hi i'm carol yelverton welcome to hungry for travel you know spain is one of those countries that's old or new all at the same time you can't help but find history everywhere you look but there's also this really nice modern vibe to the country that makes it a lot of fun to be in today we're just going to eat our way through spain we're going to make a delicious real mesko sauce required to have a fantastic experience and pie is an experience it's not just a dish we're going to take a look at tapas and we're also going to try some of the wonderful wines from spain that go beautifully with the different foods and i'll talk about pairing them but first we just want to give you an overview of spain from the eyes of some of the americans who've been there am devaney hi my name is jordan hi my name is jewel i'm an actress from new york and i adore spain i love spain i am a lover learn whether you are going to a different town by a train or by god it was really convenient the trains go so fast it's really nice the windows are huge it's so horrible and easy to get around on which i found her accommodations enough time and you're going to be going all over the place i would love to go back to spain once you go to spain you'll never want to please send me back to spain all right let's talk about some kmita some food in spanish course i want to introduce you to from mesko sauce and this is one of the sauces that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years in spain it's a very easy to make sauce that has a lot of flavor it's been used on fish they put it in salads used for a topless dish and this is what i call a back pocket recipe because it's one of those that if you need to get something ready in a rush you know you just need a quick sauce or an appetizer you can pull this together  and put it out there and it's got really interesting unique flavors that people are used to so you'll be the head of the party you go to get really simple to make so let me tell you how i start this i take a half a cup of sliced almonds i put them in the blender i'm not going to run the blender because you're way too loud but trust me on this so i pulse them pulse and pulse them until they're really of course bland and you start to get that that kind of sense of the meal of the almond and the aroma is beautiful that's going to carry through this whole dish it's  really special next i take little tomatoes so i have here some grape tomatoes but you can use cherry tomatoes or other small tomatoes that have a high sugar content so i have four old and what i did is i put them in a parolee tray i use one or two slices of garlic it just depends on how big your garlic is and then i put in a little salt and then i added some spanish olive oil and i just want to talk a little bit about spanish olive oil because it really tastes a little different it smells different has just a roma very very intense and flavorful so it makes spanish dishes really special and really stand out if you can't find it just use regular olive oil it's not a big deal so i put these in the blender to chop until skins burst i'm careful i'm turning them so they don't you know burn or anything but i get them just to a point where they're nice and soft and and delicious so i have some bread crumbs i'm going to put in too because that really helps how to give body to the sauce  give it some depth i'm going to add and again this is sherry vinegar from spain it's different i mean i have again a lot of complexity and those would see elements in it that is really different you can use champagne vinegar if you can't find this or you could use grow as well so to put in about a teaspoon or so and i can always add more to taste the next thing i'm going to put in the more red pepper flakes you know what do you know red pepper flakes just from throwing them and tomato sauces and you know they're flakes and i don't have a lot of heat what's going to happen here that's going to be different is that these are going to get ground up so we want to understand that there's going to be a higher intensity of heat in these red pepper flakes so i'm starting just a little bit i put in maybe a quarter of a cup you know if you don't like it you may not want to put any and that's fine you know that the dish will be ok but again if you want more just taste as you go in you can always add more and it's hard to take it away so good taste as you go so i also have sliced some scallions and i've sliced them and separated them into compartments right here i have the white the former part of the scallion and then i have the tops there shredded i'm going to put just the white in here and then what i'm going to do is the lid on and i'm  and i really want this to you know really blend together really really well and then at a certain point where it just a taste i think yeah that's a good blend what i'm going to do is slowly stream in this olive oil you know maybe you know for twenty thirty seconds while the machine is going and so what this is going to do and again it's just a slow steady stream and it's just going to emulsify this it's going to provide you know get some air in here it's going to give it a great texture and it's going to bring the whole dish together so i blend that up i put in a dish like you see here and all i'm going to do is garnish this with some of the scallion tops and then i think to serve this with vegetables like pea pods but you can also do like toasted baguette slices and then it's just easy just take a taste of it and it's so sweet it's delicious the comments really make a difference and here the garlic the sherry vinegar i taste beautiful the tomatoes have a sweetness to them which is really nice because of the broiling all the pieces have come together and this is not too hard either because i've been really careful about getting it to a level that i like so all of this is just you know topless it's a shouldn't salad dressings you can use and on top of the soup you can do anything you