Bocadillo de Tortilla de Patatas con Hígado

 

Spanish Potato Omelet Sandwich (with liver)

I finally figured out a way to eat and enjoy liver!  I hid it.  In an omelet.  In a sandwich.  So I can’t taste it.  😀

Here is the history behind how I came to make the bocadillo de tortilla de patatas con hígado, or a Spanish potato and liver omelet sandwich.  In full disclosure, I have never been to Spain, and my only experience with Spanish food has been in restaurants and in a friend’s home, so technically, this is Spanish-inspired food.

Sometime around 2003-2004, someone recommended Zarzuela, a tapas restaurant in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, to my mom and me.  I had never had tapas (or Spanish food) before, and was intrigued.  My mom is always up for good food, so we went to Zarzuela and waited outside for what seemed like an eternity for a table.  This is where I first had patatas bravas and tortilla española, but more importantly, it’s where I fell in love with olive oil.  You read that right.  I never appreciated olive oil until I had the olive oil at Zarzuela (probably because I was buying fake olive oils from Safeway).  I never bothered to ask what olive oil they used, but I used to dip basketfuls of their soft white bread into the olive oil, which they let you pour freely from the glass bottles on each table.  It was very mild and buttery.  A few years ago, I went back to Zarzuela after not having eaten there in a long time, and although the food is not as good as I remembered, I still liked the olive oil.

Back to the tortilla española.  It is essentially a thick omelet cooked into the shape of a round cake, filled with potatoes and onions.  It’s served cold or at room temperature, and it is one of the best human inventions.  I can eat it plain, at room temperature or slightly chilled.  Fast forward about 10 years from that first tortilla tasting.  My friends hosted a paella night at their apartment.  In a conversation about the dinner, before the actual dinner, my friend Jaimi told me that in Spain they make sandwiches with the tortilla and that it’s her husband’s favorite food.  I thought that was brilliant, except that I wasn’t eating bread at the time (I was eating Paleo), so I couldn’t try it myself.

Fast forward another 2 years to last week.  I’m watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on Netflix.  It’s the Tangier, Morocco, episode.  Tony’s at a well-known café getting high with some locals, and next door to the café is a tiny closet-sized shop (is that the right word for a nook on the side of a building with a window?) from which an older man is frying and selling Spanish-style potato omelets.  Tony narrates the instructions for making the omelet and I am mesmerized.  There it is!  One of my favorite foods being made on television.  Tony and his guides sit down on the steps and eat their omelets slathered in mayonnaise and ketchup.  My mouth is watering at this point.  And I remember Jaimi’s words, “in Spain they make sandwiches with the tortillas.”  Then I remember I have some leftover boiled lamb’s liver I wanted to try to eat.  I can hide it in the omelet! I also have an open jar of Mark Sisson’s Primal Mayo in the fridge.  And some salsa brava from the last time I made Spanish-inspired food.  And most importantly, some leftover baked potatoes, half an onion, lots of nice tomatoes from the farmers’ market, and a loaf of Ponsford’s Place’s spicy olive bread.  I’m in business!

That was it!  A nudge and video recipe from Tony Bourdain, a flashback to Jaimi’s comment about her husband’s favorite food, and a serendipitous supply of all the ingredients I needed, put this beautiful, and extremely delicious and comforting, sandwich in front of me.  Now that you know the story behind this sandwich, I won’t keep you waiting any longer.  Here is bocadillo de tortilla de patatas con hígado.  This is not really a recipe, since it relies on leftovers, but it’s a way to think about using leftovers.

Bocadillo de Tortilla de Patatas con Hígado

makes 2 sandwiches

Equipment: 8″ well-seasoned cast iron skillet, or nonstick pan

Ingredients:

1/4 medium onion, chopped
3 pastured eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt, divided
1/3 cup finely diced boiled lamb’s liver (leftover from the prior week, when I tried really hard to eat liver)
1 small baked or boiled, and chilled, potato (I happened to have small russet potatoes I baked in advance to have around for food emergencies.  You should always have baked or boiled potatoes around for food emergencies.)
4 tablespoons Primal Mayo (I like lots of mayo on my sandwiches.  I like it to squeeze out the sides.)
salsa brava or harissa, as much as you like
4 thin, whole slices of whole grain sourdough bread, the biggest slices you can find from a round loaf
tomato slices, with salt

Tortilla Fillings

Method:

In the cast-iron skillet, fry the onion gently in a generous amount of olive oil, say 2 tablespoons, until soft, but not brown.  While the onions are cooking, gently beat the eggs and 1/4 tsp salt with a fork.  Use your hands to break up the potato into 1.5″ chunks.  Sprinkle the remaining 1/4 tsp salt onto the potatoes and then stir the potatoes and chopped liver into the beaten egg.  Strain the onion out of the skillet and into the egg mixture and gently stir again.

