My Favorite New Club: The Cookbook Club... in Spain!

 Joanne Tracey over at Brookford Kitchen Diaries has started up a monthly cookbook club and the rules such as they are are loose enough that it's easy to follow along and participate. 

This month we were asked to try to find Basque by Jose Pizzaro (or another Spain/Spanish influenced cookbook) and try out a recipe to share. I was not at all surprised when the book nor anything by the author was available at our library or even through our inter- library loan program. We are a small town and it's often hard to find specific books. But I searched for Spanish cookbooks and found two to request through interlibrary loan that I thought might work for today's theme. Unfortunately by the time the two books arrived I only had a week to look through them, pick a recipe or two and get cooking!

We ended up making 3 for a complete Spanish meal-- with a protein, a starchy side dish, and some delicious vegetables. 

Since I am sharing recipes from cookbooks I won't be giving full recipes like usual with amounts because that feels much too much like plagiarism to me but I will tell you the ingredients, the general cooking method and what we changed/swapped. 

Spain by Jeff Koehler was an impressive book with nearly 350 pages; most of them recipes! Arranged by food type and not region it's not always possible to know which region the dish I was reading about was from. But there was a really nice, wide variety of recipes and the photos were just lovely. 

We selected a delicious and easy looking potato side dish to try called Patatas Panaderas Al Horno meaning Baker's Oven-roasted potatoes (page 116). With just 4 ingredients: white potatoes, onion, olive oil, and salt it was a delicious and easy dish to make. I didn't weigh/ measure my ingredients or peel my potatoes but felt confident that pretty much whatever I did would work with this recipe. We baked them in a 400 degree oven for nearly an hour; covered with foil for all but the last 10-15 minutes. It was delicious!  

The Spanish Kitchen by Clarissa Hyman-- set by region and filled with both stories and recipes. Much lighter on the amount of recipes this one had more photos of the country and the various regions and was quite interesting to read. 

I was a bit dismayed that all the recipes from the Basque region (of which there were 4) all contained fish that my boys won't eat. So I selected different recipes to try-- one from the Andalucia region and one from the Castile-Madrid region. 

Our vegetable side dish was simply called Roasted Pepper, Tomato, and Garlic salad (page 72). It too had just a few simple ingredients-- tomatoes, peppers, garlic, olive oil, sherry vinegar (it was over $10 in our store for sherry vinegar so I used red wine vinegar I had on hand), and salt. 

I ended up halving my veggies, seeding the peppers, and cutting the tops off the garlic bulb just to make it easier for me after roasting but otherwise followed the recipe exactly. They too roasted in a 400 degree oven. I only roasted them for 35 minutes since I had cut them smaller than they looked in the recipe. Good thing too as I didn't have a full hour to let them rest after baking since I forgot to start to the dish earlier in the afternoon like I had planned. But it was cool enough for me to peel off the skin from the tomatoes (I was unable to get the skin off the peppers but we didn't really notice or mind it) and squeeze out the garlic before adding in the oil and vinegar. Our salad was a bit warm when served but I honestly don't know that I would have liked it cold. 

Our main dish was called Pork with Malaga Wine, Almonds, and Raisins (page 15). This dish was still pretty simple to prepare but had a longer ingredient list. Pork tenderloin, olive oil, onion, garlic, Malaga raisins, Marcona almonds, Malaga Moscatel wine or Sherry, Brandy de Jerez, salt and pepper. 

I had to get a bit creative with this dish since I could not find acorn raised pigs or rare-breed organic pork, like the recipe suggested, I just used regular pork tenderloin. I also could not find Malaga raisins or Morcona almonds so I used regular raisins and slivered almonds. We don't drink alcohol so I refused to splurge on the specific wines/brandy and instead subbed in cooking sherry and (after a quick Google search for replacing brandy in cooking dishes) settled on apple juice. I know! I'm sure it's not the same but like I said we don't really ever use or drink alcohol and I know from smoking so many pork shoulders that we do like apple juice on our pork since my husband uses an apple mixture to spritz the meat. I also thought the apple juice would go well with the raisins and almonds. 

I seared the meat (cut into medallions) before setting it aside, then browned the onions and garlic in olive oil until fragrant. Added in the raisins, almonds, sherry and apple juice then let them boil for 10 minutes before adding in the pork and cooking it until the meat thermometer registered it as fully cooked. It too was absolutely delicious. I loved the crunch of the almonds with the sweet plump raisins and the pork; even though I pretty much never eat pork. 

It might not look like much altogether on the plate but we really liked our whole meal. 

Linking up with: Thinking Out Loud,