Tag Archives: Food

Chickpea Enchiladas a la Vanessita

by in family, Food, holidays, Random musings and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m not going to go into a very long complicated story about the brilliance of the chickpea or it’s meaning to The Cuban and mine’s relationship. Suffice it to say that they are important and this particular dish is something that has become my signature meal for friends, and for us when we just want something a little more special and delicious. This dish, over the last 10 years or so, has become our comfort food and celebratory dish. And, we love it.

After many requests for the recipe, I’ve put this together. I must warn you that I am rubbish at measuring out ingredients, and much of this is highly dependent upon my mood when I’m cooking it. So, feel free to freeform it. You’ll want to taste elements throughout so that you get the right combination of flavours to suit your tastebuds.

Ingredients for the enchiladas & filling
1 packet (8 to 10 tortillas) corn or flour tortillas (I typically use flour because The Cuban prefers them)
2 tins of cooked chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 to 3 gloves chopped garlic
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 to 1.5 tsp ground cumin
1 to 1.5 tsp dried oregano
1 to 2 tsp ancho chili powder
1 to 2 tsp chipotle chili powder
salt to taste
[NB: You can also use a packet of your favourite taco seasoning to cook the chickpeas. You can also add more or less spices as you wish and to your taste.]
Generous dollop of sour cream, crème fraîche or vegan equivalent (I’ve been using Oatly’s vegan version recently)
1/2 to 1 c shredded cheddar, pepper jack or hard goats cheese (or other cheese to your liking).

For the enchilada filling, drain and rinse the chickpeas. In a medium skillet and over medium-high heat, heat the oil and add the chopped garlic. Cook for a minute or two until soft, then add the spices and mix it well until it becomes aromatic. Add the chickpeas and then just cover the chickpeas with water and mix well. Turn the heat down, and simmer until most of the liquid evaporates. About halfway through cooking, I taste a chickpea or two to see if the flavour works. If you want to thicken the mixture a bit, add about a 1/2 tsp flour or corn starch and mix well. Remove from the heat and then mix in the cheese and sour cream.

Ingredients for the enchilada sauce:
3 tbsp butter
2 tbsp corn starch
2 c vegetable broth
1 c sour cream, crème fraîche or vegan equivalent (I’ve been using Oatly’s vegan version recently)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 to 1 tsp jalapeño powder (to taste)
1/2 to 1 tsp chipotle powder (to taste)
Juice of 1 lime (to taste)

In a medium sauce pan, melt the butter. Add the corn starch and cook until thickened, about a minute or two. Add the broth and whisk until smooth. Simmer until it bubbles and thickens. Turn off the heat. Stir in the sour cream and spices, and whisk until smooth and completely combined. Then, add the lime juice and mix in well. At this point, I taste the sauce using a corn chip, and adjust the spices as necessary. I have also added chopped jalapeño or jalapeño relish or more of the chili powders. But, add a little at a time so that the sauce doesn’t become too spicy.

Assembling the enchiladas:
Ladle a bit of sauce in the bottom of your baking dish to just cover it completely. Add about 1/4 to 1/3 c of the chickpea mixture to each tortilla and roll them up, placing each seam down in the baking dish. Repeat until you run out of tortillas or filling. (I find about 1/3 c of filling typically yields 8 generous enchiladas.)

Cover the enchiladas with the remaining sauce making sure that you cover each completely. Add another 1/2 to 1 c of shredded cheese to the top of the dish. [NB: I typically use 1/2 c cheese for the filling and 1/2 c of cheese for the top of the enchiladas and they are plenty cheesy.]

Bake until golden brown and bubbly for about 25 to 30 min at 180 C / 350 F.

Let cool slightly before serving.

I also typically serve these with a simple mango salsa (1 diced mango, 2 diced avocado, and as much diced tomato as you like tossed gently with lime juice and a bit of chipotle powder and a bit of chopped garlic).

Enjoy!

Vintage 8 in Torremolinos, Spain

by in Food, holidays, Inspiration, Kindness, Random musings, Travel and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Spain is lovely, with plentiful sunshine even on the rare ‘cloudy’ day. Clouds in Helsinki provide an alternate reality and entirely different notion of just what a cloudy day looks like I suppose. But, one thing we didn’t really think much about when we booked this holiday was food or the cuisine. One comment I heard several times before leaving was that Spain is not kind to vegetarians, and finding anything beyond chorizo, serrano and manchego would be a challenge.

Challenge accepted.

