Paella and Cesar

Los Angeles, California



It is that time again. While the weather isn't really all that warm here in So Cal; while Sandra tells me that it snowed over the weekend up at Lake Tahoe; we are, nevertheless, teetering on the precipice of summer. It is the Tuesday before Memorial Weekend, and that, my friends, is it. The heralding of Summer. Da da da da! With Memorial Day looming (a day when I celebrate fallen heroes of America by drinking ouzo and inhaling loucoumathes, my favorite of fried treats . . . but that's another post), and Fourth of July just around the corner, it is time to turn our attention to national dishes. And that brings me to paella, and Cesar.

Now, just for background, I should tell you that for the past three summers I have spent a week in South Lake Tahoe attending an immersion Spanish class. Yes, that's right, South Lake Tahoe. That beautiful, breathtaking place where young adults go to live so that they can ski all day and smoke pot all night. Or, so my northern Californian friends tell me, as one-by-one their offspring graduate from college and decide to take a year or two at high altitude. But I digress. Back at the Institute, where I study Spanish, one of the highlights of the week is to sit outside under the fragrant pines and watch one of the most popular teachers there, Cesar Garcia, prepare paella. Now, frankly, I would sit anywhere and watch Cesar prepare anything, even Jell-O, for hours on end. But that, too, is another post (requiring apologies to his very lovely wife, but then again, she knows we all feel this way).

Last summer when my friend, Bonnie, joined me at the Institute, we decided that after we returned home, we would get together to dish about Cesar and make paella. We're both pretty good cooks, so this shouldn't have been a problem. Time was the problem. So here we are, almost a year later, and we have plans to make paella this coming Friday to kick off Memorial Weekend and summer.

Truth be told, Paella was really popular when I was a kid. It went along with fondue and those avocado green and harvest gold appliances. So, I've been making it for a long time. I even acquired a paella pan way back before I had my first apartment. It used to be a specialty of mine, and I did make it a few times early on when I was wooing Billy. However, I haven't made it in a long, long time. So now, squeeking in, just before the heat of summer is upon us, Bonnie and I will make paella.

Here is my recipe, along with the method that I copied down while watching Cesar make it last summer. Le sigh . . .

Paella


olive oil
1 garlic clove, cut in half
6 chicken thighs
1 small onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
2 tomatoes, skinned & chopped
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
14 ounces. chicken stock
1/2 cup white wine
1/8 teaspoon saffron
1 cup white rice (La Bomba from Spain is perfecto)
1 Spanish chorizo, cut in small dice
6 large jumbo prawns
1 lb. medium shrimp
6-12 mussels
12 clams
1/2 cup frozen peas
1 8 ounce package frozen artichoke hearts
1/4 cup garbanzo beans


Place enough olive oil to lightly cover bottom of paella pan. Place half a garlic clove in oil; heat over medium-high heat. Once oil is hot, remove garlic and add chicken. Brown all over, turning often. Remove.


Mince other half of garlic clove and add to oil along with onion, pepper, and tomatoes. Cook over medium heat until it has softened and melded. Do not brown. Add paprika, saffron, chicken broth and wine. Bring to a boil. Add rice. Cook without stirring. "Disturb" the edges of the dish in order to let rice settle to the bottom.


Meanwhile, cook shrimp in clam broth until opaque. Remove from broth; add clams & mussels, cook until they have opened. Discard any that have not opened. In last ten minutes of cooking, arrange seafood, chorizo, peas, artichoke hearts and garbanzos over top of paella.


Continue cooking, twenty minutes or until liquid has been absorbed. Take off heat and cover with foil, then a dishcloth or tablecloth. Take to table. After ten to twelve minutes, remove cover. Salud.



The first year that I went to Cesar's paella demonstration I sat across from a woman who had made his paella for Christmas, the previous year. She told me that whenever they travel to other countries, they build their holiday celebration around a dish from that region. Which I thought was a fantastic idea. They had been to Spain that year. Before traveling to Spain, she had attended the Institute, and had gone to Cesar's paella class. So, at Christmas, she prepared her paella using Cesar's recipe. By the way, Cesar told us twice how to make the paella. Once in English, and then in Spanish. "Breakout" classes like this help to reinforce the language that we are learning in our grammar classes for several hours each day. They help attune your ear to the language, and enhance your comprehension, while giving you a break from the harder grammar classes. Pretty cool, isn't that?

While the recipe above is really mine, Cesar's recipe says to serve the paella with bread and vino. You should do what Cesar says. Yo tambien. Y gracias para leyendo mi blog.