Make sure there’s about 1 tablespoon of olive oil in the skillet.  Pour the egg mixture into the skillet and let it cook on medium-low heat until the omelet is 3/4 cooked.  Then carefully flip the omelet and cook for another minute.  Flip the omelet out onto a cutting board.

While the omelet is resting, toast your bread and slather the mayonnaise on all the slices (making sure you line up the toasts so the mayo will end up on the inside of the sandwich!).  Then add dollops of salsa brava or harissa, to taste.  Cut the omelet in half for the two sandwiches.  Top with tomato slices.

The tomato changed color! Or that is some Instagram filter. No, I just made this sandwich two days in a row because I love it so much. And I don’t care for continuity in scenes. This is not Hollywood.

Sandwich the omelet and tomato slices.  Hold the top of the bread firmly down while you use a serrated knife to cut the sandwich in half.  Enjoy!  (Don’t forget to use extra napkins.)

Edible Education 101: Michael Pollan and a Brief History of the Modern Food System

Last night, I attended the first lecture in Edible Education 101, The Rise and Future of the Food Movement, at UC Berkeley.  The semester-long course is a series of lectures given by an all-star team of teachers, including Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman (whose NYT column I used to read religiously), Alice Waters, and Marion Nestle.

Michael Pollan briefly reviewed how our modern food system came to be.  More details can be found in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I’ll share some interesting facts.  Modern food production became the way it is because of World War II.  Before World War II, agriculture was a closed-loop system.  The sun made plants grow, animals ate the plants, animals defecated, and their waste became fertilizer for the plants to regrow, with energy from the sun.  Modern agriculture is no longer a closed-loop system.  It involves humans adding fertilizers to the land in order to get crops, and using pesticides on the crops to kill pests so we can harvest the crops.  How does this relate to the war?  After the war, the US had a lot of chemicals leftover from the production of neurotoxins and bombs.  The neurotoxins, in lower doses, became pesticides.  The explosive chemicals used for bombs turned out to be an effective fertilizer.  So, we moved away from using solar energy to using chemicals to grow our food.  The globalization of food is due to cheap oil.  Pollan tells us that a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese requires 26 ounces of oil to produce.  With our modern food system, it costs us 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of “food”.  That means two Big Macs use more oil than some people’s daily commute to work.

Pollan’s lecture contained a lot of other unappetizing facts, but I will spare you.  Though most of the information he shared was upsetting, there is light.  Going forward, for a sustainable food system, Pollan says we are going to have to eat less meat and we are going to have to get people used to paying more for meat.  Our “inexpensive” meat is actually not cheap.  It is subsidized up front with corn and soy subsidies.  In a creepy, futuristic way, it turns out most of the crops grown in the US are not even edible.  The corn and soy being grown are not sweet corn and edamame.  Rather, the crops are industrial raw materials that have to be processed so their components can be used to make “food”.  If we want a sustainable food system, we are also going to have to return to using solar energy to produce food through photosynthesis.  There are farmers doing this successfully; there just are not enough of them.

Some of the students asked questions about vegetarianism/veganism and pescatarianism as solutions.  Pollan doesn’t believe that pushing a vegetarian agenda is ideal or feasible.  First, there are many climates where humans have to rely on meat, because edible plants just cannot grow.  However, the animals that live in those climates are able to digest the shrubs that do grow, and the humans can eat those animals.  Second, in every culture, as soon as people increase their wealth, the first thing they do is buy meat to eat.  We cannot ignore the fact that meat-eating is important to various cultures, not just to Americans.  With regard to pescatarianism, there currently is not any sustainable aquaculture, but there are people who have been successful with aquaponics on a small scale.  Pollan is optimistic about aquaponics.  Fun fact: the future of food may be in insects, because in a sustainable aquaponic system, the fish eat bugs instead of other smaller fish.  Maybe René Redzepi is just way ahead of his time by serving ants to humans at the Noma Tokyo popup.  😉  Just kidding, hopefully in the future we will just be eating the fish.

