I got berated for taking a shot of the messy kitchen mid-cook, but I liked it. You can see the already-made, but not yet fried spring rolls.

Frying the vegetables and almonds. Spaniards fry their onions and peppers until they are very soft, yet Chinese cuisine calls for a bit of crunchiness to be left.

The rice had carrots, onions, ham, peas, and egg. I’m not sure which of these are considered the “three delights”.

Nora loved the rice.

Spanish culture has almost no racism filters, so making “Chinese eyes” to celebrate the occasion was acceptable.

Spring rolls!

Almond chicken!

Yummy spring roll!

Almond chicken on a bed of rice.

The meal was a big success. I suspect we will be making these recipes again sometime soon. The food was delicious!

I don’t regularly interact with many of the fishermen, but the other day Bruno, my neighbor and local butcher, knocked on my door and offered me some. I threw it in the fridge and, the next day, asked him how I should prepare it. What follows is the incredibly simple recipe he gave me.

But first some photographs…

A fishing boat returning with kilos upon kilos of mackerels.

Crates of mackerel loaded onto the docks.

The Recipe

1. Chop the mackerels into slices, about two fingers wide, perpendicular to the spine.
2. Chop some garlic into thin sheets
3. Lightly fry the garlic for a minute
4. Lightly salt the mackerel slices and add to the frying pan
5. Fry until fully cooked
6. Serve and enjoy!

I used six cloves of garlic.

Really, is there any food that isn’t good fried with garlic?

We had four fish and it was the perfect, if a bit large, serving size for two people.

You cut off the tail, of course.

Chopped and lightly salted.

Added to the pan.

Done and ready for serving. I didn’t get any shots of the food on the plate because it looked so good I didn’t stop to photograph it. Chopped like this, the bones, what I hate most about eating fish, were very easy to avoid.

Recipes don’t get much more simple than this. Enjoy!

I had never eaten or cooked barnacles, so everything was new and fascinating to me. Here’s what I learned…

Bizarre Barnacle Fact

The reason this particular species is called “goose barnacle” originates from the middle ages, back before people realized that birds migrate. Since no one in Europe had ever seen geese nesting (they breed in the Arctic), but they did see geese near the sea, where they also saw these black and white crustaceans, they naturally assumed that the crustaceans were the young geese before undergoing a metamorphosis and taking flight. The English word “barnacle” initially only referred to the barnacle goose, and through this ignorant deduction, later came to apply to the crustacean.

How To Eat Barnacles

The key for me was to think of them as “little crab legs”. They are crustaceans, after all.

1. Grab them by the white “claw” end
2. Stick the whole “arm” into your mouth
3. With your incisors (front teeth), break the “sleeve” as close to the claw as possible
4. Slide off the sleeve and eat the meaty arm

That’s the ideal scenario. As you get the hang of it, you’re more likely to end up severing the whole arm when you’re trying to just break the sleeve, and then you have to suck the arm out of the sleeve. You don’t discard any part of it, of course, without first sucking all the wonderful sea watery goodness from every crevice.

An empty sleeve, arm removed.

The arm, still attached to the claw with sleeve removed, ready for eating.

And of course you should serve them with a chilled white wine. We had a perfect wine.

Some of the best Spanish white wine comes from the Rueda region.

For the second course, we had some grilled shrimp.

Yummy.

In our wine-and-crustecean-induced stupor, we retired for a little siesta. Luckily the candles we left burning didn’t burn down the house.

The meal was a wonderful success. Before this weekend, I was amazed that people actually ate barnacles. Now I’m proud to be one of those people.

When a friend of ours who has a little vegetable farm gave us a bag of enormous gorgeous green peppers, we knew we had to try this recipe.

Ingredients

Potatoes, eggs, peppers, and optional onion. I used half of the onion, all the potatoes you see here, all the eggs, and it ended up being enough to fill seven peppers.

Procedure

Slice the potatoes thinly. We have an adapter to our blender that lets me slice potatoes perfectly evenly like this. Without such a device, the process just takes a little more time and care to do with a knife.

Dice the onion.

Fry the potatoes and onions together in very hot oil until the potatoes turn golden brown.

Remove the potatoes from the oil (I use a colander with a bowl underneath to collect the oil) and add all the eggs. Getting the right egg-to-potato ratio can be tricky.

I made too much potatoes and eggs for the dinner with my wife, but this stuff keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days.

Remove the stems and seeds from the pepper, while leaving the body intact.

It should look like this. Now simply spoon in the potato and egg mix.

And fry them.

Flipped over after underside is cooked. Peppers take a good long time to cook, so 20-30 minutes is not an unreasonable amount of time for them to be in the oil. Just don’t let them get completely black.

Serve with wine, of course.

Yummy!

Before you know it, they’ll disappear!

Conclusion

In the end, the conclusion that my wife and I drew about this recipe was that the taste isn’t any better than just a regular tortilla with the peppers cooked inside it, and this is considerably more work (twice the frying time). It is, however, a clever gimmick to do for dinner parties. It’s novel, which will please your guests, but it’s not worth the effort if you’re just making dinner for yourself.