want with it it's really really special so i want to talk to you now about the idea of astronomy because that's really important in spanish culture that's drawn to me is the idea of the whole circle of food where it's grown how it's prepared how it's served how the pieces all come together and so it just it just is about the big picture and i want to take a look at what astronomy means in the big well the last shot you saw there was a great big paella and in that look delicious pie a really is the dish of spain and as i said before it's an experience it takes a long time to cook but it's a lot of fun to cook it's a party dish and it's just a way for everybody to come together and end up with a product that is really really fabulous my son every year has a pipe pan that's much bigger than mine and we do a big thing where he puts it on the grill in the backyard and we all just hang out and let the player cook and we talk and have a great time together and at the we're feasting on this amazing rice dish so one thing i want to share with you about pie is that there are several things you need to do to have a good pie and it's simple but there's just just a couple of things that if you do them right it's all going to come together and they're very simple the first is your pan this is my pa a pan and you can see it's got a broad bottom on it you know so a lot of surface can be covered it's pretty shallow on the sides and it's also got some dimples and those little dimples help the ri cook more evenly because the rice is going to be cooking in here with all the meat and vegetables for quite a while so this is a typical pie a pan it's made of carbon steel just like a walk is and it retains heat really fast and gets hot really fast just like a walk so it's a really kind of that's part of the process of cooking it if you don't have a pant don't worry you can certainly use a pan like this which again has a wide base and kind of a shallow side to it and so it's going to give you that pretty much the same result and you'll be fine so no worries so let me walk you through the steps to a pio at what i've done is take some saffron and saffron is a beautiful beautiful herb that grows in spain and it has like a kind of a honey grassy feel and taste to it it's just delicious it also gives this beautiful golden color to the pio that really helps us to stand out so i have some warm chicken broth for i have cups so i put the saffron into the chicken broth the warm chicken broth and i just let it infuse and it's going to sit there in the warm broth for quite a while and just get some beautiful flavor to it now saffron's pretty expensive and a lot of people are hesitant to buy it but i call this one of those investment spices where you know you buy it you don't use it you know very much at all and i've kept my saffron just my little container saffron i've had it over a year and i just you know you're just using a pinch or two in a dish so yes it costs a lot of first but you know you use it over time it really pays for itself and it's really worth it in dishes like this so that's setting there now what i want to do is turn my attention again to the pie a pan the all important pan i put some of my spanish olive oil in here and get it hot and then what i did before just to move this recipe along for you is i took chicken thighs and i saute them for about ten fifteen minutes i like using the chicken fries because they have a real juice in this to them they don't dry out and they really are typical of the kind  of meats that were used when pio was originated in the middle part of spain you know many many years ago they didn't have access to seafood even though we commonly think of seafood paella but this is kind of a more traditional look at this so we're using the chicken breast today so i let that rest after i take it out and that's all set and then i add about a half a cup of cherry so true so is spanish pork sausage and has a really beautiful flavor very strong very intense i don't use a lot of it i use about a half a cup and i get i put it in i let it saut down and you get just enough of the flavor in in that that it tastes really really good when i'm done i take it out and again this isn't hot so i'm just going to move it out for you just to show you because then it's time to make a sofrito and this really is going to be the base of the dish it's going to provide a lot of the the taste elements that make pie is so wonderful so i have an onion to plum tomatoes and two cloves of garlic and i'm just going to put them in and what happens is that you don't cook least for a couple of minutes you can cook these for quite a long time so you want to cook them about say fifteen twenty minutes and you want to let them really really cook down so that the onion is caramelized the peppers are really softened you have the beautiful smell of the garlic and it's just soft warm the onions are sweet and they just have this wonderful flavor they're really really delicious then i had a couple of other things like to add the tree so back again and i'm also putting  green beans now what i usually do is i take maybe a handful of you know just string beans and i cut them into three so they get to be about this size so again you don't need a lot of green beans and i'm putting them right now so they can cook a little bit but they don't have to cook through i also have a tablespoon of rosemary that goes in here that just adds a wonderful our magic quality so let that cook and then i'm going to add these plum tomatoes again to plum tomatoes that are chopped up you really have to start with this kind of rice now again if you can't get it you might find something in your store called valencia rice that would work just as well but i also if you can find arborio rice which is a talian medium grain rice that would work well too it's the same kind of rice made for the same kind of purpose grown for the same kind of purpose which is to absorb a lot of moisture so this rice is