Spanish Omelet

Last year's post:  Cold Sesame Noodles with Cucumber
Two Years Ago:   Empanadas with Chicken, Corn and Zucchini

Although most people in the United States think of omelets as breakfast food, the Spanish omelet (or Spanish tortilla, not to be confused with Mexican tortillas) is a happy hour or dinner entree.  This omelet is one of the most common tapas items, found all over Spain.  A Spanish omelet closely resembles a frittata because it's cooked in a pan and then cut into wedges to serve.  Although it's typically fried in a fair amount of olive oil, then flipped and fried on the other side, this recipe is a lighter and simpler version.  It uses only the fat from the chorizo, and there's no flipping involved - it bakes in the oven, which makes it puff up beautifully.  It makes an easy, fast and delicious dinner.

One of my good friends in college spent a year studying in Spain.  When she returned, she made a traditional Spanish omelet for her buddies so we could try it out.  She fried potato slices and onions in a lot of olive oil, then added the eggs and let the bottom cook until brown.  She put an inverted plate over the frying pan with her hand on top, flipped the pan over so the omelet was on the plate, then slid the omelet back into the pan to brown the other side.  Impressive, but a little scary unless you don't care about your kitchen, which we didn't because we were in a college apartment, after all.

Anyway, as I mentioned this recipe has chorizo in addition to the potatoes, which really revs up the flavor. Make sure you buy Spanish chorizo - not Mexican chorizo - and take the paper casing off before slicing. If you do happen to buy Mexican chorizo by mistake (or can't find Spanish chorizo), just cook it and crumble it like Italian sausage and use it that way.  It'll taste a little different but will still be very good.

Shallots (a mild onion) are added to a parsley salad that goes on top of the omelet when served.  The lemon, shallots and parsley lend bright and tart notes that balance the omelet beautifully.

A brief discussion about pans - this recipe calls for a 7 or 8" nonstick ovenproof pan (or a larger pan if you're going to double the recipe to serve four).  I bought a cast iron skillet a few years ago to make cornbread, and it works perfectly for this recipe.  If you don't have one, consider buying one - they're cheap and they last forever.  Properly seasoned and cared for, they become perfectly non-stick.  All you have to do after making something is to rinse the pan with hot water (not soap) and scrub with a brush, then dry thoroughly and wipe with a drop of cooking oil.  I had absolutely no issue with taking the entire omelet out of the pan in one piece.  (Just don't use cooking spray, it becomes gummy and sticky and hard to remove.)

Spanish omelets are traditionally served either warm or at room temperature, so they're very versatile for parties (cut in small pieces) or family members who come home at different times.

printable recipe
Spanish Omelet

Serves 2

1 red potato, about 3-4” in diameter, scrubbed and cut into chunks

4 eggs

Salt and pepper

4 ounces Spanish chorizo, paper casing removed and sliced

2 sprigs fresh rosemary, leaves picked

1 shallot, peeled and very finely sliced

1 lemon, juiced

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.

Put the potato chunks in a pan of boiling salted water and simmer until just cooked through but not falling apart, approximately 8 – 10 minutes.  Drain in a colander.  Beat the eggs with a fork in a mixing bowl, season with salt and pepper, and set aside.  Put the sliced shallot in a medium bowl with the lemon juice, some salt and pepper and the olive oil.  Stir and set aside for the shallots to soften while you make the omelet.

Heat a 7 or 8” nonstick (or cast iron) ovenproof frying pan over medium-high heat.  Add the chorizo slices and potatoes and cook until everything is lightly golden, 3-4 minutes.  Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and set aside.  Sprinkle the rosemary leaves into the pan, then immediately pour on the egg mixture.  Add the chorizo and potatoes on top, spreading out evenly.  Place the pan in the preheated oven and bake until the omelet is puffed and golden, about 8 – 10 minutes.

Remove the omelet from the pan and cut into pieces.  Add the parsley to the shallots and toss to coat.  Serve the omelet with some of the parsley salad on top.

The omelet may be served warm or at room temperature.

Spanish Shrimp

Last Year's Post: Chocolate Honey Almond Tartlets
Two Years Ago:  Spinach, Blueberry & Goat Cheese Salad

I came across this recipe by Mark Bittman of the New York Times and just had to try it, in part because of his description:

Excuse the superlatives; this spin on a Spanish tapa is my favorite, and everyone I serve it to loves it. The shrimp juices infuse the oil, and the sum is beyond delicious. 