They made me open a brand new bottle of wine (you know how I hate doing that) just so they could put a cork in the oil. Something about it preventing fire or burning of the rosquillas.

I’m curious as to why this would be. Searching the internet, I can only find references to putting a wine cork in the oil when frying octopus, and even then the only explanation given is that “My mother always did it, so I always do.” Does anyone know why putting a wine cork into frying oil would have any effect on anything?

You have to keep a stick in the middle of the dough ring and spin it around at first until it forms a good shape.

When they come out, they are lightly dusted avalanched with sugar.

Not bad, huh?

I ate one warm, and it was delicious, but everyone immediately informed me that eating warm rosquillas will make your stomach feel bad. When I asked why, I was chastised for always asking why. This was a fact that everyone knew (there’s even a song that mentions it), and I should accept it as true. As I’ve already discovered, there is plenty of “common cultural knowledge” that is complete humbug, so pardon me if “everyone believes it” isn’t good enough for me.

I suspect that the real explanation is that this “fact” was made up to keep little kids (and husbands) from robbing the cooling plate, and also supported, via confirmation bias and mothers saying, “See? I told you you’d feel bad!”, by the times when too many of them were eaten because they were just so delicious. My bet is that the only difference between eating them hot and cold is that they taste better and you’re more likely to overeat them hot.

But I fully admit that there could be some enzyme reaction taking place during cooling that is the real explanation. If so, I’d love to learn about it.

I’ve made a variation that I enjoy that includes onions and peppers, although any ingredients beyond egg and potato are superfluous to the recipe.

A blurry flash-less photo of the raw ingredients. These peppers are exactly like regular old bell peppers in flavor and texture, but these just happen to be a little cheaper in Spain.

Step 1: Peel the potatoes and chop up all the veggies.

It’s important that the potatoes be sliced very thinly like this.

Step 2: Fry the potatoes, onions, and peppers in plenty of oil for 10-15 minutes, stirring every 2-3 minutes. When the potatoes begin to fall apart due to your stirring, they’re probably done.

Step 3: Dump entire contents of frying pan into a colander, collecting the oil in a bowl beneath.
Step 4: Put 2-3 tablespoons of the collected oil onto a smaller frying pan and put it on the stove to heat up. I usually save the remaining oil in a jar for future potato frying adventures.
Step 5: Beat 5-6 eggs in a bowl and add the fried vegetables. Add salt and optionally a little pepper.

Step 6: Pour mixture into the smaller frying pan and let cook on low heat for 5-10 minutes.
Step 7: This is the extremely difficult part that takes lots of practice. You have to place a plate over the frying pan, flip it over, and slide it back onto the frying pan to cook the other side. The really good chefs can flip it in the air, but that can get kind of messy.

The finished tortilla de patata. At this point, it can be eaten with a knife and fork and any number of sauces, including ketchup, mayo, and/or Tabasco.

Step 8: Cut a bit to fit on your bread and put some ketchup on it.

You’re done! Time to eat!

Ingredients

• 1 cow tongue
• 1 large or 2 small leeks
• 1/2 an onion
• 3 carrots
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• 1 tomato
• flour
• 2-3 eggs
• salt
• white wine (optional)

Instructions

1. Coarsely chop up all the veggies and place them in a pot with just enough water to cover them.
2. Place tongue in pot (the cow’s, not yours). It’s not that important that it be completely covered by the water, because you can turn it a few times while its boiling.
3. Add a few pinches of salt (2-3 teaspoons?)
4. You can optionally add about a glass of white wine, as well
5. Boil for 60-90 minutes, depending on the thickness of the tongue.
6. Allow to cool
7. While it’s still warm (it’s easier when warm), remove the skin from the tongue.
8. Cut into thin cross-section slices. The thinner the better.
9. Purée the vegetables in the pot. We use a handheld mixer (see photo below).
10. Bread and fry each slice
    1. Heat oil in frying pan (we use sunflower oil)
    2. Pour some flour on a plate
    3. Beat 2 or 3 eggs in a bowl
    4. Cover each slice of tongue in flour
    5. Dip each slice in egg
    6. Place each slice in hot oil until golden brown
11. Place each breaded and fried slice in the pot with the sauce
12. Simmer on low heat for a few minutes to let the flavors mingle
13. Serve with a healthy serving of silly tongue jokes.

Photos

The tongue slices look pretty similar to sliced roast beef. Well, it is sliced roast beef, if you think about it.

Marga’s mother has one of those circular-saw-like meat slicers like the butchers and deli chefs have. Use one of those if you can.

The boiled veggies. You can see some of the beef fat on the surface. Mmm!

Puréeing the veggies into a thick orange sauce. No Spanish household is without one of these mixers. Many, many recipes call for turning veggies into sauce like this.

The slices moving from plate to flour to egg to frying pan, and eventually….

…to pot with sauce.

I sprinkled mine with dried parsley to make it look like a photo from a real recipe book.

Serve with good bread and a fine Rioja. The Spanish eat bread with every meal, and the best part of this dish is mopping up all the sauce on the plate with fresh bread.

¡Que aproveche!