Day: 6 February 2022

This is a recipe that a very good friend recommend me but using smoky tofu instead of bacon. So I decided to give it a go:

Ingredients:

• 1kg of fresh spinach
• 1 onion
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 250g of smoky firm tofu
• 150g of cheese (of your taste)
• 1 cup of rice (paella or risotto style)
• 1 can of tomate sauce
• 200ml of cream
• 1 cup of chicken/veggy stock.
• 1 cup of plain flour
• 3-4 eggs

Process:

• In big sauce pan, add boiling water and cook all spinach. They will reduce a lot. Once they are soft, drain the spinach and chopped them very thinly.
• In another sauce pan, add some olive oil and fry for a bit the chopped garlic cloves. Then add the rice. Fry everything for a bit, then add two cups of boiling water to the rice and let it cook at low-medium heat. Try to get it as much dry as possible to hep making the balls later.
• In a frying pan, add a bit of oil, at medium-heat. Add chopped onions, and fry until golden, then add chopped tofu. Fry everything, try to get a golden color from the tofu.
• In another frying pan, add the tomate sauce, stock and cream. Mix well, and let it cook at low-medium heat.
• In a big bowl, put the chopped spinach, rice, tofu and cheese. Mix everything very well. Make you a big favour, let it cool down! Put it in the fridge, outside, whatever.
• In one plate/bowl add the flour and in another the whisked eggs.
• From the spinach mix, start making some balls, then pass them through the flour, cover properly, remove any excess and the pass through the eggs. Prepare all balls before frying. If you let the mix cool down, it shouldnt be much effort, and then frying would be easier.
• In the small frying pan, some a bit of oil and heat up. You dont need to deep fry.
• Then in the small frying pan, put 3-4 balls and fry them until golden in all sides. Them add to the tomate sauce mix.
• I filled the tomate sauce pan with spinach balls, so I used the left over and did some other balls and “omellete”.
• Keep the spinach balls in the tomate sauce until it thickens up a bit.
• Then you can remove from the heat, and ready to eat!

The recipe is very tasty. I didnt manage to get a good ball form, I think my rice was a bit too wet? In the video the balls look super rounded. But anyway, I had a good lunch the whole week!

It was normal to have a small snack or tapa in most bars in Spain, from a small plate of crisps, salty peanuts or fried almonds to some seafood. Even buying a 1kg sack of almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts wasnt that expensive.

Now, when I go to Portugal or Spain, I try to buy some small bag of fried almonds. But now I wanted to do it myself because I had the gut feeling that it couldnt be that difficult. I found this video and I used it as reference.

Ingredients:

• 200gr almonds (with skin)

• pinch of salt

• olive oil for frying

Process:

• Put the almonds in a sauce pan with boiling water. Boil for 5 minutes.
• Remove the almonds from the water, let it cool down for 1 minute and then remove the skin. It should be quite easy. Recommended to push with your fingers from the side of the almond, not the tips.
• Dry them in kitchen paper.
• Put a frying pan at medium heat with the oil. Once the oil is hot, add the almonds and kit stirring.
• Once the almonds get golden, remove the pan from the heat and take the almonds for the oil, trying to drain as much oil as you can. Then put again in kitchen paper to soak up more oil.
• While warm, add salt to the taste of the almonds.
• Once they are cool down you can store them in a glass jar.

Really tasty!