Fabada Asturianas

I've been enjoying the Vuelta a Espana this year and it has been a much more open race than either this year's Giro or Tour. Given my painting project at the moment I was also amused to see that two stages this years started in the sites of Peninsula War Battles: Talavera and Salamanca. One of the best stages was Sunday's Stage 15 which took place in the northern region of Asturias. I decided to assemble the ingredients for that most typically Asturian dish, Fabada, to have while I was watching it, as my final Grand Tour recipe of the year.

Only the podium girl on the right looks like she could take on Fabada!

Watching the Vuelta this year, I was conscious of how arid much of Spain is, in comparison to Italy and France.  Just as the Vuelta is lacking in visible podium girls (they are there (see above) just not really seen on TV) in comparison to the other two Tours, so much of Spain seems to be lacking in green vegetation. It's a parched looking landscape of dusty soil and small, stunted trees.  Going north to Asturias, however, saw thickly wooded mountain slopes, dotted with some truly spectacular castles and abbeys.  It's a part of Spain I would like to visit, although the weather can be wet, given how close to the ocean it is.

As is well known, olive oil which has pictures of girls on the label tastes better

Fabada is very much in the same cross-Pyrenean tradition as Cassoulet and Alubias rojas de Tolosa,  It is what food writers would call a 'hearty' dish, meaning that is it is hugely calorific.  Like Cassoulet and Alubias, there are many different variations and my version is an amalgam of various recipes. Basically, though, it's about beans and meat and as such is really a winter dish in Spain, often served in small portions as a starter.  To begin, I fried some red (which is often specified) onion and garlic (from the Isle of Wight!) in a little Spanish olive oil, which I think is, on the whole, better than Italian, French and Greek oils anyway (there is also really excellent olive oil on Malta but they don't really export it).  I used two small cloves as I was chopping it but if you are using whole cloves to cook in the dish then up to six is suggested.

The next key ingredient is Serrano ham, ideally in one piece so you can cut it into chunks but, given how difficult it is to get it in any way other than sliced I used a pack of sliced Serrano and chopped it into pieces to add to the garlic and onion.

Next is sausages and I grilled some Waitrose chorizo, as it should be the variety that needs cooking first, but also added a cured chorizo and a black pudding in lieu of morcilla Spanish blood sausage, which you can get in the UK, mail order, if you want to be authentic. 

Peel the black pudding and cured chorizo and chop into chunks with the grilled sausages too.  I only used three of the grilled sausages, keeping the others for another meal.  Add the black pudding to the pan  first and cook on  a low heat for about five minutes with the onion, garlic and Serrano ham.  Then add the two types of chorizo. In Spain they are likely to put the sausages in whole but I chopped them all into pieces about an inch long , mainly because my pan isn't that big.

While this is going on, grill a small steak and a small gammon steak in lieu of salt pork.  'You can't use a picture of Tesco meat!' squawked a horrified Old Bat, in true John Lewis partner style.

Add all the meat, chopped into pieces about an inch and a half square, into the pan and add some seasoning.  I had a ready made bouquet garni pouch but, at least, it should be a bay leaf.  Some paprika, and I prefer the smoked version, plus some strands of Saffron (this is not an economy dish).  I remember, when I was small, that you could buy saffron powder in supermarkets but as it became more and more expensive it disappeared.  You can still get it but it costs about £5 per gramme. A bottle containing a few strands costs about £4 in the supermarket but fortunately one of my lady friends had brought me some back from India. Add some black pepper but you don't need salt because of the gammon.

Now add a glass or two of stock, a glass or red wine and some passata.  I don't measure this out, just do it by feel, so that you have enough liquid to enable the dish to simmer for an hour without drying up.  If it starts to look a bit dry just add more stock (or wine).  They do make wine in Asturias but it is very difficult to get in most shops, which are Rioja fixated. Given I was (mostly) cooking with it I used a Cariñena red from Aragon.

Now it's time to add the beans. Traditionally, you would use dried beans and soak them overnight and then cook them the next day but I can't be bothered with that!  Most UK adaptions of the dish suggest haricot or cannellini beans but Asturian fabes are larger than this and so butter beans are a better substitute.  Put two cans into the pan with all the other ingredients and stir them in.

Simmer gently on top of the stove for around an hour, stirring and checking the liquid, occasionally. In Spain, this would be served without an accompaniment, other than bread, and often is a soup bowl.   I had it with rice but Savoy cabbage would also be a good alternative.   I've got enough left over for three more servings at least!