The recipe makes the list of his favorites, and he calls it "Simplest and Best Shrimp Dish".  How could you not try it?  And he's right - the recipe is unbelievably simple and beyond delicious.  Buy the best shrimp you can find because it's such a simple dish.  All you do is gently brown some garlic in olive oil, then add the shrimp with salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika for flavor and saute until cooked.  The whole process takes maybe 15 minutes.

The shrimp can be served on their own, over rice or pasta, or even over greens as a salad - the garlic oil makes a great dressing.  Mark Bittman also suggests stuffing them into tacos, or I can also see using them in quesadillas or enchiladas.

The original recipe calls for hot paprika, but I used smoked paprika because it was what I had on hand.  It's your choice - a little more heat, or a little more smokiness.  It will be great either way.

print recipe

Spanish Shrimp

Serves 4

Other seafood you can use: similar-sized scallops (or larger, though they’ll take longer to cook).

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, or more as needed

3 or 4 big cloves garlic, cut into slivers

1 ½  pounds shrimp (20 to 30 per pound) peeled, rinsed, and dried

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 1/2 teaspoons hot or smoked paprika

Chopped fresh parsley leaves for garnish

Warm the olive oil in a large, broad skillet or flameproof baking pan over low heat. There should be enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan; don’t skimp. Add the garlic and cook until it turns golden, a few minutes.

Raise the heat to medium-high and add the shrimp, some salt and pepper, the cumin, and the paprika. Stir to blend and continue to cook, shaking the pan once or twice and turning the shrimp once or twice, until they are pink all over and the mixture is bubbly, 5 to 10 minutes. Garnish and serve immediately.

Good with bread, over rice, tossed with pasta, or over greens as a salad.

Cheddar Olives

Last Year's Post: Brie & Pomegranate Toasts
Two Years Ago:  Fondue

Cheddar olives were first popular a while back, and then they sort of went away for some reason.  I've started seeing them on restaurant menus again, and for good reason - they're perfect appetizers or tapas with beer or wine, and they're great on a cheese board or charcuterie board.  They can be prepared in advance and refrigerated or even frozen until time to bake, and they need to sit for 30 minutes after baking so you don't need to worry about baking them while your guests are around.

The one issue they used to have is that the cheddar dough tended to slide off when they were baked.  Leave it to the obsessed people at Cook's Illustrated to test ten jillion variations until they found one that solves the issue.  Having made cheddar olives before, I was a little surprised at the amount of dough they called for in their recipe; it seemed like you'd end up with a cheese biscuit with an olive center rather than an olive with a thin cheese exterior.  So, I decided to do my own test by doing half the olives their way, and half using a smaller amount of dough.

Starting back at the beginning, there are two important parts to making this recipe work well - using a good extra-sharp cheddar, and refrigerating the prepared olives before baking to allow the dough to set. The recipe calls for small pimento-stuffed green olives, but I've also made it with pitted black olives.  Green olives are sharper and saltier, black olives are milder.  You could even have fun and use some garlic-stuffed olives from the olive bar, but you'll need to increase the amount of dough if they're big. You typically find the smaller stuffed olives in jars; I found a 5.75 ounce jar of stuffed Manzanilla olives that ended up containing 48 olives, which perfectly used up my half-and-half recipe experiment's worth of dough.  If you use the lesser amount of dough per olive (which we preferred) you could probably do more than 50 olives.

You drain and roll the olives around on a towel to dry them, then grate the cheese and mix the dough in a food processor.  You shape the dough around the olive by first gathering about a teaspoonful in your hand, then roll it into a ball and flatten it into a disk.

 

 Place the olive on the disk and pull the dough up around the olive, then roll it around in your hand again until it forms a perfect little ball.  After you make one or two it becomes easy and it's actually kind of fun.  And magically, your hands don't even get all sticky.

Refrigerate for at least an hour, then bake and let rest for 30 minutes before serving.  Or, if you want to freeze them for later, freeze them separated on a plate or baking sheet before placing in a plastic bag so they don't all stick together.  You can bake them later directly from frozen which is really handy.

 In the first picture below, the olives with the larger amount of dough are on the top half of the baking sheet.  On the cooling rack, the bigger ones are on bottom part.  And on the picture at the top of this post, you can see the difference between the two cut olives.  As I said, we really preferred the version with less dough - it lets the olive be the star. So, I adjusted the recipe accordingly.

printable recipe

Cheddar Olives

Makes approximately 50 olives

50 small pimento-stuffed green olives, rinsed (about 6 ounce jar)

1 cup all-purpose flour

¾ teaspoon paprika

½ teaspoon pepper

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

8 ounces extra-sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

7 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 7 pieces

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1 tablespoon water

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Spread olives on a dish towel and roll around to dry.  Pulse flour, paprika, pepper and cayenne in food processor until combined, about 3 pulses.  Add cheddar and butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse crumbs, about 12 pulses.  Add egg, water, and Worcestershire and process until dough ball forms, about 20 seconds.