really really essential to the dish so there are three things that are essential it's the kind of cookware you use the saffron and the rice so i'm going to put about a couple a half of rice in here and then i'm going to stir it around and i'm going to just let it coat everything you know get incorporated in and that's looking good and then i'm just going to add the and then at this point we're going to our broth and you'll see there's really a lot of broth that you have to work with here and you think oh my gosh this is way too much broth for this little tiny pan but really it's not so the idea is that you just get that incorporated in can just give it one little stirred get everything put together ok make sure little moisture on the chicken everything's looking good and again this is all going to come down to cook together and now you have to do something that you're not used to doing it's not what we do when we cook in this country but you're not going to cover this usually we cover rice when we cook it we don't do that here we put it up on a maybe a medium medium high flame depending on your burner and we step back we let this cook just as it is it's going to do its own little thing it's going to cook away on its own we don't need to worry about anything now are our work is done and in about twenty minutes we're going to check it again keep your eye on it just you know don't don't completely walk away but come back and check it in about twenty minutes and you're going to look for rice that is which means it's firm to the bite so we don't want it overly soft but taste the rice and if it's too hard just let it cook a little more and you can add a little more broth if you need to and then once that broth is really well cooked down we're going to do another final step and that is we're going to turn the heat up to high and we're going to let a crushed form on the bottom it's called asako rot and it is this wonderful flavorful element of pio that's that's really fantastic so we don't want to burn obviously so we're keeping an eye on this as it's cooking as it's cooking and you start to smell kind of a crunchy little flavor you know element aroma then turn the heat off to cover this with foil and let it rest for a couple of minutes and then you're ready to serve it and in the end your pie a is going to look like this play out and what i've done is just have garnished it with a little parsley and then lemon wedges a lemon wedges are kind of one of those typical ways to sort of play out a lot of color but also people love to squeeze the lemon all over their paella and so you end up with this really pretty dish you know it just it just makes a wonderful presentation so that's what looks like and again it's not that difficult at the end of the day it's a not that difficult to make a pie you just need to know those the key steps to it so enjoy one of the other things i want to talk to you about though our top us because those again are just really traditional and important to spanish cuisine and top us are basically small plates so we would have little bites of this little bites of that we often got a topless bars here in the united states and you know when you go and you get small plates you get maybe three or four depending on the number of people you have with you everybody gets a taste of something we're going to show you a top this recipe that's easy for you to make at home it is just a couple of steps and it's a bread wrapped with tomato served with serrano ham spain has some wonderful distinct wines that pair beautifully with the dishes that we've seen today and the recipes that i've shown you so i'd like to walk you through some of the major wines that you'll find in spain and talk about the things that are special about each one and how they pair with food the first one i want to show you is one of my favorites it's called neo it's from northwest spain and it's got just a great aroma there's a kind of a fruit a peach apple thing going on this is a really well balanced wine and the thing that i really really love about it is that it has a boyish thing acidity so you can pair it with flavors that have a lot of spice a lot of taste of them and it's really going to go great it's wonderful with seafood but i love it with a real mesko sauce and the reason is that there's a lot of tomato in this mesko sauce i mean there's a lot of acidity in the tomatoes so pairing that with a wine isn't always easy but because of the really good acidity in this wine and the city in the tomatoes you find a balance so that's what we call a really perfect pairing when you have the right amount of city and other elements in the food in the wine so that one is not overwhelmed by the other now let me tell you about rio hob because that is like the big red it's like the major one of spain it's the i ndistinct wine that people drink in spain all the time it's a really beautiful read it's got a lot of structure to it it's got a lot attendants in it you know full black current aromas and it's the kind of a wine that you're going to have with a big beef dish sure you know a big kind of hearty meal now i like this with our chicken pie it because the chicken thighs really work with this they have like that that's having like the big comeback in the last five years and it's sherry you know we used to associate sherry with the wine that our grandmothers would have a tipple of in the parlor but there's been a resurgence of popularity and people are really getting into sherry into love it's a really it's almost like it's a wonderful i love to cook with this it's really perfect for desserts but it's also wonderful for top so it's a kind of wine that you would enjoy in all kinds of ways so as we can see there so many different flavors and wonderful aspects of spanish gastronomy and this is just scratching the surface here but it's been a lot of fun to get these recipes out here for you and to enjoy some time together would like to thank this spanish office of tourism