Cooking with Jose Andres

I hope you had a wonderful holiday and are stimulating the economy!

For Easter dinner, I made some decorated Easter Egg Cookies (similar to what I made for our Christmas brunch) which were a big hit at the dinner….now they want the cookies to be a tradition…groan! It took me 2.5 days to make 45 cookies. No two cookies were alike. But I took photos and here’s one of them that I know you’ll appreciate!

Hope you got your taxes in today! So now you have time to try some of the recipes from the Made in Spain cookbook.

I tried some Spanish recipes last weekend! I tried the Artichokes Stuffed with Quail Egg & Trout Roe (p. 93)….mostly out of curiosity because I couldn’t imagine what it would taste like. It was pretty bland…the roe added some salt. The artichokes and quail eggs are very rich and soft textured. It all just didn’t come together for Bill or me. I also tried Extramaduran Cold Tomato Bread Salad (p. 30). The salad dressing was delicious! I would have never thought to use smoked paprika in this way or as the main taste of a salad dressing. I added some parboiled green beans to the salad, which told me that you could pretty much make the salad out of anything you want because it’s the dressing that makes the salad. The Cabrales Blue Cheese with Apples and Olive Oil (p. 105) is also a delicious salad. The contrast between the creamy blue cheese and the tart/sweet taste of the Granny Smith apples was perfect! Since I love donuts (but never eat them, honest!), I’m going to try the Sweet Fried Dough dessert next. The Baby Squid with Caramelized Onions (p. 163) also intrigued me so it’s on my “to do” list as well.

Have you been trying any of the recipes from the Made in Spain cookbook? If you have, please send me an e-mail with any of your comments and I’ll post them to the blog for you or you can click on the “comments” link at the bottom of this post and add your trials yourself!

It’s going to be a very interesting dinner of tapas! I think I’ll do the tapas in “flights” since there might be 12 of us for this dinner. We have some new members who will join us in May! Remember to prepare “BITES” rather than whole entrées since we have so many courses. Each course will still be plated so you can share how you prepared it but 3-4 bites is sufficient.

The dinner will be at my house in Cupertino. If you have not let me know if you are coming or not, please do so I can have a final count. I have not heard back from everyone yet so it will be 10-12 people for dinner.

Bon appétit!