Working with 1 heaping teaspoon dough and 1 olive at a time, roll dough between your hands to form a ball, then flatten into a disk.  Place olive in the center of the disk and fold the dough around it, then roll it around in your hands again to make a uniform ball.  Place cheddar olives on a large parchment-lined baking sheet and refrigerate for 1 hour or up to 24 hours (or freeze to bake later).

Preheat oven to 350d.  (If the cheddar olives are close together on your baking sheet, remove half and bake half at a time or use two sheets so they’re spaced at least 1 ½” apart).  Bake until bottoms are well browned and tops are golden, 16 to 18 minutes (if baking from frozen, increase time to about 25 minutes).  Transfer olives to a wire rack after baking and let cool for 30 minutes before serving.

Goat Cheese and Chorizo Rolls

Last Year's Post: Healthy Homemade Spaghetti and Meatballs
Two Years Ago:  The Best Salsa Ever

Goat cheese and chorizo are one of those magical combinations where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, like tomatoes and basil - the spicy, meaty chorizo is perfectly offset by the creamy goat cheese.  Add in crisp phyllo dough and you have a great little pop-in-your-mouth appetizer.  I debated serving the rolls with a plum sauce or salsa verde on the side - you certainly could - but in the end decided to forego a sauce to let the chorizo and goat cheese flavors shine.  Having said that, I might serve some sort of chile sauce with them next time for the people who like a lot of spice, since the rolls aren't particularly spicy on their own.

True confessions - these rolls are a little fussy to make, as is anything made with phyllo.  But once you set aside  the 30 minutes or so required for assembly, it's a simple matter to bake them until beautifully brown. They can be baked several hours in advance because they're equally great served slightly warm or at room temperature.  Just don't refrigerate them after baking or the phyllo will soften and you'll lose the textural contrast between the creamy filling and the crisp shell.  (They can also be made in advance and refrigerated or frozen prior to baking.)

Phyllo is one of those things that people find very impressive and think a normal person can't work with, as in "you actually MADE those?", but nothing could be further from the truth.  You just have to know a few tricks.  Phyllo dough is very thin and dries out fast, so you need to keep the stack covered with a damp towel.  Treat the individual sheets gently when brushing them with butter and don't worry if a sheet cracks or tears because you'll be stacking and rolling multiple sheets together.  If one tears really badly just toss it because there are jillions in a box.  And above all, remember that a little butter fixes everything.

First you make a simple filling from cooked and cooled Mexican chorizo, goat cheese, and chives.  Mexican chorizo is different from Spanish chorizo primarily in texture - it's the soft version that looks kind of like bulk Italian sausage.  Spanish chorizo is a cured sausage that looks like a stick of pepperoni.  If you can't find Mexican chorizo you could substitute finely chopped Spanish chorizo in its place.  Since Mexican chorizo is raw, it needs to be cooked, cooled and chopped fairly fine before adding it to the goat cheese and minced chives for the filling.

After making the filling, it's time to butter and stack the phyllo sheets.  The original recipe called for 16"x12" sheets, but my phyllo was 8"x12".  It works out the same in the end but you can only get half the amount of rolls per stack with the smaller sheets so it was a little more work.  Basically you stack and butter three sheets of phyllo at a time, then cut the stack into 4" by 8" rectangles.  Place some filling on the short end, fold in the sides and roll up.  Each finished roll is placed on a baking sheets seam-side-down and brushed with butter before repeating with the next stack until you have 18 rolls.  It's a little messy but the butter makes your hands nice and soft.

You can tell I wasn't too concerned about having each stack cut precisely 4" wide - they came out slightly shorter or longer - but who cares?  It's artisan, as The Lawyer would say. They bake up beautifully brown and are an impressive, unique and delicious bar snack, appetizer, or small plate for a tapas party.

printable recipe

Goat Cheese and Chorizo Rolls

Makes 18 rolls

8 ounces soft plain goat cheese, left at room temperature for 1 hour

1 cup (8 ounces) Mexican chorizo, cooked and chopped into small pieces

1 ½ tablespoons minced chives

Salt and pepper

9 - 12"x16" phyllo sheets (or 18 - 12"x8" sheets)

1 stick of butter, melted

In a bowl, blend the goat cheese, chorizo, and chives; season with salt and pepper.  Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.

