Do you really eat that? - Yes, I do! And it's delicious! – Part DEUX!

Hi everyone,

I would like to share with you what is not only a quintessential Portuguese dish but also a personal symbol of good times with friends.
I am talking about Arroz de Cabidela loosely translated: Chicken blood rice. That’s right! Rice with blood!!

I know that some of you may have stopped reading this post already after the last piece of information, but for those of you who are still with me – thanks for hanging on - let me tell you that in spite of the obvious shock factor,Arroz de Cabidela is really tasty.

I could easily bet that anyone who tries it without knowing it has blood in it would gladly keep eating – it can be visually appealing as you can see below.

Photo credit: Arroz de Cabidela by Rui Moura, used under an Attribution, Noncommercial and Share Alike license

Before I go into the recipe though, let me tell you why I say that this dish is for me representative of good times with friends. Arroz de Cabidela is known among many, particularly in the north of Portugal, as a late night meal – I mean really late! So late that it is actually early morning most of the times. 
The typical time to have it would be on the weekends after a long night of partying and that is one of the reasons why it became somewhat of a ritual among some of us. For you to better understand in what other ways this dish and everything about it became a ritual, I should explain that I come from the countryside of Portugal where there is does no more than two large cities which means that the majority of the people that live in the rest of the cities, have strong ties to the countryside because in fact most of the cities are very rural. So… many of our families raised animals, farm animals. Among them – chickens! And this is where it gets fun.
None of us would actually ask our parents for a couple of chickens to prepare the dish. For two main reasons: the first being that we never really planned ahead of time; the second is as I mentioned before, the late hours in which this would take place. How did we go about it then? Well, simply put – we would steal the chickens from our own families!!! Typically we would go to the house of the one person who suggested that we cooked in that occasion. It was accepted by everyone as a thing that youngsters did so we would never really get in trouble.

However this was only half of the mission! We still had to find a place to cook. Most of the times it was in the middle of the woods or in a corn field – this meant of course that we also had to make sure we had all the utensils and ingredients with us... so we had to go on another thievery mission at the risk of waking our families and getting caught.

By now, one would think that we would be already tired or sleepy… drunk we were for sure, most of the times! Happy drunks though! Nevertheless, there was still a lot of work to do: Kill the chickens; reserve the blood, plucking and butchering the chickens and begin the actual cooking!
Now imagine the scene: A bunch of young, starving, drunk and tired boys, some girls too, in the early hours of the day in the middle of the woods trying to get through with this process!!

I think you can see more clearly what I mean by it was so late that it became early morning when we got to eat it.

Would you want to take charge of this chore?!?!

Photo credit:  Chicken Plucking 2 by mrvklaw used under an Attribution, Noncommercial and No Derivative Works license

Here’s a video (in Portuguese – sorry but I could find one good one in English or with subtitles) where you can see the cooking of this delicacy.

Did you learn any Portuguese in this bit?

Cooking with blood is actually common in Portuguese cuisine. Here’s a short video on lamprey blood rice that displays the typical reaction of someone who is not accustomed or aware of it:

I admit that it does not look at all appetizing
but I love it!

Finally let me share a traditional recipe with you. Not that in our moments of late night craves we would follow any recipe, especially given our state. That’s the risk when you undergo on gastronomic adventures at dawn, but here’s the recipe:

- 1 chicken

- 0,5 dl / 1.7 fl. oz. of olive oil

 -3 tablespoons of vinegar

- 1 big onion

- 2 garlic cloves

- 100 gr / 3.5 oz. of bacon

- 2 bay leaves

- 1 red hot chili

- 1 bowl of rice

- Salt and pepper to taste

1- Keep the chicken's blood in a bowl with the 3 tbsp. of vinegar to prevent it from curdling – this should be done immediately after slaughtering the chicken.

2- Chop the onion finely and cook it with the garlic on olive oil until golden.

3- Add the chicken (cut in medium sized pieces), the giblets to the pan (exclude the liver) and the bacon (chopped in cubes) to the pan. Add the bay leaves and the hot chili pepper-

4- Season at taste (this was typically left to the most sober or less sleepy of the bunch due to its major importance); add hot water and cook until chicken is soft.

5- Remove and reserve the chicken; add the rice (long grain or Arborio) to the pan and make sure you have enough broth to cook it in (we say that the rice should be swimming in abundant liquid).

6- When the rice is almost done (5 to 8 minutes) add the chicken and then the blood and let in sit in low heat for 5 minutes.

7- Serve with Portuguese red wine, if you can still drink and enjoy!

I really hope you try it!!!!!

Cheers

Pedro

Do you really eat that? - Yes, I do! And it's delicious!

