Dish Thirty-Three: Spain

This dish nearly didn’t happen. Well, dish 33 would have done, but not that week, maybe a week or so later, and it probably wouldn’t have been Spain. As it was, the two weeks after I did this one I was unable to do any 80 dishes as we were on holiday, and then it was Daniel’s 6th birthday party. Lots and lots of baking involved, but not 80 dishes. Lego minifigure birthday cake, lego biscuits, lego candy, lego pizza, lego head marshmallows, lego minifigure crayons. Definitely no 80 dishes that week, in fact we had a takeaway. Two weeks without 80 dishes was quite a break, but I think 3 weeks would have almost seen the end of the project, getting out of the swing of things. It almost did anyway.

But because I’m like a dog with a bone, I did manage it. I chose Spain in an unorthodox way – as we sat in the creche at church preparing it for the morning ahead, I thought about the busy day ahead – cleaning the house and doing the washing up, and of course, packing for a week’s holiday in Scotland starting on Monday. I decided I might be able to fit in an 80 dish if, and only if, it was easy and I already had all the ingredients. I pondered what might be an easy country, and decided Spain probably would be. So I searched on the internet looking for Spanish recipes that I had all the ingredients for and found what I was looking for. Pollo al Chilindron. All the ingredients already in the larder and relatively easy to make, even for my stunted abilities.

Map of Spain

Spain is, as I’m sure you know, in Europe. The capital city is Madrid and they speak Spanish. I give this information about each country, but it somewhat feels daft telling you about Spain in this way. Well, maybe some of my readers are very well acquainted with Paraguay or wherever, and they felt like I was treating them like a big thickie by telling them about Paraguay. So I have to stick with the formula. I don’t speak Spanish. At my school it was compulsory to learn French to GCSE (except for the girls who were learning English as a foreign language), and if we wanted to we could choose either German or Spanish. I chose German. Spanish is much more closely related to French than German is, and to be frank maybe I would have made the better choice choosing Spain – I really wasn’t very good at German, although I took both French and German to A-Level. I decided a good few years after school that I was going to learn Spanish next after I’d learnt Welsh. Got books and everything, but I never started. Dawn decided to learn German in October, and is teaching herself – she wrote her first letter, two pages, in German today. She puts me to shame.

Back to Pollo al Chilindron. Pollo means chicken, and Chilindron is the type of sauce the pollo sits in. It’s basically chicken stew. The new technique I learnt in making this dish was blanching tomatoes. You may remember from Egypt (when I think it was almonds I had to blanche) that blanching means to take off the skin. For this recipe, you need to have skinless tomatoes. The best way to take the skins off a tomato is apparently to shallowly cut the tomato skin (I cut it into quarters) and then place the tomatoes into a bowl of boiling water. After not very long, the skin just easily peels off. Da na! Skinless tomatoes. They feel gross. I hate warm tomatoes.

This recipe really was easy, just as I had hoped, which was just as well in the circumstances. And it looked so tasty. Have a look at the picture – it really did! It’s not often that the picture looks appetising, let’s face it, but this one does. What’s more, it tasted good as well. I fortunately, as usual, made too much and had some left over. I usually eat it the next evening, but we went to Scotland the next day, so I froze it and ate it the week after we got back. It really was good and Dawn enjoyed it too. I will definitely make this one again. It turns out I’m saying that a lot doesn’t it. Well, that was one of my personal intentions for this project – not only to cook 80 dishes from around the world, but also to learn to cook and to get some recipes to fall back on instead of jars of jollop.

Pollo al Chilindron

Pollo al Childindron in the pan

Ingredients

600 grams of chicken

Flour

Olive Oil

4-5 garlic cloves, chopped

1 large onion, chopped

1 red pepper, chopped

1 green pepper, chopped

4 blanched tomatoes, chopped

Pollo al Childron

1 large glass of dry white wine

Water

Salt

Pepper

 

Method

1. Chop the chicken into large pieces.
2. Wash the pieces and pat them dry with kitchen towel.
3. Put salt and pepper on them and cover each piece with flour.
4. Heat the oil in a pan, add the pieces of chicken and fry until it’s goldenish.
5. Add the garlic, give it a stir and then add the onion.
6. Cook for a couple of minutes, add the peppers and stir.
7. Cook for 5 minutes and add the tomatoes.
8. Mix it all up and add the wine. When it starts to boil, turn the heat down and leave it to simmer.
9. Add about half a glass of water when it begins to thicken.
10. Cover the dish up and cook for a further 30 minutes.
11. Serve. We had ours with pasta.