oil
30 grams butter
1.5 kilos potatoes
200 ml chicken stock
100 ml thin cream
1 small tin anchovies
100 grams grated parmesan
Freshly ground black pepper

Peel and slice the onions into rounds.

Melt the butter and olive oil on a low heat in a large shallow pan. Add the onions and stir into the fats. Cover and cook slowly for 30 minutes, stirring from time to time until the onions are soft and translucent.

Peel the potatoes and slice into thin rounds.

Heat the chicken stock and cream together slowly. Chop the anchovies quite small and add together with their oil to the stock and cream. As the liquids heat the anchovies should dissolve.

Preheat the oven to 160 centigrade.

Once the liquids are hot, assemble the dish. You will need a shallow ovenproof dish.

Put a layer of overlapping potato slices in the bottom of the dish. Strew over a third of the onions, then a few spoonfuls of the stock mix, then thinly scatter over some grated parmesan. Season with black pepper, then continue with the layers finishing with a layer of potatoes generously covered with the grated cheese.

Cover and bake in the oven for 45 minutes.

You can cook to this point the day before the dish is needed, and the resting time does add to the flavour of the dish.

If you are serving the potatoes straight away, uncover them, turn the oven heat up to 180 centigrade and put the dish back in the oven for about 15 minutes until the top is nicely browned.

If you have prepared the dish in advance then it will need longer in the oven to reheat the potatoes through. I had my dish 10 minutes in the oven covered and then another 10-15 minutes uncovered until the top was nicely browned, again at 180 centigrade.

Apicius Inspired Onions, Pork Cutlet & Garlic Mash

19 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by Nevenka in Food for One, Main Courses, Vegetable Dishes

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Apicius, Garlic Mash, Onions

Marcus Gavius Apicius, renown Roman gourmand, to whom the first European cookbook still in existence was dedicated. My friends are well aware of my passion for all things culinary and when they come across interesting or obscure books on the subject are likely to treat me to a copy. This one was a gift from my lovely friend Suzane.

It is considered to be the work of several chefs of the time and so the recipes vary in the detail and style quite a lot, with many of the recipes appearing to be notes to oneself or to other chefs who already know the basics of the recipe. I have a couple of recipe books which are collections of recipes by women in a particular region of Spain, and the style is similar in that they assume for example that everyone knows how to make a basic potato tortilla and so only give you their variation on the recipe.

So although the Apicius cannot be used as a straightforward recipe book, it gives a fascinating insight into the cuisine of rich ancient Rome, and there is enough information in some of the recipes to be inspirational. The use of herbs and flavourings is particularly interesting to me. They used a range of fermented sauces, almost concentrated stocks, one of the favourites being that made from Lovage, a descendant of which is still much used in Germany, Maggi Wurze. The fish version sounds very similar to Nam Pla the Thai fermented fish sauce. For sweetness they went for concentrated sweet wines, such as date wine as well as honey. Sweet and sour, salt and sweet, bitter sweet, the new and trendy Umami, they are all there and often skilfully heightened by the use of fresh herbs.IMG_0102

This onion dish I have made before and served it as a vegetable dish, but with the addition of a little extra water during cooking, it makes a really good sauce come vegetable.

APICIUS INSPIRED ONIONS

Per person

Peel a medium sized onion and cut into slices.

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a sauce pan, and add the onions. Cook over a low heat with a lid on to keep in the heat and the moisture. Stirring and turning the onions over from time to time.

When the onions have cooked down and are an even golden colour and translucent, add the seasonings.

A quarter of a teaspoon of Maggi Wurze – which is a lovage essence.

A teaspoon  of good honey.

A teaspoon of red wine or sherry vinegar

a good pinch of fresh thyme.

The same of fresh oregano, chopped finely.

Salt and pepper.

A tablespoon water

Continue cooking until very soft and almost a puree.

Serve as a sauce or vegetable accompaniment to meats and fish.

Garlic mash is a regular favourite and there are several ways of making it.

If you want the mash to still be creamy white but with a hidden punch then slow roast the garlic cloves. Leave them in their skins for cooking, but cut a slash across the centre to allow the insides to expand. If I am cooking a Sunday roast, I often throw in a few extra cloves of garlic to have garlic mash the next day. Just add the garlic pulp to your potatoes when mashing.

Another method is to finely cut the garlic and fry it in butter or olive oil until golden brown, and then add that to the mash and mix in. This is the style of mash here. I have used spring garlic as it is in season. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it resembles spring onion but has a pink tinge towards the roots, and has a lovely mild and sweet garlic flavour. I also deglazed the pan in which I cooked the cutlet and added this to the mash for extra flavour.

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