Day 77: Easy paella

Dear Husband is a bit of a prankster to his nearest and dearest so when an unknown man phoned me one Saturday while I was en route to do the weekly food shop, I was convinced that it was Dear Husband or someone that Dear Husband had put up to it. You see, one of Dear Husband’s trademark moves is to conduct his pranks by phone. There are too many stories of people he has caught out to remember and, although it has been a good few years since he caught me out, I was convinced that ‘Saucepan Man’ was a prank as it was too much of a coincidence that (a) I was doing the Challenge; (b) I was en route to the supermarket; and (c) who nowadays goes door-to-door selling saucepans???! Plus, he was phoning from our landline so I thought Dear Husband was slipping up and had forgotten to withhold the Caller ID. Seriously, if Dear Husband was in actual fact at home and a salesman did call, then wouldn’t you think that Dear Husband would have come on the phone and said “Hey Lynda, there’s a man here selling saucepans…” etc. etc. etc.?! But no, that's not what happened!

And don’t worry, I have Bluetooth in my car so I wasn’t driving whilst using a hand-held but, there I was, talking to ‘saucepan man’ who had said that he called to one of my sister’s houses ‘up at the top of the road’ and she told him to come down to my house as I would buy them. Now, I always say that if I was an eskimo, you could probably sell snow to me but hey, I just think I feel sorry for people going round houses selling things, trying to make a living through people who don’t want to see them so it's a tough gig. Anyway, Saucepan Man said that he had this ‘amazing offer’ of these chef-quality saucepans and (of course) he only had ‘two sets left’. He ran through what he had and I was ‘hmmm-ing’ and ‘haaa-ing’ and saying how great the offer was – you know, playing along with the prank. However, after about 10 minutes of Saucepan Man going into great detail about these saucepans, I slowly started to twig that Saucepan Man was really and truly a saucepan salesman. Doh! I had to do a serious bit of back-pedalling so eventually when Saucepan Man said to me “Here, I’ll put you on to your husband now”, I started to cringe at my flippant but sometimes over-enthusiastic attitude to him. So, you know by now of course what happened, we bought the saucepans - €400 reduced to €125 for 8 pans, I think. I thought that even if they were completely useless, so what – they would do for a while anyway and if for nothing else but the sheer embarrassment caused to myself and probably Saucepan Man. As I said, you could sell me snow if I was an eskimo…

So what has this story got to do with tonight’s recipe? Well, the recipe for Easy paella said to use a 25cm diameter paella pan or heavy-based frying pan with a lid so what do you think was in the saucepan set? Yes, a 25cm diameter heavy based frying pan with a lid! You see - there was a point to me telling you the story.

Every Friday evening, prior to doing my weekly food shop the next day, I take about 20 minutes to flick through my cookbook. Armed with my pink post-its which are labelled Saturday-Friday, I pick the recipes I intend to make each day so that I can put the ingredients on my shopping list for the next day. I had intended to make the paella dish on Saturday for lunch; however, one of my followers on Twitter asked me had I made the paella yet and I hadn’t so I skipped the recipe forward to tonight. Having returned from a week away on Tuesday, I had to make a trip to the supermarket on Wednesday as we would have surely starved had I waited until the usual shopping day. So, I had all the ingredients I needed and off I set to prepare my latest dish…

There were quite a few ingredients so I made sure on Wednesday that everything I needed was in stock as it drives me crazy when I am mid-way through a recipe only to discover that I’m missing an ingredient. The first thing I had to do was sauté diced onion and chopped garlic with salt and pepper in olive oil for 8 minutes (in my nice new frying pan!). I then stirred in the paella rice (which is now stocked in M&S) and let it pop for 1 minute before adding 200ml of white wine and a pinch of saffron. Once it came up to the boil, I reduced the heat and let it simmer until most of the wine evaporated. The recipe said to slice a red pepper but mine was looking a bit dodgy so it ended up in the bin and I used a nice firm orange pepper instead. I added the pepper into the pan along with the diced pork and let it fry until the raw pink colour on all the bits of pork had disappeared. I poured in a jug of chicken stock, brought it up to the boil and let it simmer for 15 minutes whilst giving it an occasional stir throughout. I then added in the fresh prawns and garden peas, put the lid on and let it all simmer for 3 minutes. Finally, I added the juice of half a lemon and served.

The verdict…

An incredible 9 marks out of 10 was Dear Husband’s verdict! I’m not sure if the high marks were because the dish tasted that good or if it was because he was still recovering from a lack of my cooking over the past week or so. I really didn’t think he would have scored it as highly as he did even though he loves prawns and loves pork in sausages but, as for the larger diced pork, it was one of the few times that I actually cooked with it so I had little feedback to go on prior to this dish. So there you go, a really good dish apparently and I’m glad it scored high to get me back into the Challenge. I’m not doing too bad on that front with my cooking getting a 10 last night and a 9 tonight. But, as the saying goes, what goes up, must come down and somehow, I don’t think my culinary efforts will be able to maintain those high scores throughout the remainder of this Challenge…