For casual entertaining, the tapas experience translates well to the small home kitchen. One delicious hot tapas classic easily made at home is called pinchos Moruños, or Moorish skewers, essentially small kebabs of pork marinated in Arabic (Moorish) spices and grilled, usually on a hot steel plancha. Because most Muslim Arabs wouldn’t eat pork, one presumes the original dish was lamb. It’s anyone’s guess how it evolved into this ubiquitous tapa selection in Christian Spain. Nevertheless, now it means pork seasoned with garlic, cumin, coriander, pimentón and sometimes oregano. Once skewered, they need only about 5 minutes on a hot griddle.
Fresh kale is wilted ever so slightly by tender-crisp, hot onions -- and glazed with reduced vinegar before being graced with freshly made croutons, shaved cheese, and figs (fresh or dried). A single pan handles all the parts of this recipe that need heat, and the flavor that accumulates in there is absorbed by the bread as it toasts. Deliciousness builds, step by step, and the results are glorious. (My feelings about this dish are pretty much summed up in the yield estimate.)
Chicken Larb (Laotian Chicken and Herb Salad)
This is what I call a sleeper recipe. At first glance it doesn’t look like much — a whole chicken rubbed with a little fresh ginger, roasted, and served alongside elbow macaroni tossed with diced tomatoes and the roasting juices. Exactly what makes this dish so remarkable is hard to pinpoint, but there’s a wonderful alchemy that occurs when the chicken, ginger, and tomato all come together. It’s comforting, a little exotic, and truly delicious. To create a maximum of pan juices — since these become the sauce for the noodles — I add the giblets to the roasting pan and pour a bit of white wine over the chicken partway through roasting. During roasting, the drippings, the wine, and the roasted giblets cook together, creating a savory jus. The chicken also roasts on a rack to encourage the drippings to caramelize a bit as they hit the hot pan, developing even more flavor. I make this year-round using canned tomatoes, but if you make it in the summer, by all means use fresh ripe tomatoes.
You can buck up the personality of a bowl of pasta by merely switching the order of how grated cheese and tomato sauce are blended with the noodles. Bring in smoky flavors and a snap of chile, and you have a modern improvisation.
Fish is easily overcooked, which makes it a strong candidate for slow cooking and an easy night's work for the cook--unless of course you complicate matters by throwing something tricky into the mix. I love a culinary dare. Rich fish like salmon and mackerel are delicious served with beans, but the two cook at such different rates, they typically can't be cooked together. By using red lentils, which are the softest of dried beans, and a forgiving fatty fish, like farm-raised salmon, I found I could trim the difference to about 10 minutes. A brief simmering of the lentils on their own does it; then the salmon is added and everything slow-bakes together in a low oven.
We all need a great beef stew in our cooking back pocket, and this one’s mine. It’s fairly classic in its preparation — the meat is browned, then piled into a sturdy pot and slow-roasted with a lot of red wine, a splash of brandy, and some onions, garlic, carrots, and a little herb bouquet to keep it company. It finishes spoon-tender, sweet and winey through and through, and burnished the color of great-grandma’s armoire.
In the United States, we don’t usually see ground meat on skewers, but it is typical throughout the Middle East and Africa. The trick to this dish is not to overmix the lamb, so it doesn’t become mealy. I like these meatballs nice and small so the bite you get is fully caramelized—lamb on the outside, onion on the inside.
Ingredients
This recipe requires advanced techniques, accurate measurements using the metric system, specialist equipment and professional experience to achieve good results.