Absinthe / Food and drink (4)

Amb una mica d’Oscar Wilde i 4 pel·lícules, em vaig quedar amb les ganes de saber lo que era l’absenta però sabia que estava prohibit en molts països ja que es deia que era una beguda molt perillosa. Aquest perill és, però, una mica de llegenda segons una mirada a Wikipedia i per això es va tornar a fabricar i comercialitzar fa uns anys. I concretament a Tortosa és un dels llocs on es fabrica – per tant, l’any passat en vam comprar.

Bé, provat ja – diversos cops – he de dir que (a) m’agrada, i (b) no m’he convertit ni en artista ni en un borratxo. Té bon gust, em recorda una mica a begudes com les herbes de Montserrat, bàsicament perquè està fet d’herbes – el principal sent el donzell (o artemisia absinthium!).

Hi ha (almenys) dos maneres de preparar-ho. Pel que diu Wikipedia, la més espectacular – amb foc –es una “nova” manera de fer-ho, però els famosos artistes de Paris ho feien amb la segona versió, amb aigua gelada.

1.Amb foc, poses dos tarrons de sucre damunt la cullera especial dalt del got. Li fas passar l’absenta, i prens foc al sucre. Es desfà i cau a la beguda. Ho remenes i ho dilueixes amb aigua freda.

2.Metode més tradicional – poses un dit (o dos) de la beguda al got i els dos tarrons de sucre a la cullera. Tires aigua gelada poc a poc damunt el sucre, el qual es desfà i cau a la beguda. Remeneu i a beure! Sembla ser que una proporció bona, pels dos metodes, és una part absenta a 4 o 5 parts d’aigua.

En fi, ho explica tot molt millor a la Wikipedia. I aquí tens l’info sobre la beguda tortosina.

....

So, thanks to Oscar Wilde and a couple of films, I always wondered what absinthe (the weird green drink all these artistic-type folk used to down by the bucketful) was – I say “was” as I was sure it had been banned thanks to all the crazy behaviour it led to. So, imagine my surprise when I saw it is made and sold in Tortosa! A bit of internet research soon showed up that it hadn’t been banned everywhere, and it’s fame was a little bit exaggerated and, in fact, it was/is now coming back into fashion. So I bought a bottle of the stuff.

I have to say I like it – it has a delicious “herbal” flavour (basically it is made from herbs such as wormwood) to it and goes down well on a night after a hard day’s work. It has not converted me (yet) into either (a) an artist or (b) a drunk. Despite the word cannabis blazened across my bottle, it no longer (if it ever did) includes any cannabis.

According to Wikipedia there are (at least) two ways to prepare it.

1.       1) With fire. Balance the special spoon you get when you buy the drink over a glass. Place two sugar cubes on it. Gently pour the absinthe over the sugar. Then set light to the sugar and it will gradually melt into the drink. Stir and add cold water.

2.      2)  The cold water method. Set up your spoon and sugar cubes again, having already put the drink in the glass. Pour cold water slowly over the sugar and into the drink. The sugar dissolves. Stir it in and Bob’s your uncle.

In both versions, it seems that a suitable proportion is one part absinthe to 4 or 5 parts water. Apparently, the “burning sugar” method is a modern idea, and the Bohemians and other drunkards who used to live it up in Paris used the second method. Me too, I tried the first, but prefer the second. Anyway, you read and I’ll drink. Oh, and here’s the local manufacturers’ web page.

Calçotada / Food (3)

Today’s Catalan food post is about a feast rather difficult to reproduce outside of Catalonia as you probably don’t have the basic materials – calçots (*see below*).

The calçot-eating feast (calçotada) is a January-March outdoor fun barbecue feast thing with friends and family. It can be an Organized Event at a restaurant with an outdoor eating area, but, in my opinion, it is best when held at someone’s house – a house out in the wilds with a bit of land.

First, invite a few friends or family around. The days before, get all the ingredients or divide the chores up amongst your guests. The famous calçot sauce (see below) should be made if possible the day before to get it out of the way.

