Clotxa

I always say that it is the winters that make it worth while to live in the Mediterranean and not the summers. It is nearly always sunny and most days it is possible to eat outside. Here in Catalonia they like to take advantage of this and have many fiestas that involve eating.

Clotxa (pronounced clotcha) is a sandwich of the countryside.  It can be made with sausages or other vegetables but traditionally it is made with salted preserved sardines, tomatoes and onions. It was made famous by a village called Riba-Roja d'Ebre.  A village by the river Ebro in the south of Catalonia.  Many villages of this region are now having Clotxa fiestas.

Serves 2-4

Ingredients

1 round 1 kg loaf
4 tomatoes
4 small onions
4 salted sardines (you can use any salted fish, such as kippers or smoked eel)
Extra virgin olive oil

Prepare a BBQ or heat the oven to 230 c. If you are cooking in the oven you can wrap the tomatoes and onions in foil and place in the oven.  Pan fry the sardines for a few minutes on each side.

Wait until the flames have died down and you are left with the hot embers.  Place the tomatoes and onions (unpeeled) on the heat and cook for about 10 -15 minutes, turning to cook all sides.  Place the sardines on the BBQ  and cook for a minute on each side.  While everything is cooking cut the loaf in half and carefully cut out the centers and reserve.  As soon as the everything is cooked and cool enough to handle peel the tomatoes and cut out the core and squash into the center of the halves, then peel the onions and do the same.  Skin the fish and take out the bones and add to the halves.  Drizzle in a good amount of olive oil into each half and then replace the bread in the center, squash down and cut into quarters if you like and eat.

Curly Endive Salad with Romesco Sauce

This salad is called Xato (pronounced chato) in Catalonia.  It is tradionally made with tuna, anchovies and raw salt cod, I have left out the salt cod for this recipe as it is not to everyone's taste.  Escarolas (curly endives) are now in season and you will see that a lot of villages in Catalonia having this traditional salad with competions for making the romesco sauce.

To make authentic Romesco sauce you really need Ñora or Choricero dried peppers, you can buy them from Spanish suppliers online.  If you make it without it will not be the same and in my mind it is worth to source them, they come dried on a string and can be hung up in the kitchen.  If you have a garden or greenhouse you could grow them.

Ñoras

Choricero

Serves 4

Ingredients

1 escarola (curly endive)
Small tin of anchovies in oil
Tin of tuna in oil
50g black olives in oil

For the Romesco sauce

2 tomatoes, cut in half
15 Almonds
15 Hazelnuts
slice of rustic bread
7 garlic cloves
75 ml extra virgin olive oil
2 Ñora or Choricero
Splash of red wine vinegar
salt

How to go about it

First put the dried peppers in a small bowl and cover with boiling water and leave for a few hours to soak. Wash the escarola, use only the really light green leaves, save the outer, darker green leaves and use in a soup if you wish.  Put the drained escarola in the fridge to crisp up.

The romesco can be made in the oven or in a frying pan.  Add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to the pan and gentle fry the whole unpeeled garlic cloves, keeping one back to add raw.  If you prefer a milder flavour of garlic then cook all the cloves.  In the same pan fry a piece of bread and tomatoes.  Dry fry the nuts. Or you can roast the ingredients in the oven 160c for 20 minutes, roast the nuts for only 10 minutes and keep an eye on them as they burn easily.  You can make this in a pestle and mortar or use a hand liquidizer.  Scrap of the flesh from the peppers, skin and seed the tomatoes and mix with all the other ingredients add the vinegar at the end, just a teaspoon to lift the flavour a bit. Loosen the sauce with a splash of boiling water and toss the escarola in a bowl with the romesco,  you might not need all of the sauce, you can save it for another day.   Arrange on plates and top with anchovies, tuna and olives.

Catalan Bread with Tomato

I get pregnancy type cravings for Pan con Tomato or (Catalan spelling) Pa amb Tomàquet, it's a basic thing but taste divine.  You can eat it as it is or top it with Serrano ham or Manchego cheese for example.



Ingredients

Tomatoes
Country style bread
Garlic
Extra virgin olive oil,  Arbequina if you can get it
Manchego cheese
Jamon Serrano

There are two ways of making it. The traditional way is to rub a cut tomato onto bread or toast.  You usually use a special tomato for this method which is called a hanging tomato.  These tomatoes are dried on the vine in a dry place for winter.  They have a particularly thick skin which makes them ideal for this preserving method.  The odd one goes rotten but more or less they will keep for months in this way.

Hanging Tomatoes

Bread rubbed with hanging tomatoes

The modern way of making tomato bread is to grate the tomato into a bowl add olive oil and salt and then spread it onto the bread or toast.

You can rub garlic onto the bread first, this is better suited to toast as the hard crust makes it a natural grater.

Then rub or spread tomato onto the bread.  If you rub the tomato onto the bread, drizzle olive oil onto it afterwards.  Sprinkle with sea salt and top with your chosen topping.

Cannelloni bean and vegetable soup with harissa and yoghurt

So many vegetables in the garden, I think I am turning into a vegetarian.  I thought I would give this a bit of a twist, instead of making a straight forward minestrone I decided to put a bit of harissa and yoghurt in it.

Serves 4

Ingredients

300g of cannelloni beans, soaked overnight
3 carrots
1 courgette
bunch of swiss card
1 clove of garlic
1 onion
handful of green beans
1 - 2 teaspoons harissa (depending on how hot you like it)
1 tablespoon of tomato purée
1 400g tin of chopped tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
small sprig of rosemary
small sprig of oregano
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper

For the yoghurt sauce

4 tablespoons of yoghurt
juice of half a lemon
1 teaspoon of lemon zest
2 tablespoons chopped basil
salt

How to go about it

First cook beans in a pressure cooker for 10 minutes or 40 minutes in normal saucepan.  Drain but reserve liquid.  Peel and chop onion, garlic and carrots, chard stems, gentle fry in saucepan until soft.  Add chopped courgette and continue frying for a few minutes.  Add herbs and cumin and fry for 2 minutes.  Add harissa and purée, mix and them add tomatoes, chopped chard leaves, beans and liquid from beans and more water if you think it needs it.  Season.  Simmer for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile make yoghurt sauce by mixing all the ingredients. Serve.