Salsa

Los Angeles, California

Way back in the very beginning of time, I mentioned that I had come up with a brilliant idea that everyone should have three things in their life which they are passionate about. Remember? Right away, I wrote about one of my passions, which is writing. And quite soon after, I revealed that behind door number two was: cooking. And now, friends and neighbors, it is time to reveal the final trump card in my life. My final lifeline which, along with its two sisters, keeps my soul nourished. And that is salsa.

Now, you might be thinking that salsa is that thing that you can make by chopping up tomatoes, for a start. More cooking, you're thinking, and what's new and different about that? But no. Salsa is dance. And I could leave it at that, because for me . . . salsa is dance, full stop. Of course, there is a lot of dance out there. A friend of mine has a modern dance company. And, I once saw Baryshnikov dance with the American Ballet Theatre. And, stretching back into my past, there has almost always been dance in my life. Everything except tap: ballet; jazz; folk; belly (yes, belly); and finally, salsa.

I have a friend, Kim, who is a really, really good salsa dancer. Well, she's just a fine dancer, period. She was a Thriller creature -- you know, in the Michael Jackson video, but that's another post. Or not. Anyway, Kim, taught me the basic, non-partnered salsa steps some years back. And I took classes with her that were based on salsa -- salsa aerobics, and a salsa/jazz dance class, for example. But it took me about a decade to take the next step - to learn to dance with partners.

Then, in the summer of 2005, we were visiting friends in Sonoma County, California. They took a group of us out to a Greek restaurant. We ended up dancing, in a line, Greek-style (you know . . . after a shot or two of ouzo). I felt so joyful, so full of joy, that I came away from that night thinking that life was too short to miss out on dancing. I realized, once again, that I had to have dance in my life. I needed, I lusted after, a steady diet of dance starting right then. But what kind of dancing would I do? I didn't want to take formal classes -- I mostly just wanted to go somewhere and dance, like we had at the Greek restaurant. But back home, Greek dancing was out -- it was just too hard to find it on a regular basis in LA. But salsa . . . salsa was out there.

My pilates instructor at the time, Lisa, had begun salsa dancing and told me about a club that was in my neighborhood. It was called Rio. And it was there that I took my first class in partner-led salsa dance, taught by an instructor named Laura Canellias. My friend, Cindy, came with me. I was hooked after my first class. Cin said she was too, but in retrospect she was not so much. She made plans to go with me again, and canceled. Plans made again, and once more canceled. I finally realized that if I really wanted to learn salsa, I would have to go it alone. So I did.

Learning salsa was challenging. My feet could already move well, and I had a frame that was adequate. But the experience in class of partnering -- literally being held in the arms, albeit not closely, of strangers of that other gender -- well, that ran the gamut of emotions from shyly uneasy to feeling the downright nervous ickiness that I felt as a fifth grader at cotillion dance class. And, just like in that experience, once again I was taller than a lot of the guys.

While trying to adequately acquire this skill of partner-led salsa dance, there were some disasterous moments. When I told one man, who had asked me to dance, that I was a beginner, he turned on his heel and walked away! And there was that shocking dance with Walter (who later turned out to be a favorite -- a true blast as a partner), when he bent my back across his knees and played my torso like congas . . . I'm not making this up. But, even in those first few months, I could have a dance experience that went, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, all glimmering. Those precious seconds when you feel like you're flying with none of the attendant dangers of sky-diving or bungee cord-jumping. Moments when the movement, the music, and the magic came together in divine symbiosis.

I've now been dancing for almost five years, and I could probably go to any club in the greater Los Angeles area, and know someone from the LA salsa community. We are a tight-knit and supportive group, and we can literally dance the night away. I suspect that for many of us, life and love may come and go, but salsa goes on. And our community is part of the beauty of that. Right now I am learning salsa rueda which is a Cuban-style street dance, done in a circle or wheel (rueda). It is 'called' like square dance, and you change partners as you move around the circle. It is fun. One of the great things about salsa is that there are various dances with origins in distinctly different places in Latin-America. As you learn more, you can acquire different layers of nuance which, when interwoven, will make you into a distinctively-styled dancer. In the dance, everyone is unique. Like snowflakes, or butterfly wings.

But the best part of it is that I have learned to dance in the face of . . . whatever. Billy doesn't dance much (our agreement is that he knows enough to dance once with me if salsa is played at a wedding or what have you). But he understands that dancing brings me bliss, and a centering comfort that is necessary to my well-being. He supports me, and I am so grateful to him for this. For, in the last analysis, after the bliss of dancing, I come home to Billy, who holds a space in my heart greater than any other interest I may ever have. But I also think that he appreciates me for who I am, and a large part of that is that I am now a salsera. And that doesn't mean that I make that stuff with the chopped tomatoes. Though, truth be told, I can do that as well. Just not in the same shoes. Thanks for reading my blog.