It’s a kind of romesco sauce made with roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic, ground hazelnuts (and almonds optionally), chilli pepper, ground toasted bread, vinegar salt, and olive oil. There are variations of course. The resulting sauce should be delicious, slightly vinegary or spicy, and thick.

On the day, you want your guests there nice and early (i.e early for lunch – about 11 o’clock is fine for a 2 o’clock meal) as most of the fun of the day is to be had searching for suitable wood for the barbecue, getting it lit, chatting, drinking beer, a few crisps, a bit more chatting, preparing the food.... you need two kinds of wood, one suitable for producing embers for barbecuing the meat and another one (e.g. dry olive tree branches is what we use, though in the area where this tradition started out - Valls - they use pruned branches from vineyards) for making a quick huge flame.

Done that? Start to clean up the calçots – scrape a bit of soil off, cut any roots or excessively long leaves off – and  get them on to whatever you’re going to use to barbecue them  - some kind of grill thing, a home-made wire contraption or even the metal springy bottom from a bed! Anything which allows them to get “burnt” quickly when you flare up the fire.

Have some more beer, and a few peanuts. Greet the latecomers.

Probably best to barbecue the meat first, and then try to keep it warm. People usually do sausages, lamb chops, black puddings. Then throw the quick-burning branches on the fire, and place the layer of calçots in the flames for a few minutes till the outsides go black – i.e. burnt. Immediately wrap them up in bunches in old newspaper. This keeps them warm and helps them to finish cooking on the inside – i.e. go soft.

Now, you usually all stand around a long table in the garden with a little dish of the sauce in front of you, the wine on the table in a porrò (see photo below - designed to pass around, pouring from the small hole directly into the mouth without touching it (with your mouth)), and remember (too late now) you should be wearing your don’t-care-if-I-make-a-mess clothes. Some less experienced calçot feasters also wear bibs. It has been said that in the urban capital of Barcelona they may even wear gloves but that’s nonsense ... the whole point is to make a mess. Get a calçot, hold it up by the leaves and peel the burnt skin down and off till you see the tender white calçot. Dip it in the sauce and hold it above you, and gently bite away at the bottom. You may need a few bites and a few sauce-dips to finish one, eating as far as the non-tender green leaves. Then repeat. You will soon see the sauce and burnt stuff gets everywhere, a very dirty messy meal! It’s said that a typical adult would eat about 10 of them. The calçots, and especially the sauce, are delicious but don’t overdo it as once this part of the feast is over, you tidy the table up a bit and dig in to all the other great stuff. Usually a plethora of barbecued meat, roasted artichokes, a variety of omelettes, olives, crisps, toast with allioli (like garlic mayonnaise, homemade also before lunch), roasted red pepper and aubergine, wine and/or beer and so on. When you’re well and truly stuffed you can sit around all day in the nice Mediterranean winter sun, chatting away, and having a coffee, or get dragged into doing games and sports by the kids who are usually fed up of just cooking and eating by now.

As I’ve said, difficult to reproduce this event in South Yorkshire or other places in the world, but no winter-spring visit to Catalonia is complete without trying one!

* The key to the question – just what is a calçot? Well, according to different English web pages or newspaper articles it could be a spring onion, a shallot, a scallion, a green onion, a sweet onion, looks like a leek... whoah, wait a minute! Having eaten many, I’d say it’s a kind of bland sweetish (i.e not really cry-your-eyes-out onion flavoured) onion but the trick is not so much what dodgy translation we can find in a dictionary, but more in how it is grown. The farming technique and soil is key to producing the "calçot". As the onion starts to grow, you pile the soil up around it, and again a few days later, and again, and so on. It’s a slow and careful process (my father-in-law used to do it) but if you do it well, and the weather is suitable, and the kind of soil right, eventually you get these long white 2 cm (?) thick “onions”. Try these links... Guardian , Wikipedia , another blog post on the subject by someone else.

