The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (20 page)

However, we arrived in Barcelona on Sunday and most of the stores were closed. Instead, we hung out at La Sagrada Familia, the famous unfinished church designed by artist Antoni Gaudi. Before that trip, I'd seen the church only from a distance; the spires always remind me of tapered candles left out too long in the sun. It's impressive on many levels. But what I admire most is that Gaudi started a church that he knew he would never live to see finished, perhaps the ultimate definition of faith.

The next day, the ship docked at the Spanish island of Palma de Mallorca. We stepped up our hunt for a pan. Mike confirmed that standard paella pans are crafted from carbon steel and thus would not work on the induction
¹⁹
burners in the ship's Culinary Arts Center. The best way to tell if a pan will work on an induction burner is to see whether a magnet will stick to it. Mike sent me on my way and headed into town on his hunt armed with a tourist magnet from the Sagrada Familia. I'd booked a day-long excursion to watch a Spanish chef make paella over a blazing fire in the countryside. A bus delivered me and two dozen cruisers to a restaurant set up in a stone farmhouse.

Under a small wooden pavilion, the chef's crew commenced with threading three whole baby pigs onto monstrous wrought-iron poles. The poles hooked into a medieval-style spit device over a row of white-hot fires. The distraught look on some of the cruisers' faces signaled that many had likely never seen a whole pig, much less witnessed an iron rod jammed up one's backside. Only a cruise passenger skewered and put onto the spit could have yielded more horrified stares.

As the crew tended to the pigs, the chef worked the paella. He started with hacked-up pork bones on a flat, shallow pan nestled above another bracing fire in the 102-degree heat. Chef tossed out points in Spanish to his young Catalan assistant, who caught and translated them for the group. “Chef says that he likes to start with bones because the marrow will caramelize and add richness to the dish,” she said. The pork crackled and snapped as the pool of fat slowly widened and the remaining meat on the bones darkened with its own sugar.

Chef stooped over the heat to place two dozen white chicken thighs into the pan. Each sputtered as it hit the oil. Then he tossed in bowls of chopped onions, tomatoes, peppers, and rice, one by one. Finally, he poured in a bucket of dark chicken and fish stock. The watching crowd sat mesmerized, most slightly drunk from drinking sparkling wine in high heat at midday. Chef handed a long paddle to a clean-shaven midwestern guy in a golf shirt. He eagerly took it. Everyone took a turn stirring, including an eighty-four-year-old man in Sansabelt trousers who teetered over his walker as he pushed the oar around in the rice.

“Dad, are you okay?” his concerned daughter asked, approaching. “It's pretty hot over these coals. Maybe you should sit down.”

He waved the paddle at her, nearly falling off his walker. “Back off! I'm having a good time,” he said gruffly. “That chef isn't much younger than me, you know. This is the first time I've cooked anything in years and I'm liking it.” She slunk away.

The area took on a meaty smell that mingled with the aroma of charred onions and peppers, joined later by the sweet scent of massive, lobsterlike langoustines, the final addition by the chef near the end of cooking. When finished, the pan was substantial enough with the rice and other ingredients that it required four strapping Spaniards to haul it away. Armed with fireman-style gloves, they squatted in unison and with a collective grunt hauled the pan up and walked it inside the dining room like pallbearers.

As the food arrived, I noticed that even women who had been aghast at the sight of the skewered pigs now happily gnawed on the pieces of roughly cut pork. The room went silent as everyone concentrated on lunch. The chef's assistant emerged from the kitchen with one last tip. “Try a bite of paella and then a bite of the raw green pepper slices you'll find on the table. It enhances the flavor.” He was right. It drew out the earthy, soft, and sweet flavor of the saffron rice and the light sea-scented stock.

The bus dropped us back in Palma, a town filled with beautiful Spanish architecture and populated by women dressed in beach attire even in the middle of downtown. Mike alerted me to meet him in the kitchen section of the department store El Cortes Inglés. He'd located two paella pans that he thought would work on the ship's burners. After some debate, we purchased both. We then boarded a bus whose destination was “Airport/Harbor.”

Mike asked, “Are you going to the harbor?”

“Yes,” the driver replied.

After a few stops, we realized that we were heading out of town to the airport. We nervously looked at our watches.

At the airport, Mike talked to the driver again. “Are you going to the port next?”

“Yes,” the driver said.

“With the ships?”

“Yes.”

“Do you go to the moon?”

“Yes,” the driver answered, nodding.

Mike waved me off the bus. “Let's take a taxi back to the ship.”

The night before, we'd barely made it onto the ship in Barcelona before the crew pulled up the gangway. Once again, we ran through the port, this time each of us clutching a paella pan.

The next day, I told the story of our chef friend Ted and our wedding. “Oh, it's not fair that you have to work on your anniversary,” a woman from Asheville, North Carolina, said.

“Are you kidding? If I was at home, this is exactly what I'd be doing, making paella.”

 

When we recounted the trip back home, we both measured the days in meals and countries: lunch in Monte Carlo overlooking a white sand beach populated with beautiful topless French women (crisp salad Niçoise thick with anchovies, roasted whole fish with fennel and tomatoes); in Barcelona, a late bite just off Las Ramblas (spitroasted rabbit, broiled mussels with garlic and parsley sauce); the hike to a hillside cliff for hot, sweet tea above Tunis (sugary dateheavy Tunisian pastries); a bite in an ancient square in Palermo, Italy, after being overcharged by a crafty seventeen-year-old Sicilian cartand-buggy driver (handcrafted pizza with fresh tomatoes, grilled squid with sweet fennel sausage); and, finally, the best
pasta vongole
(pasta with clams) of my life high above the harbor on the island of Capri.

Paella sounds complicated, but it's just a casserole that originated as a poor fisherman's supper designed to use up scraps left in the nets. Make it once, and then adapt the technique to make a one-pot dish that's simple or extravagant based on what you've got on hand. Just keep intact the base aromatics known as the
sofrito:
onions, garlic, and tomatoes. I've made paella with and without meat, with green beans, asparagus, fresh corn, rabbit, garbanzo beans, scallops, andouille sausage, littleneck clams, and even Dungeness crab.

 

 

 

 

1 pound medium shrimp, deveined, shells reserved 1 quart chicken stock

 

6 chicken thighs and/or legs
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon dried thyme
Couple of pinches of cayenne

 

2 tablespoons olive oil
8 ounces chorizo, cut into bite-sized pieces
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 large yellow onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
2 large tomatoes, seeded and chopped
2 bay leaves
1
cups uncooked Bomba, Arborio, or other short-grain rice
Pinch of saffron threads (about
teaspoon crushed)

One 14-ounce can artichokes
1 cup frozen peas, thawed
2 ounces diced pimento
About 1 pound mussels, bearded and scrubbed
2 or 3 lemons, cut into wedges
Strips of green pepper

 

Combine the shrimp shells and chicken stock in a pan, and simmer until needed.

Season the chicken pieces with generous doses of coarse salt and pepper, the thyme, and the cayenne.

Heat the pan over medium-high heat or a hot grill. Add the oil and sauté the chorizo until it is partially cooked, about 5 minutes. Add the chicken to the pan and brown it well, turning occasionally, for about 15 minutes. Remove the chorizo and chicken and set aside. Add the garlic, onion, and green pepper to the pan and cook until the vegetables are softened and starting to brown. Add the tomatoes and bay leaves and cook another 3 minutes. Meanwhile, strain the shrimp shells from the stock.