[As an aside, but related to this tale of gastronomic bliss, sometime in September this year during a sleepless night, I made the mistake of watching a documentary The Cuban found, entitled Dominion. I haven’t been able to eat meat since and my diet now borders on veganism. I’ll spare you the details of the documentary. But unless I know definitively that the pig, chicken, cow or fish I’m about to ingest enjoyed a happy life and was slaughtered in a way which wasn’t delightfully and gleefully cruel, I ain’t touching it.]

Anyway…thus far and two weeks into our sorjourn to the sun, we’ve been rather underwhelmed by the food. Aside from a lovely Italian bistro down the block from our home away from home, the food we’ve had can be best described as ‘meh’.

All that changed yesterday. And, we have Vintage 8 to thank for the dining delights, an experience we plan to repeat several times before we depart back to the land of darkness.

We found Vintage 8 after searching for solid restaurants in the area, thinking it’d be a nice place to meet up with old friends. Since its situated at the end of the route for our daily evening strolls here on holiday, we decided we’d try it yesterday rather than hit up our favourite Irish pub for a pint of Guinness before dinner. Typing out that comparison seems like such an insult both to the restaurant and the chef, because the only thing the two options have in common is that they lie rather closely to one another by happenstance. But, that’s part of Vintage 8’s charm. It sits on a block of utterly incongruent choices — Burger King and a Chinese-Thai place both provide alternative options to this gastronomic gem. But, the reviews. Just about every review of Vintage 8 sang its praises. And, a few of those reviews came from vegetarians, which intrigued me.

We arrived early by Spanish dinner-time standards (probably around 18.45). And, we were the only folks there other than the chef, who performed dual functions until later in the meal, taking care of our every need as well as cooking up some insanely delicious treats.

The menu itself is a delight, with whimsicial, playful names featuring giants like John Lennon, Ella Fitzgerald and Paul McCartney in various dish descriptions, along with flavours I’d never imagined but wanted to try. Nothing looked uninteresting.

I opted for the tasting menu, which the chef was incredibly and kindly willing to adapt to my annoyingly vegetarian food habits at the moment. The Cuban, rather bravely, also decided on the tasting menu (his first ever!), opting to try both fish dishes rather than the lamb or chicken which typically closes out the four-course meal. Here’s the truly crazy part to both of us: the four courses we each were about to savour cost an astoundingly cheap €19.90 each, and included a beverage (red wine for me and water for The Cuban). This culinary adventure also included a starter and dessert, both of which were just as delicious on their own as they were a part of this culinary journey of Morrocan and Mediterranean fusion food. Oh, yes, we will be back, my new best friend.

So, here’s what we had. [I’m rather sad that the pictures here do very little justice to the food, and don’t include each course. Our next visit, I’ll have my proper camera so that I can capture these insanely lovely tasting and beautifully plated dishes. I’ve included some photos, however, just to give you, dear reader, a bit of salivatory satisfaction for now.):

  • Mushroom croquette: I gladly could have eaten a mound of these, but I love mushrooms and all things fried. The Cuban, who is not exactly enamoured by fungal foods of any sorts, loved them as well. And, the beginnings of a happy food face first emerged across the table from me.
  • Vintage 8 Egg: This won the ‘best tapa’ award and it’s clear why. This seems like an egg, but borrowing from The Cuban, it is ‘the best egg I’ve had. In. My. Life.’ Served with deep-fried onions and fresh bread rolls which you dip into this most divine egg. So, so much more than ‘just an egg’.
  • John Lennon’s Pacificism: Goat’s cheese with a tomato and aubergine compote and fresh greens.  A couple sat near us just before we left and were underwhelmed by the goat cheese course. I hope that they ate those words when it arrived. I love cheese of all sorts, which is perhaps my number one reason for not going full-on vegan. This dish blew me away completely; not because of the cheese, but because of everything else happening within the dish. There is this slight crunchiness to the dish that I couldn’t work out, but which delighted my taste buds further. The chef shared his secret with me; and I shall carry that secret to my grave. Suffice it to say the flavours work perfectly. Note that the picture looks like a mound of salad greens. Clever.

[At this point, our dishes diverged, whereby I had two non-menu item courses made ‘just for [me]’, and The Cuban had two fish courses. I must say, his looked incredible as well and judging by both the clean plates and his face, they rocked.