Ingredients (for four)

2 cloves of garlic (chopped)
1 small red onion (chopped)
1 pack of Serrano ham (chopped)

1 black pudding ring (peeled and cut into chunks)
1 chorizo ring (peeled and cut into chunks)
4 paprika flavoured sausages for grilling (cut into chunks)
1 small rump steak (cut into pieces)
1 unsmoked gammon steak (cut into pieces)
1 glass of Spanish red wine
2 tins of butter beans

Olive oil
Saffron strands
Paprika
Black pepper
Passata

Giro food: Chicken with garlic, lemon and rosemary

Well, it is the first big cycling tour of the year, the Giro d'Italia and so I thought I should do an appropriate recipe. I've done Tour and Vuelta linked recipes before but not one for the Giro which, given Italy has the most interesting and consistently high quality food of the three, is a bit of an anomaly.  One of the Eurosport commentators actually is doing a recipe a day so I thought I'd have a go at the one for Stage 8, which is a pheasant recipe.  However, while his recipe was for the regionally, appropriate pheasant, it is only in season in the UK from October to February, so I used chicken instead.  I pointed this out to him on his website and he came back and said that people might have frozen pheasant in their deep freeze. Oh yes, between the Ben and Jerry's and the peas, of course.  It was like when Selena Scott said on The Clothes Show, once, that "everyone has their Jean Muir little black dress".  Actually, Selena...  But then this character calls himself 'Jono', which is only one step down on the pretentious scale from calling yourself 'Jonty'.  Thinking about it, for many years I did actually often have frozen pheasant in the freezer as my aunt and uncle used to shoot them and give us a brace every time we went down to see them in Sussex.  The Old Bat pointed out that we had them in the field at the back of the house at the moment and perhaps I should get my air rifle out.  "Only if you pluck them" I replied.  Silence.  When I was small we often had dead (obviously) pheasant hanging around in the garage before Christmas (we would always have it on Christmas Eve) and my poor mother had to pull all the feathers off.  It is no wonder she preferred to cook Spam fritters.

For the first time in a major cycling tour the race started outside Europe, with three stages in Israel, giving us the most scenically tedious stage ever, as they trekked across the Negev desert.  Enlivened only by the occasional random camel, the landscape reminded me of a recent documentary on the Titanic where they digitally recreated what the wreck site would look like if the ocean was removed, thereby providing a scene like the one from the opening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It looks like it might be a close race this year with a number of people looking like they could win and Chris Froome and Sky looking decidedly off form (Are your men on the right pills? Perhaps you should execute their trainer).  The race is currently being led by British cyclist Simon Yates who was banned for four months in 2016 because his team doctor failed to apply for a Theraputic Use Exemption for his asthma inhaler.  It's amazing how many asthmatics seem to take up cycling.

Anyway, at least the Giro has not banned podium girls, unlike the Vuelta and as now threatened by the Tour de France this year.  Does no one worry about what tall, skinny students and models in Europe will do in the summer?  Don't they have an association fighting for their rights?  Perhaps, I could help them form one, as they are an oppressed minority and those seem to be the only groups who anyone thinks about these days.  It's not often I see the Old Bat completely enraged but she was last night when there was TV advert for the Army that showed a unit having to stop patrolling while a Muslim soldier prayed to his imaginary friend.  "But they're the people we should be fighting!" she squawked, on the edge of apoplexy (she loves Donald Trump).  On a similar note, I don't have any time for the government of the People's Republic of China, as I have worked with them quite a bit and found them unpleasant but they went up in my estimation last night when they refused to broadcast the Eurovision Song Contest, not on grounds of musical taste, as you might think, but because there were people with tattoos in it and these have just been made illegal in China.   Hooray!  Can we do this too, please?

Anyway, on to our recipe for Stage 8.  The trick with this is to marinade it for an hour.  I put two chicken breasts (or a jointed pheasant if you have bothered to check when it is actually available, Jono) in a glass bowl with around 50cl of olive oil, together with the individual leaves from around four stalks of rosemary, one quartered lemon and about six cloves of crushed garlic.  Make sure you rub the marinade into the chicken breasts thoroughly and add salt and pepper before covering and putting in the fridge for an hour.

Take the chicken breasts and gently brown them in a casserole on top of the oven and then add the marinade (without the lemons), two glasses of Italian White wine and cook with the lid on for about forty minutes.

You should, properly, serve this with rice and green beans but I substituted peas as I can't stand green beans which are always cold whenever you get them on the plate and, anyway, taste like compressed pond slime.

Speaking of pond slime, the Old Bat (careful) was cleaning out the pond yesterday and rushed inside ,crying: "There is a baby alligator in the pond! Get the camera!"  I pointed out that as we don't live in Florida it was unlikely but there you go.  It was a newt, of course but, still, we don't recall having one in the garden before.

An appropriate wine to accompany newt, er chicken masquerading as pheasant, would be the aromatic Greco di Tufo, the grapes for which are grown, appropriately for a stage with a mountain top finish, at altitude.  In fact it is produced in only eight villages just ten miles from the stage finish at Montevergine di Mercogliano in Campania, just north east of Naples.  Mine came from Waitrose (£10.99 and helped cushion my senses to the Eurovison Song Contest, too.