Ok, like I promised: How To Make Paella

Making paella is actually quite simple. On a scale from cold cereal to goose cassoulet, it rates a strong fried rice. It is reasonably easy to throw together but hard to do very well. First, you need to get yourself to a market to buy the following:
· 8 large shrimp. Frozen are fine. It is easy to buy fresh shrimp in Spain if you are willing to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $35 a pound. You could probably find them in places in the US like the Fulton Fish Market or Louisiana, but it isn’t worth it for this recipe.
· 3 nice fresh squids
· half a pound of mussels
· 2 artichokes
· an onion
· some garlic. Whatever you think you might like. Five cloves?
· a pound of rabbit, bone in, cut up into pieces. Here in Spain all the butchers have this sort of industrial strength scissors bolted to the counter. I’ve never seen such a thing in the US, butthat doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’ve never seen South Dakota, for example, either. Try to get them to not give you gross things like rabbit lungs and eyeballs. This is food, not a pet. You just need the meat.
· a pound of chicken, bone in, cut up into pieces
· one red pepper
· 2 or 3 tomatoes, or some canned ones
· olive oil
· paella rice. This is sort of oblong and short; I don’t know how else to describe it so you will have success. Ask around, I guess. Don’t mess around with regular rice. You will fail in this endeavor and probably many others, if that’s what you call following directions.
· peas. They can be frozen ones.
· coarse salt
· a lemon
· 6 threads of saffron, or not, if you don’t feel like shelling out the dough

Also, you will need:
· a paella pan, which can probably be procured in Crate and Barrel or a kitchen store, but which I suppose could be replaced with a big cast iron skillet. For this recipe, which is for four people and sort of on the extravagant side, you need something about 18 inches in diameter.
· a burner large enough to heat the bottom of the pan evenly, or a stove with two burners close enough together so that both can heat the pan at the same time. Or you could try on a campfire, or a gas grill. But I don’t know anything about that.
· another pot, full of water. Maybe a half-gallon or so. Maybe a gallon. Better safe than sorry.
· newspaper, for the floor in front of the stove. Things will splatter.
· a mortar and pestle

First, I like to prepare. You can sort of skip around if you are the sort of cook who prefers to just start and see how things go. If you want to do it right, and be a little compulsive about it, do it my way. Wash all the sea creatures and meats. Pat the meat dry. Sea creatures are used to being wet. Cut up the squid into little squares, maybe the size of a stamp. Pick the extra seaweed off the mussels but don’t cut off the little beards. Set everything aside, maybe in the fridge. That probably depends on whether you are planning to take a long time to cut everything else up. I can’t hold your hand through every tiny step, you know. How will you learn?

Dice the onion and set aside. Cut the garlic into discs and put them in the mortar. Or in the pestle. Whichever one of those things you put other things in. Peel the artichokes and cut the hearts into quarters. Clean the pepper and cut into long strips. Do that thing with hot water and a sharp knife that peels tomatoes, or use canned ones. Pitch the seeds, dice the tomato part, and set aside. Spread out the newspaper.

Take a deep breath, because things are going to move pretty fast from here on. There will also be sizzling noises, which scare some people. Try to keep it together. Pour some olive oil in the paella pan. This is probably the only ingredient in which too much is really bad and too little is really bad. What you’re aiming for is a nice coating for all but the outer two inches of the cooking surface. Turn the heat up high, and when the oil thins a bit, you can shake it around to cover the whole thing. Hopefully, you have hit the exact spot where your stuff won’t stick to the pan and yet your rice won’t feel greasy. If it comes out bad, next you’ll know whether you guessed right or not. It won’t be the end of the world. Maybe don’t offer to bring it to a dinner party until you’ve gotten this part down.

Brown the chicken and rabbit pieces. Like I said before, you can use only chicken, only rabbit, or whatever mix you like of the two. I suppose you could leave the meat out altogether, but you’d need to have broth of some sort handy in the place of the water you have in that other pot I told you about. While we’re talking about it, actually, why don’t you heat that up? Great. It doesn’t have to boil, necessarily, just heat up.

Ok, so the meat is browning. Once it gets a little head start, toss in the pepper strips. While they are doing their thing, put the mussels in a pot and put it on a medium-low heat without any water. Without. Any. Really. They’re going to die; you can’t stop it now. Anyway, they will open soon enough and release some water of their own. When they open, just leave them to cool. Cook the meat and peppers for 5-10 minutes. When the peppers are soft enough for your tastes, take them out and set them aside.

Stir the meat around a little. That’s something cooks do. Flip it and stuff so they don’t get blackened. Toss in the shrimp and squid. Actually, in Spain they use this thing that sort of looks like a big, oafy squid but isn’t a squid. It’s called sepia and, frankly, doesn’t taste that good as a squid substitute in things like fried calamari. Usually it is grilled. It’s probably what you need to use in real authentic Spanish paella, but I can’t imagine you could find it fresh in the US. If the paella is horrible, then you can write me a letter about it and then go on a search for sepia. Cook those things until they are done; the shrimp will turn pinkish and the squid white. Squid is pretty hard to overcook, but shrimp is not, and it tastes awful if you do that. Err on the side of underdoing them. When the fishes are cooked, take them out and put them aside.

Add the pieces of artichoke heart. Well, first sort of shove the meat off to one side, then add them. Brown them for a few minutes. Add the onion and fry that, too. When it a little brown and soft, mix it in with the meat. Clear off some space in the pan for the tomato and throw that in there. And, hell, why not the peas? Stir a little. Look at the newspaper. Isn’t it gross? Covered in oil? Aren’t you glad you did as I said? Ok. Now bark like a dog.

All right, back to work. The water in that other pot – remember that other pot? I told you to heat it up a while ago? – should be hot now. Pour it into the paella pan, so that it just about covers all the stuff. Let that simmer for about twenty minutes. Meanwhile…toss some salt in with the garlic and crush it with the pestle, or mortar, whichever isn’t the thing you put other things into. Add the crushed garlic and the saffron to the pan. You could do a little cleaning up now if you like not having a ton to do after dinner. Or pour yourself some wine and stare out the window. This isn’t so important.

At the end of the twenty minutes of simmering, get that rice ready. Pour a strip of rice about four inches wide that bisects the pan and rises a bit above the water line. That’s the right amount of rice. Using a wooden spoon, shove the rice out of its nice neat line so it is evenly distributed throughout the paella. Cook the whole mess for five minutes. During that five minutes, go find those mussels you set aside. Twist off one of the halves of their shell, leaving the mussel attached to the other. Section the lemon. When five minutes have passed, lower the flame. You should be seeing the water get sucked into the rice and the whole thing starting to look more like a wet paella than all the ingredients for paella underwater. When the rice is set enough that it can handle some arranging, put the shrimp and peppers on top of it in a way that pleases you. Then take the mussels and get a little of the paella liquid in their shells. Embed them in the rice, shell down. Wait five more minutes, then add the lemon wedges in some sort of decorative manner. It’s done.

When you serve it, don’t mix everything up. Try to sort of dish it out like you would pie, though it should not be solid, certainly. Just use a little common sense. You worked so hard to get it to look nice. So that’s that. Good luck.