  • ‘Just a veggie burger’ mini-burger. If you know anything about my food preferences, you know I do not do onions. This burger had what I think were carmelised onions and I ate them all. I LOVED them. A little tiny mini-veggie burger entirely for me served with fresh crisps and a little green salad with hearts of palm. Yes, please. Oh, yes.
  • The Cuban had prawns wrapped in filo dough and fried with perhaps the best description of all time, aubergine and ‘black magic fuckery’ tomato  sauces. He was scraping his slate plate.
  • For my final course to this meal-I-never-wanted-to-end, I had a filo pastry base topped with Morrocan spiced vegetables and tgenerous slices of fresh cheese, which resembled an incredible combination of parmesan or manchego (perhaps an aged manchego?). Honestly, this was unreal.
  • The Cuban’s last course was salmon over potatoes, which sounds rather plan but was anything but. In TC’s words, ‘Wow. Just wow’.

As if this wasn’t enough, we still had dessert to conquer. A divine date and almond biscuit topped with a lime sorbet and covered in an avocado-mint sauce. (According to The Cuban, this dish beats my brownies, which, okay, stings but I admit defeat. Because chef is a bloody genius!)

This. Meal. Honestly. We were happily stuffed when we left, but not to the point of feeling sick. The Vintage 8 tasting menu is a steal, and provides so much seriously delicious food that we honestly can’t wait to return. And, when we return, I’m taking the proper camera. And, a healthy appetite. I intend to work my way through whatever chef puts in front of me.

Should you ever find yourself in Torremolinos, Spain, or anywhere near here, go to Vintage 8. You will not regret it.

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On Anthony Bourdain

by in Documentary films, Food, In memoriam, Kindness, life, Random musings, Writing and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Finding Anthony Bourdain was a complete accident. Flipping through channels in Moscow on a completely ordinary day, I stumbled across this weird dude on a military boat saying, ‘Not how we expected this show to end, huh?’.

Anthony Bourdain in Beirut, 2006 from Andrew MacGregor Marshall on Vimeo.

That dude was Tony and he was filming an episode of No Reservations in Beirut. The problem was all hell broke lose on his first day of filming and he, his crew and many others were trapped in a hotel until they could get out of the country safely. He, the star, seemed more concerned about his crew, the other hotel guests (particularly the kids) and the hotel staff, as well as all those beyond the hotel living in hell on earth. He cooked for his crew as stress relief, and mostly he showed such a rare degree of honest compassion for everyone else in that episode that he was just … some dude who happened to have this really cool gig, talking about food and eating it on camera. In a war zone.

I was hooked.

I watched him through the last episode of No Reservations. I mourned the closing of El Bulli with Tony.  I have watched almost all of Parts Unknown faithfully, although I am a bit behind.

I love his perspective on food, his commentaries on the cultures in which he finds himself and his interactions with the people he meets as he eats and pontificates across the globe. He makes the different seem not so bad. And, not quite so foreign.

When he traveled to Cuba in 2011, I was equally thrilled and horrified. My biggest fear was ‘which’ Cuba he would see; which Cuba would he show his legions of followers from the couch. But, before that show aired, he wrote the following:

It’s easy, I know, to over-romanticize the unspoiled. Especially when “unspoiled” means “poor”. But look. Look.

Whatever your politics, however you feel about Cuba–look at tonight’s show and admit, at least, that Havana is beautiful. It is the most beautiful city of Latin America or the Caribbean. Look at the Cuban people and admit that they are proud and big hearted and funny and kind–and strong as hell, having put up with every variety of bullshit over the years. On these things, I hope we can agree.

That episode made me weep for the country which has embraced me and which also breaks my heart just a little every time I think of her and her amazing people. He got it. And, better yet, he showed it to everyone else.

He showed so many parts of this crazy world to us all, and showed us the unpolished, unvarnished, unsanitised versions. Because that’s life. For all of us. Regardless of the perfect images we personally choose show to and share with the world.

‘Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.’
— Anthony Bourdain (No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach

This past year, he’s also been a rather vocal ally to women, supporting #metoo, understanding the inherent irony of a chef from an incredibly chauvinistic and misogynistic profession giving voice to acts of misogyny and sexism. But, you know, having that ultimate dude as an advocate for women calling out powerful men meant something.

All of it did. It does.

Now, in a world in which we won’t have his wit, his curiosity, his insatiable appetite for all of the food, his uncanny skill with words and their descriptive beauty and power … I’m simply heartbroken.

Thank you, Tony. You gave us too much. And, forgive me, but I really, really, really want to punch you right now.

If you feel at all at the end of tether, before you do anything, please call / reach out to me. Reach out to someone. Anyone.

In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. Take a moment and know that you are loved.