Spanish flavours | All Things Sicilian and more

Usually when I buy vongole I have them with spaghetti (garlic and parsley and white wine), but now and again I like to play around with different flavours and because I had some Chorizo in the fridge, the vongole ended up being more Spanish than Italian.

You can see the ingredients that went into this dish. Paprika is called pimenton in Spain. It has a smoky taste, but if you do not have it use common paprika instead.

Because the vongole release their salty juices when cooked, I generally do not add salt. A recipe very similar to this one but without the Chorizo is in my second book, Small Fishy Bites.

1k cockles
400-500g cooked Cannellini beans
3 Chorizo sausage (skins removed and sliced)
2-3 tsps smoked pimenton (mixture of sweet and
hot to taste)
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 glass white wine (or Manzanilla or Fino sherry)
4 spring onions sliced
1-2 cloves garlic chopped finely
2 tbsp of tomato paste or 1 can (400grams)
of peeled tomatoes
2-3 tbsp finely chopped parsley
2-3 springs of thyme

Lightly fry the sliced Chorizo in very little oil until it starts to brown. Remove it and set aside and use the same saucepan to proceed with the rest of the ingredients.
Add more oil to the pan and sauté the onions on low heat till they soften; add the garlic and pimenton, stir gently for 1 minute.
Add tomatoes, thyme and wine or sherry, cover and simmer until the sauce has thickened.
Add cockles and parsley.
Cover and cook until they have opened, shaking the saucepan occasionally to distribute the heat evenly.

Serve with plenty of bread.

Cooking with Spanish flavours sent me looking at some of the photos from my last trip to Spain. Fond memories of good old Barcelona and a butcher in Madrid!

Writing this recipe has brought back many memories of Spain..

I enjoyed it very much.

One of my favourite ways to cook rabbit or hare is with chocolate; chicken can also be cooked in the same way but is less common. If it is chicken it will cook in a relatively short time, a rabbit will take longer and a hare will take much longer – I cooked hare and it took close to three hours to cook.

There are several Spanish and South American recipes where chocolate is used in savoury dishes so the chocolate does not need to be considered unfeasible – Spaniards ruled Sicily over long periods.

Those of you who have been to eastern Sicily may have noticed the Baroque architecture that is especially prevalent in this part of Sicily and you may have visited Modica, the centre for Sicilian chocolate; this is where the recipe is said to have its roots.

In this Sicilian recipe the rabbit (or hare) is cooked in the same way as alla stemperata (in all stemperata dishes the ingredients include celery, carrots, onions, vinegar, sugar, raisins or sultanas, pine nuts, green olives and capers) but fennel seeds and cloves replace the last two ingredients and finally dark chocolate is used to enrich and thicken the sauce. The flavours in the stemperata have been partly accredited to the Arabs and are characteristic of much of Sicilian cuisine.

Hare, like all game benefits from marinading in wine before cooking. I do this when I am cooking rabbit as well, but there is no need to marinate chicken. I always save some of the leftover cooked hare and sauce for a pasta dish – use ribbon pasta, e.g. tagliatelle or pappardelle.

Whenever I buy hare I remember butcher shops in Italy where each beast is often left with a part of its body to make it recognizable – the head or the foreleg complete with fur, hoof, claw or paw.

INGREDIENTS

hare, rabbit or chicken 1.5- 2 k

dark chocolate, 200 g

onion, 1-2 sliced

red or white dry wine, 1 cup

wine vinegar, ½ cup

cloves, 6-8

celery, 4 stalks, sliced finely

carrots, 3 sliced finely

bay leaves, 4-6

fennel seeds,1 large tablespoon

extra virgin olive oil, ¾ cup

chilli flakes and salt to taste

pine nuts,1 cup

raisins or sultanas, ½ cup (naturally sun dried)

sugar, 1 tablespoon

PROCESSES:
Clean the hare or rabbit or chicken and cut it into manageable sections at the joints.

Marinate it in the wine and half of the quantity of the oil and bay leaves for at least 3 hours and turn it occasionally (if cooking chicken you could marinade it for 1 hour if you wish).

Remove the pieces of meat and drain well; keep the marinade for cooking.
Add the rest of extra virgin olive oil in a large frying pan and sauté the pieces until golden. Remove them and set aside.

Add the onions, carrots and celery to the same pan and sauté until soft but not coloured.

Reduce the heat, and add the wine marinade, bay leaves, fennel seeds and cloves, the seasoning and vinegar. Cover with a lid and simmer it gently until it is soft – the time will vary as it depends on the meat. For example farmed rabbit will cook in a little time ( 40-60 minutes, the same as chicken, whereas a wild rabbit could take 2-3 hours).You may need to add some water periodically as it cooks so that it does not dry out (this has always been my experience).

Add the sultanas or raisins, pine nuts and chocolate about 30 minutes before it is cooked Remove the lid and evaporate the juices if necessary.

More rabbit recipes:

Tag: Spanish flavours

VONGOLE (COCKLES PIPIS OR CLAMS) WITH SPANISH FLAVOURS

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HARE or RABBIT COOKED IN CHOCOLATE. Lepre o Coniglio al Cioccolato (‘Nciculattatu is the Sicilian term used)

CONIGLIO A PARTUISA (Braised rabbit as cooked in Ragusa)

PAPPARDELLE

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