When Lindsay is busy with school (studying for her online class or working on projects for her preschoolers) I often volunteer to make dinner. Lindsay tends to be more of a comfort food cook: chicken n’ noodles, mac n’ cheese, tacos (Mexican food is a comfort food for us, ok). I tend to be a little more experimental. So when we decided to have guests over in the middle of a busy week I started brainstorming.
We recently bought a new Brazilian food cookbook. I really like it and went to it first for ideas. I have already learned to make Galinha Assada com Farinha de Rosca (a baked and breaded chicken dish). I saw a recipe for pumpkin stuffed with beef and thought I would try that, but Lindsay didn’t really take to the idea for guests we don’t have over so often. So I turned to the internet for inspiration, I usually talk to Minh (a friend who is in Iraq) over Skype in the afternoons. He suggested the Spanish Paella dish. While we were in Barcelona we saw the dish everywhere. You would think that we would have tried it when we were there, but no. We really only ate Tapas in Barcelona. Even though we saw this dish everywhere we just couldn’t stomach (excuse the pun) the 12-18 euro price tag.
To make Paella you start by cooking sausage, onion and red pepper with some oil. Then you add chicken broth and uncooked rice and bring everything to a boil. Add some spice and let it simmer for 20 minutes. Then you cook shrimp with it for another 6 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste and bon appetite! Basically you can put anything you want in, but normally it has at least two types of meat in it. I really like the idea of cooking the rice together with everything.
All in all it was a wonderful evening. Cris and Ilzo (our friends from church) loved the dish. They scraped the pot clean! I am happy to have gotten to know some friends better and add one more dish to my cooking repertoire.
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