Unroll the stack of phyllo sheets and cover with a lightly dampened kitchen towel.  Remove one phyllo sheet (covering the rest with the towel to keep moist) and place on a board.  Brush lightly with melted butter.  Top with two more phyllo sheets, buttering each lightly.  Cut the 12"x16" phyllo sheets into 6 (8"x4”) rectangles or the 12"x8" sheets into 3 (8"x4”) rectangles.  Place a tablespoon of filling at the short end of each rectangle and roll up, folding in the sides.  Set the rolls seam-side down on the baking sheet and brush with melted butter.  Repeat twice more (if using larger phyllo sheets) or five times more (if using smaller sheets) to make 18 rolls total.

Bake at 400d for 10-12 minutes, until golden brown.  Let cool for 5-10 minutes before serving, or serve at room temperature.  Once baked, keep the rolls at room temperature (do not refrigerate) and serve within a few hours to keep the phyllo crisp.

  

Note:  the rolls may be made in advance and refrigerated or frozen.  If frozen, thawing prior to baking will yield the best results.  A few minutes additional minutes of baking time may be needed.  

Pinchos Morunos

Last Year's Post: Gazpacho
Two Years Ago:  Pork with Thai Peanut Sauce

Color is Important
I grew up in an era where mothers regarded cooking as a necessity and their primary goal was to get food on the table that their family would eat.  Much of that food was beige.  Presentation and garnish were not concepts most moms thought about.  But times have changed, and cooking is now a conscious choice rather than a necessity since there are so many prepared foods and casual restaurants that are available.  There are many reasons to make the choice to cook - including good health, nutrition, dietary needs, or just plain fun - but as long as you made the effort to cook your food, why not make it look pretty?

Color plays a big part in making food pretty, which is why I chose multi-colored mini-peppers for this dish.  I could have used one big red pepper which would have added some color, but the multi-colored peppers are even better.

I've posted recipes in the past that were relatively colorless (Italian Sausage and Wild Mushroom Risotto ) because they are just that good, but it's a lot more impressive when they have all kinds of vibrant colors ( Seafood Cobb Salad ).  In particular, meat tends to be fairly brown so think about livening it up with a colorful sauce, relish, or accompanying vegetables.  Even a fresh parsley garnish on top of soup or rice helps to add color.  I once read about a chef who said he garnishes every meal he makes even if it's just for himself alone, because he felt it made that much difference to the overall eating experience.

Pinchos Morunos is Spanish in origin and is commonly found in tapas bars.  This particular recipe version converts it into a main dish by adding onion and peppers, but the pork by itself on small skewers would be a classic addition to a tapas party served with just a drizzle of lemon olive oil.  What makes it Spanish is the combination of spices on the pork, in particular the saffron.  I love the distinctive taste of saffron.  The pork is spiced but not very spicy in terms of heat, and it's what makes this dish special.  The spice mix colors the pork as it marinates before grilling.

I decided to halve the small peppers so they would fit better on the skewers plus it made them easier to seed, but I decided to leave the stems on for presentation and color.

I think I've mentioned somewhere previously that it's a good idea to separate your meats and vegetables on different skewers because they have different cook times.  If you alternate everything on each skewer your cook times become a compromise between ingredients, although for some reason that's the way skewers are most often shown.  In this case the meat was going to cook faster than the vegetables but the peppers and onions needed about the same amount of time.

One last note - although the recipe calls for marinating the meat for a few hours, it's very flexible.  I've grilled it without any marinating time at all, or you could let it marinate overnight so don't let that stop you from using this as a weeknight meal.  Served with rice or couscous, it's a fast, delicious and very healthy meal.

printable recipe

Pinchos Morunos

Serves 4

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

1 tablespoon sweet paprika

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

¾ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon saffron threads, crushed

¼ teaspoon ground red pepper

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 (1 pound) pork tenderloin, trimmed and cut into 1” cubes

1 red onion, cut into 6 wedges

8 multi-colored mini-peppers, cut in half lengthwise and seeded

8 (12”) wooden skewers

Cooking spray

Combine the first 10 ingredients in a zip top bag and toss to distribute spices.  Add the pork tenderloin cubes and toss to coat evenly.  Refrigerate for 1-2 hours.

Soak skewers in a water for 30 minutes prior to grilling to prevent burning.

Prepare a grill for direct cooking over medium heat. 

Separate each onion wedge into two pieces.  Thread meat pieces on four skewers; alternate onion and pepper pieces on the other four.

Grill over medium heat for 5 minutes per side for the meat, and 6 minutes per side for the vegetables, flipping once.