Hey y’all!
Have you ever had paella before? Well it’s delicious and you should try it if you haven’t yet!
I have to tell you that we actually made Paella in Barcelona on our second or third night (already don’t remember, that says a lot about my memory…).
Paella was actually created in Valencia, which is a few hours down south of Barcelona. The original paella calls for rabbit, chicken, green beans, white beans and snails.
It really is delicious but when you make it, you can put whatever seafood you fancy! We usually freestyle it big time. You just have to make sure you have the right liquid to rice ratio and the “staple spices” and you are good to go! Making it with seafood can be tricky,but you just have to add the seafood later on during the cooking process since you don’t want to over cook them! (example: shrimps and scallops should be put almost at the end to ensure they are cooked to perfection!).
Anyways, as it was quite tricky to find rabbit and snails in Barcelona, we opted for chicken and chorizo.
Now don’t go all judgemental on me, I don’t have my camera gear to take somewhat nice pictures so bear with me here!
This is what our paella looked like. It was very yummy I have to say! ( I know, highly pixelated picture…pish posh!)
Again, sorry for the horrible picture!
Anyhow!
Our wonderful host in Madrid recommended that we try this really good Rice and paella place around the corner from our apartment so we decided to wait for our journey to Madrid to eat some real paella.
The name of the restaurant he suggested is La Barraca. Since we went for lunch and didn’t want a super heavy paella, we opted for the vegetarian version, which was equally delicious! Here’s a picture of our meal.
It was really great because we had to wait 30 minutes after ordering because they were actually making the paella at that point! When your paella shows up 5 minutes after you’ve ordered it, it’s a bad sign because it was not made to order therefore it is not fresh! Now you know next time you go to a Spanish restaurant ;).
Anyhow!
I hope you are now craving paella because I found a few recipes for you to try at home!
http://spanishfood.about.com/od/maincourses/r/paellavalencian.htm
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tylers-ultimate/paella-valenciana-recipe/index.html
Enjoy! Buen Provecho!
Alex
xox