Hi everyone,

As I mentioned in a previous post, growing up Portugal I had the chance to eat several things that most people in America would not recognize and if they saw them, they would probably roll their eyes and even gag a bit! And understandably so, I should say, because some of these things are not appetizing to the eye… One such thing is the percebe, in English: Goose barnacles. That’s right! Barnacles - Those things that you see sticking to the side of boats that have spent a long time still in the water; or onto rocks by seashores, right above the waterline.

But nothing better than images to explain what I mean by not appetizing to the eye, so here are a few:

Photo credit: Navaja-Viva and Percebes by crystalmartel, used under an Attribution license

Photo credit: Percebes by chausinho, used under an Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike license

Photo credit: Goose barnacles by Pedro Moura Pinheiro, used under an Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike license

Although scary looking, I admit, these things are a treat!

Here’s the recipe for percebes (I have never cooked them differently or have seen them cooked differently, so if you go for it stick to this recipe) which is probably one of the simplest recipes ever:

Ingredients:

1 kg (2.2lbs) of percebes
3 litres of sea water
3 garlic cloves
6 bay leaves

1. The best percebes have a dark trunk and a reddish lip at the edge of the shell as shown in the 3rd photo above. If you choose to pick the goose barnacles yourself, which might be a dangerous task, try to do so during low tide. 
2. Rinse them well to get rid of any sand.
3. Boil the sea water and add the garlic and the bay leaves.
4. When it’s boiling, put the percebes in the pot. Let it come up to a boil again. Wait 1 minutes and remove them immediately.
5. You may wish to serve them cold (I prefer) in which case you should put them in an ice bath. Serve with some lime and tabasco on the side but whatever you do make sure you have a nice stupidly cold beer!!!
   
   

Eating these might be challenge as well, here are some tips on how to:

Hold the shell between your fingers; and pull down the outer skin of the trunk (not edible) with your other hand (almost like taking a sleeve off) but you must be careful not to smash; the exposed trunk loook and has a squid-like texture - yummy!; You can, and should, also eat the insides of the shell - I use my fingers alone but you may want to use a small pealing knife!

It is definitely worthwhile the work!!!!!

Enjoy!!!!!

Pedro

Flavors of the Old World

Olá!!! 

Cooking is a big part of my personality. It is something that I do on a daily basis but, I am happy to say, I do it a lot more often than not with enthusiasm. In fact, it is not rare for me to start planning or thinking about what to cook for dinner while actually having lunch. But moving along…

I can't really pinpoint what awoke in me this love for the kitchen but I always think of my father, who was a brilliant cook until the moment he lost his vision. I learned a lot from watching him cook and also tasting the kinds of things that kids typically don't even want to see, let alone eat! Like octopus for example! My father still tries to cook every now and then which is an amazing thing to watch - it is all controlled by the touch, smell and flavor. But going back to octopus... most of the people I know do not really eat it or like it which is strange because everyone seems to love calamari. Anyway, octopus is very tricky to cook but it is also very forgiving when it comes to the cooking times. 

In the link below you can watch Eric Ripert cooking Pulpo a la Gallega or Octopus Galician style.
I wanted to share this link for a few reasons: first, I love octopus! (I actually have a massive tattoo of an octopus weaving down my right arm; second, I think Ripert is awesome; third, being Portuguese from a part of Portugal called Minho that borders Galicia, Spain, I am very familiar with this dish. Minhotos and Galegos have the same historical background and in fact their dialect, O Galego is very closely related to Portuguese even more so than to Spanish.

Enjoy the video:

I loved this recipe. It goes wonderfully well with some white wine from the region like Galician Albariño or the Portuguese Vinho Verde both of which should be served stupidly cold!

Far from me to argue with Eric Ripert about the cooking time of the octopus but I have cooked octopus several times and in different ways and his 45 minutes mark is not really a standardized expectation. The cooking times depend on several aspects of the octopus such as: its size, origin and whether or not it was tenderized (it was nice to hear Ripert talk about that – I typically beat the octopus and very rarely massage it (time consuming). As I mentioned before, the octopus although tricky to cook it is always forgiving, meaning that if you cook it a little it becomes soft, a bit more and it becomes tough, cook even more and it becomes soft again. Of course, I don’t want to be constantly checking it for doneness so I have two tricks that I always use:

1 – I throw one whole onion in with the octopus which will be my guide for doneness – basically when the onion is done, starting to get somewhat mellow, the octopus is done (With the an onion I don't need to cut into the octopus).

2 – Combined with the onion and to speed up the cooking time I also throw a cork from a wine bottle – I have no idea why it works I just know it does.

If you like octopus and haven’t had tried this recipe, I hope you give it a shot. If you never tried octopus, be adventurous and imagine you are somewhere in Portugal or Spain by the Atlantic. In doing so you might add an extra flavor to it!
Enjoy!!!!

Pedro