Spanish Dinner! Ole!

We've been receiving plenty of potatoes from our lovely CSA. 2 weeks ago I made potato leek soup (which, I found out after the fact that I was following the recipe wrong. It calls for 2 32-oz cartons of chicken stock (I substitute veg stock of parve chicken bullion) but I have always used just 32 ounces. And it comes out thick and delicious. I'm not going to change it because I like it thick but it now is a bit less healthy since there are more potatoes per serving, but potatoes are a healthy starch and blah blah blah...I digress...).

We now have plenty since we have 2 week's worth of potatoes so we used about 2 pounds last night as part of our Spanish dinner to remind us of our lovely honeymoon in Spain. So we made a tortilla espanola and mushroom paella.

The tortilla espanola was nearly 2 lbs of potatoes, 3 onions and 3 eggs (we used egg substitute) and was really simple. Now, I didn't fry in 18 oz (!!!!) of oil like the recipe told me to, but I sauteed the onion and potatoes in a few tablespoons of EVOO for a while until they were cooked through. In retrospect, I should have left it a bit longer to brown the onions more. I added lots of salt and pepper (maybe too much salt) and it was tasty. Then instead of more oil I sprayed the pan with Pam and added the eggs and potato-onion mixture (I pre-mixed them in the bowl and the heat of the potato-onion mixture started cooking the eggs which was kind of cool!) and cooked it on one side. It held together well when I (well, OK, The Pedant) flipped it and it was fairly evenly brown. The other side was also fairly brown, but fell apart when I tried to put it on a plate. Nonetheless, it was SO TASTY.

TP made the mushroom paella. It was (of course) a Mark Bittman recipe from the glorious How To Cook Everything Vegetarian and just really lovely. We used brown rice that TP pre-boiled (as per Bittman's suggestion) and baby bella mushroom caps. It was perfectly cooked. It was warm and delicious and tasty.

To top it all off for a great evening, we each had a square of Lindt 70% dark chocolate. All while watching the last hour of the BBC Pride and Prejudice. A perfect evening in my book.