Back from Spain and ah, the delights of Spanish home cooking, which is generally found in restaurants specializing in comida casera (home cooking) and seldom found in modern homes, at least not in the home of the modern, working Spanishwoman who is just as likely to stock her freezer with frozen pizzas and bags of frozen paella mix.
I'm incredibly jet-lagged from our return 24 hours ago. What's worse, so is my 3-year-old, whose internal clock, still highly accurate cannot be fooled into anything. "Time to wake up!" he'd announced last night at 3am. I simply made him push through the day today, all the way to a reasonably regular bedtime this evening.
Jet lagged and not-yet unpacked, I set about in the kitchen almost immediately to try to recreate the most delicious bowl of lentils I'd ever eaten in my life, one of the definite high points of our trip to Madrid. Lentejas con chorizo can be found on the menu of just about every typical Spanish restaurant and the version my son and I had in the modest little Meson El Botero, a working man's restaurant near the Plaza de los Descalzas Reales (Plaza of the Barefoot Royals) was so savory, and so satisfying, that even my relatively fussy child ate it with gusto.
The large, perfectly formed, intact yet soft, brown lentils floated in a rich broth along with a few little cloves of garlic and small bits of potato. There wasn't any discernible chorizo, yet that must have been what gave the broth its flavor.
My Spanish friend, Elena, told me it was so simple to make this dish: just throw some water, onion, carrot, garlic, lentils, sausage and a slice of bacon in an olla and cook until finished. No need to soak the lentils, she said.
I knew it could not be so simple.
The version I made today was certainly edible, although the lentils turned out much more al dente than I would have liked--next time I will soak them overnight. The sausage, ugh, forget American sausage. I'll have to find an internet source for real Spanish chorizo. And as for cooking the lentils in just plain water, I know that the cooks at the restaurant El Meson Botero, must have used some sort of meat broth, no doubt concocted from mounds of marrow bones and delicious scraps.
But if making a perfect bowl of Spanish lentils requires that I first slave over stock, I will do it. Because I'm not adding anything to the repetoire that is merely adequate. It has to be so good, as Nigella Lawson once put it, that not only do I want to make it all the time, but I have to stop myself from making it all the time. Or words to that effect.
I'll keep trying with the lentils; I may have to resort to writing the restaurant and asking for the recipe. No doubt they'll tell me just to throw some lentils in a pot of water.
Maybe it's the water that makes the difference.
11:22:26 PM 
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