Spanish at home

I got inspired last Friday... I wanted to go out to a nice dinner with the boyfriend, and to my dismay, it's impossible to get a reservation on a friday night in the city the day of. So after attempting to make a reservation at a couple places, OpenTable had nothing until Monday in some cases (what?), I opted to make dinner at home. I was inspired mainly by a couple of Spanish places, Spanish food is so fresh, and full of flavor, but why does it cost, oh $22, to eat paella? I mean, it's main ingredient is rice, which even if you are buying good quality rice, is still a cheap filler. Now I understand that some ingredients like rabbit, and lobster are hard to come by and thus the price tag should be a bit hefty, but for chicken and chorizo? so I took on this dinner challenge and decided to head to the store and gear up to make some yummy spanish food at home.

First course I bought a fun variety of Spanish cheeses with a few figs, opened a can of sardines in tomato sauce, served it with some bread. really easy and delicious. To go with that I got some Linguisa sausage (Portuguese, but close enough) and grilled that with some onions and peppers to put on some bread tapas style.

Then for the main. Paella. Chorizo and shrimp. to be honest i improvised a bit, so i don't really have a legit recipe, but basically I sauteed the chorizo (out of the case) rendered the fat, cooked the sofrito in that fat until the veggies were soft, added 1 cup rice right into the dry pan to toast it, added fresh tomatoes, and then 2 cups of chicken stock that I infused with saffron and shrimp shells from the shrimp I de-shelled. easy! covered that and cooked it like rice, low and slow. when the rice was pretty much done I pushed the shrimp down in, threw some frozen peas on top and steamed that until the shrimp were pink. Anyway, I bought some good Spanish wine, and voila, an instant meal... for probably half the price! so the next time you think you might want to go out to eat, think twice, and get inspired to cook at home, you might just save a buck or two!