Passport & Plate - Morcilla with Pardon peppers
Spain | Friday, March 6, 2015 | 4 photos
Ingredients
1red pepper quartered, core and seeds removed.
1/2 tsp sweet smoked paprika
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
big pinch freshly ground black pepper
1 large onion sliced very finely
2-3 cloves of garlic sliced finely
300g Morcilla sliced into 2cm rings (any good blood pudding will do, I've done this with Stornoway black pudding and it's excellent!)
1 400g can of black eyed beans drained and rinsed (or chickpeas, if you prefer to keep it authentic)
about 15-20 Padron green peppers
juice of ½ a lemon
olive oil
salt to taste
How to prepare this recipe1- Set the grill to high and grill the red pepper slices, skin side up, until slightly blackened. Keep warm to one side.
2-Set a frying pan over a medium-high heat. Warm spices in the pan for a minute or two, careful not to burn them, then add a dash of oil and fry the onion for another couple of minutes, until softened.
3- add the garlic. Give it all a quick stir then using a wooden spoon, push all the onion mixture to one side of the pan to leave the bluk of the frying pan clear.
4- Fry the morcilla for 3 minutes, then flip and do the other side. Once cooked and crispy, remove from the pan onto a warm plate with some kitchen paper to absorb any excess oil.
5- Add the beans to the onions in the pan with the lemon juice and the grilled red peppers, give a good stir round then leave it well alone for a few minutes to let some of the beans crisp up..
6- Heat a second pan on high. With only the tiniest dash of oil, fry the Padron peppers until blackened all over and shrivelled. Scatter peppers with a few pinches of nice chunky sea salt, then add a bit more just in case.
Serve the morcilla on a bed of the black eyed beans with the Padron as a side dish. Best served in the sunshine, with a very crisp spanish lager.
The story behind this recipeI first tried Padron peppers last year, crammed around a stand up tapas bar in La Boqueria market in Barcelona, only because I was too polite to say no! My husband and I were crammed up at the bar beside another group of travellers. We had ordered a couple of tapa including deliciously greasy fried chorizo, morchilla in chickpeas and patatas bravas. One of the group of girls beside us, who it turned out to be from Singapore, asked me to share her food. I said that I was ‘ok, really!’ but she scraped a large quantity of fried green chillies onto my plate anyway. I hadn’t even considered ordering them, I like chilli well enough but not a whole plateful, that just seemed like madness! However they were now on my plate and I thought I’d better try them just to be polite. They were an absolute joy: salty, oily and sweet with a slightly citrusy tone and mild heat. Why would she share something so tasty? It turns out that Padron peppers are notorious, because only 1 in every 20 is hot: eating a plateful is a game of russian roulette with shrivelled, salt-encrusted bullets. My friend had bitten into a fiery one on her first go and decided that she couldn’t eat a whole plateful of chillies that hot, but not wanting to send back an untouched plate, she tried to palm them off on an unsuspecting stranger. I enjoyed them so much that I ordered them several times during the rest of that week and when I got home, I missed them so much I decided to try and recreate them. I had to order the peppers online and when they finally arrived, I had them, fried black in olive oil and salt, with almost everything for about a week. The morcilla with black eyed beans is a corruption of another tapas favourite from that lunch. It is traditionally served chickpeas, but once when making it at home, I realised too late that I didn’t have any, so I just used what was to hand. I was so pleased with the result that I decided to keep it that way as a wee personal twist on a delicious original.