Photos say more than a thousand words, they say...

Thyme soup / Sopes de frígola / Food (2)

So, as threatened, here goes for a bit of food-blogging. The Catalan recipe I’ve chosen to start with should really be the last one to be posted, though, as it is perfect for an evening when you’re feeling stuffed, bloated, after pigging out on a plethora of other rich Catalan food. But, a promise is a promise – I rashly promised a friendly soup-blogger that I’d post a Catalan soup recipe and as I don’t know how many food posts I’ll be doing, I’d better get this one done now! Shut up Brian and get on with it...

Thyme soup / Sopes de frígola

Ingredients – a nice ripe tomato; dried wild mountain thyme – especially good if you collect it at the right time of year, the magical summer solstice; a “spring garlic” (i.e like a spring onion in shape but really a young garlic stem/plant before the bulb starts to grow to its usual size if that makes any sense); stale bread (we use yesterday’s baguette); salt; olive oil; and water.

1.       Put some sprigs of thyme in about a pint of water (I’m guessing numbers here from watching the missus making it in the following photos). Bring it to the boil and keep on a low boil for a few minutes till the water goes golden-coloured, i.e thyme-flavoured.

2.       Meanwhile, as that’s boiling away, chop the “spring garlic” thing up into really small bits and place in a bowl.

3.       Get your tomato and “roast” it on an open fire – i.e. hold it in tongs and burn the outside while it hopefully goes soft on the inside over embers.

4.       Peel off the burnt skin (the tomato’s, not yours) and chop the tomato up nice and small into the bowl.

5.       (If you don’t have an open fire, skip points 3 and 4 and open up a tin of tomatoes from the supermarket and chop one up!)

6.       Bang a bit of salt into the tomato and garlic mixture.

7.       Chop up your stale bread (e.g. 3 inches of baguette should do the trick – as the actress said to the bishop), and heap it into the mixture.

8.       Lashings of locally produced (unless you’re living in the north of England) extra-virgin olive oil over the mixture. Mix it all up.

9.       Your thyme “broth” should now be ready. Sieve it and pour this liquid over the bread-tomato-garlic mixture. Mix well.

10.   Enjoy it!

Especially recommended as a light meal to help you digest on an evening, and/or to keep the winter blues away. This quantity should serve one or two people depending how much you like it! Now for the photos....

Food (1)

Per si no s'ha notat, amb 5 anys de blog sense cap entrada sobe menjar, no sóc un foodie (persona interesat, i molt, en el tema del menjar). M'agrada menjar bé, però també m'agrada menjar malament. Xalo amb la gastronomia catalana i anglesa, però xalo igual amb una torrada de pa amb baked beans (el menjar que faria jo si em demanesseu de cuinar). No sé cuinar gaire, ni entenc tot el que es diu sobre temes gastronomiques. M'agrada comprar coses de qualitat i de producció, però no perque tinc un gran recepta al cap, sino per motius de salut (fisic i mental)....

... havent dit aixo, però, ja va sent hora que intento transmetre alguna cosa de la cuina catalana pels lectors "internacionals". Per tant, aquest any intentaré posar algunes receptes o explicacions de temes foodie!

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Let's get this straight before we start - I ain't no foodie. I do like to buy good quality food, if possible locally produced, and from small locally-run shops but it's more of a question of health (physical and mental) than because I have some major cooking plan in mind. I love eating great food cooked by somebody else, and I love going to all the different Catalan outdoor eating feasts, but I also love cheese sandwiches, crisps, and beans on toast. And if I'm cooking, that's probably what you're going to get!You may already have guessed this as I've blogged for 5 years now without talking about food. It's just not a big thing with me - much to my wife's annoyance when she turns out delicious things every day which I gobble up with the same enthusiasm as the chips and eggs I cook when it's my turn...

Having said that, I've decided it's about time I tried to pass on to my "international readers" the thrill and pleasure Catalan cooking does offer, so this year may feature a few culinary delights on the blog - watch this space!