Sunday Dinners: Roasted Vegetable Paella
May 2nd, 2009
The Sunday Dinners project is a collaboration between Andrew Schloss and Cookthink.
Food snobs have been known to come to blows over whether a bouillabaisse deserves the label without rascasse, the bony fish of the Mediterranean that’s more skeleton than meat. There are heated debates slugging out the origins of pasta, and brawls determining whether an authentic cassoulet is the one from Castelnaudary, Carcassone or Toulouse.
But cooking is at heart a folk art, and we do it a disservice whenever we take its products too seriously. For the quality of a dish does not lie in the purity of its recipe or the authenticity of its ingredients, but in the way that it fits the taste, lifestyle and dining habits of those who choose to cook it and eat it.
I therefore advocate fiddling with classic recipes, or any recipes for that matter, that seem overly complex, expensive or time-consuming — which leads me to the subject of this week’s Sunday dinner.
Paella is the signature dish of the coastal villages of Spain, and like all folk foods there are countless original recipes, some of which have chicken, some sausage and some ham, but they all agree on a quartet of basic elements: rice, saffron, shellfish and sofrito.
A mixture of onion, bell pepper and tomato, sofrito is to Spanish cooking what the French mirepoix of carrot, onion and celery is to savory North American food. Such vegetable combos form a triumvirate of flavor for their cuisine, creating a palate, so ingrained, that when they are missing, natives have a problem knowing exactly what’s wrong. They only know there’s a hole where the flavor used to be.
The paella that follows has all but one of the basic elements. It replaces shellfish with grilled vegetables. This variation not only makes the dish less expensive and easier to shop for in areas where fresh shellfish is hard to find, but it brings its own smoky redolence to the classic.
The paella is served with braised artichoke hearts and a quick version of olive bread, made like garlic bread, with a sliced baguette and tapenade — a paste of ripe olives and olive oil.
Recipe: Roasted Vegetable Paella (Sunday Dinners)
Recipe: Warm Tapenade Bread (Sunday Dinners)
Recipe: Artichokes Braised In White Wine (Sunday Dinners)