Also important to the future of food, is my personal interest, which is encouraging home cooking.  Pollan does acknowledge that home-cooking is just not feasible for people with long work days, and suggests that we may have to move to socialized cooking, where families get together and take turns cooking for everyone in the group.

After the lecture, I asked Pollan whether the drought in California is driving any innovation in livestock farming with pasture grazing.  So far I’ve only read that farms are trimming their herds.  Sadly, Pollan said that it’s only getting worse in California, because farmers are moving into almond farming, which is currently very profitable, while livestock farming is not.  The problem is that it requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce one almond.  So California is providing cheap almonds to satisfy the country’s demand for almond milk, almond butter, almond flour, and almond snacks, at the cost of depleting its already limited water supply.  While my almond consumption is fairly meager because almonds tend to upset my stomach, now I will never look at an almond or almond product the same again.  I would rather take a bath than eat a handful of almonds or drink a carton of almond milk!

Finally, before you start to feel sorry for us Californians about our drought (do you?), I have to disclose that the reason the country relies on our produce is that our state’s politicians managed to negotiate a deal where we would let the Farm Bill slide, and in return we would effectively be the only state allowed to grow edible crops.  According to Pollan, under the Farm Bill, the corn and soy farmers in other states lose all of their federal funding if they try to grow anything edible.  I’m looking forward to learning more about the Farm Bill when Marion Nestle speaks.

Edible Education 101 has started off strong, and I can’t wait to see the other lectures.

San Francisco Clam Chowder

A rainy day is the perfect day for a hot bowl of clam chowder.  What could feel better than slurping clams and sipping a rich, creamy broth?  My favorite clam chowder is made by Hog Island Oyster Co. in the San Francisco Ferry Building.  Their chowder is rich and sweet with cream.  It’s a broth-based clam chowder without any flour thickener, and has just enough potato and bacon to make the corners of your lips reach for your ears.  Here’s my take on the Hog Island chowder.  I call it “San Francisco Clam Chowder”.

San Francisco Clam Chowder. My take on Hog Island Oyster Co.’s clam chowder.

San Francisco Clam Chowder

Serves 2 for soup course, 1 for main course.

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs. clams.  I used littleneck clams from Washington.
• 2 slices good bacon.  I used 4505 Meats bacon.
• 1 tablespoon good butter.  I used Kerrygold.
• 1/4 large onion or 1/2 small onion, thinly sliced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 sprig fresh thyme (optional, but I had it)
• 1 small organic potato, diced.  I used a gold potato, because they are my favorite.
• 1 cup bone broth.  If you don’t have this, just use vegetable stock.
• 1.5 cups filtered water
• 1 Tablespoon bourbon (This is optional, but I bought a huge bottle of Bulleit to make vanilla extract and I don’t drink.)
• 1/2 cup good cream.  I used Claravale Farms Jersey cow raw cream, because I already had it.  It’s really delicious.

Instructions:

Give your clams a filtered water bath (chlorinated tap water is not good for them) so they let go of some of their sand.  Let them soak until you’re ready to use them.

Cook the bacon in the butter over medium heat until the bacon has softened and let go of some of its fat.  Don’t cook until crisp.  Add the onions and garlic and cook until the onions have softened.  Add the broth, water, and thyme and bring to a boil.  Add the potatoes and simmer for 5 minutes.  Add the bourbon.  Drain the sandy clam bath water.  Add the clams to the pot and turn the burner to medium-high.  Cover and cook until the clams have opened.  They will not all open at the same time, so scoop out the ones that have opened into your soup bowls. Continue cooking the rest of the clams, but watch them.  Throw out any clams that did not open.  Do not eat the clams that did not open.  Do not force the clams open if they don’t pop open themselves.  Turn the burner off and stir in the cream.  Ladle the broth with potatoes and bacon over the clams in your bowls.  Eat.

Fun Fact: Winter Squash Harvesting

I learned something new and interesting at the Clement Street Farmers’ Market today: all winter squash is harvested in September (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere), and stored until sold or eaten.  This is great news if there are no farmers’ markets where you live.  You can just make one car trip to a squash farm to buy a winter’s worth of squash, and then store it yourself.  You might even be able to negotiate a discount for buying a large quantity.