Drunken Paella

It wasn't quite a lost weekend, but definitely a hazy one. We wore ourselves out pretty nicely, but now we've almost recovered enough to get back to the business of exposing ourselves.

The mercury was pushing 30ºC in Paris and the air heavy and balmy, with plenty of sunshine. It's as though someone forgot to remind Mother Nature that the weather here is supposed to suck hard, then unexpectedly snowball you. Such weather calls for just one thing: Hot, sweaty sessions of day-drinking.

Before starting our Sunday session of boozin' in the sun, I prepped everything I could to make a proper paella mixta after coming home later. After lubing up with a beer and bloody Mary first, of course.


If you've done the necessary prep work (the bulk of which is just measuring out your ingredients and having them at hand), making paella is easy. Even hammered. Hell, even without a proper paellera (paella pan).

Take a wide, shallow pan, heat it up, and throw in a few tablespoons of olive oil. Throw in a bunch of whole prawns (or crayfish or langoustines... something with beady eyes, meaty tail, and tasty guts) and heat until nice and pink/red. Set aside.

Now throw chunks of Spanish chorizo into the pan (Mexican chorizo isn't quite the same, but you can do that if you like) and brown. Set aside.

With the pan still going, throw in a mixture of very finely chopped onion, a crushed garlic clove, and if you feel like it, a small tomato that's been beaten to a pulp. (Don't bother with the canned stuff.) Maybe a dash of sweet paprika. Once they're nicely sweaty and soft, throw in two cups of rice and sauté in the mixture until browned.

Pour in 3 cups of seafood broth. Or in my case, I had only made 2 cups of broth (basically by boiling and straining the carcasses of around 2 dozen previously cooked and eaten shrimp) and added an additional cup of water. The homemade shrimp broth is awesome and simple. If you can't swing it, use chicken or vegetable broth.

Get the heat up nice and high until the broth starts to boil, then turn it down to a medium low and let it sit for about 15 minutes. At that point, most of the water should be gone and your rice should be al dente.

Grab a healthy pinch of saffron (the real shit, not that turmeric-infused powdered orange trash) and mix it into the rice. I prefer to grind mine down with a pestel and mortar first for even distribution and to get as much scent and color out of it. Re-introduce the sausage to the pan and mix in as well. Press your filter-feeders into the rice and make it look pretty.

Crank up the heat under your pan to high, in order to form a light crust at the bottom. You'll know it's good to go when you smell a slight burning scent. It should take less than a minute.

That's it! Some people like to finish it in the oven, which I did to get a little extra "roast" on the prawns from the broiler. It gives them that just-barbecued-on-the-beach feel.

Trust me, you can easily do all of the above while completely tanked. In fact, it will come out even better when you're in a less inhibited state of mind.

Case in point: After drinking all day, I got to the step that requires a "healthy pinch" of saffron. Apparently, after numerous cocktails and beers, you don't think twice about dumping half a container of real Iranian saffron into your paella. Since it's not polite to discuss finances, let's just say that good saffron makes uncut Colombian cocaine look like a bargain.

While you may want to kick your own ass when you sober up and realize you just used up half a college tuition's worth of spice, the memory of saffron flavor exploding all over your tastebuds and olfactory senses makes it forgivable.

Hell, even if you don't follow our drunken lead, a good paella is still easy and surprisingly simple. And you can make it with just about anything - chicken, rabbit, mussels, clams... Even vegetarian if you swing that way.

Of course, there's never too much of a good thing. Keep your buzz going by enjoying your paella with a nice old-vine Garnacha from Spain. It's the hotness as wine goes right now, and dirt cheap to boot.

Back from ze Market/Back to ze Kitchen

This vacation from cooking has lasted long enough.

My finger is healed, the outdoor markets are irresistibly sunny, and we need to get our fill of quality, unprocessed food before going on (proper) vacation this summer. While we're looking forward to gorging on luscious foods from California and the Pacific Northwest, we'll be dealing with substandard kitchens and, dammit, we're gonna miss just going down the street to pick up stuff like this:


More or less from the top left: Lamb for grilling, gigantic French apricots, roma tomatoes, local cherries, baguette de campagne, enormous avocados, tomatoes on the vine, spiced/herb sausage made by our local butcher, farm-fresh eggs, Catalan and Nicoise olives, organic prawns (I guess that means they're farmed?), and a freakin' lemon.

We can't wait to put all of these in our mouths.

Though not all at once. That's for another site.

Egg. Salad.

Not egg salad. But salad. With eggs as the centerpiece.

Thanks to the whole dealie with frying my finger, literally, last week, I've been shying away from any heavy-duty cooking. First off because I'm now terrified by the sound of searing flesh. Secondly because almost any wet kitchen activity - from cleaning fish to doing the dishes - would require re-dressing my finger over and over again.

While Paris is a fantastic place to eat out, though, it can get old... Not to mention expensive. And with all the awesome ingredients available, it's maddening not to be able to cook. The solution? Cold dishes. Or those with easy, minimal cooking/prep. Or salade composée, as they like to say here.

Wanna Root?


Root vegetables may be more of an autumn thing in most people's minds, but French markets – like those in most places – are stocked with beets, carrots, and potatoes year round. The colors, though, are varied enough to shout "SPRING!" And chives seem to be on market shelves and fancy menus in amounts unseen since the Sour Cream n' Chives mania of the 1980s. Non-veg components include a gently poached egg and a walnut oil and strawberry syrup vinaigrette.

Egg on Egg on Egg Action


This one's pretty simple... Lumpfish caviar over diced egg whites on toasted baguettes with butter. We decided separating the yolk out and turning it into decor was the best way to go – not only for aesthetics, but to have the option of picking off some yolk to put on top of the canapé: Some folks find the yolk to compete too much with the caviar. This being cheap lumpfish, it's not a big deal either way... Oh, and look, somehow some chives snuck in. (Gotta use up the giant bunch from the market somehow!)

Brown Town
Salade de lentilles et son oeuf poché (er, lentil salad with poached egg) is a lunchtime staple around town, especially at the new upmarket "fast food" joints that try to push healthy meals (i.e. small portions) at non-fine-dining prices (i.e. cheaping out by serving mostly cold dishes). This is actually fine, because as is often the case with French cuisine, the simpler the better. And sometimes, we do actually crave something this stupidly simple.


I figured any moron could make a lentil salad, but I decided to look at recipes for inspiration anyway. Among the first I stumbled upon seemed one of the simplest, and by virtue of it being by Alice Waters, it must be among the best. I got as far as her first ingredient – she recommends French green lentils, and those happen to be the cheapest and most plentiful around these parts – and scanned over to the onion-type component and saw shallots. At that point, I nodded and threw the rest out the door. A new inspiration struck me.

The Persian dish addassi is a lentil dish that somewhat resembles Mexican refried beans in consistency. It's often eaten as a belly-warming breakfast with a pat of butter and nana-dagh, which is essentially fried mint. And you know, nothing goes better with lentils than melted butter. (Alannah agrees, and pleasing the wife comes first and foremost.)

Taking inspiration from that, I scrapped Ms. Waters' recipe (which I'm sure is fantastic) and started making an addassi-style salad.

The cooked lentils were combined with some chopped scallions (whites only) softened in butter. They were then stirred with a dressing based on melted butter, a bit of olive oil, cumin, pepper, and dried mint that I'd ground down into a fine powder with a pestel and mortar. While all that chilled, it was on to poaching the eggs and slicing up – you guessed it – chives to finish.

It's all criminally simple, and above all, mouthgasmically good.

It also keeps quite well, so you can make a huge batch, throw it into a Weck jar (or other fancy-pants brand of canning jar) and take it to work for lunch, where all your coworkers will think you scored a promotion and are now getting your take-out from Fauchon/Neiman-Marcus/Harrod's/(enter-your-local-overpriced-food-hall-here).