Cooking gammon in the Instant Pot is easy, painless and, above all, tasty. Instant Pot ham though is not great for my waist line as I seem to snack on it all day (particularly good dipped in Quirky Cooking’s BBQ Sauce if you haven’t glazed it!). In my defence, it’s really, really nice and well, it’s there in the fridge, all I have to do is pinch a bit.
There are two ways of cooking Instant Pot ham, all details here….
 |
| Add caption |
I have been meaning to write this post for a while as I would like to start a surreptitious campaign to bring fideos to the UK. Fideos can be defined as extremely short and thin spaghetti (well, the ones I like are thin). You can make lovely soups with them and one hugely popular soup is the Spanish recipe this post is for: sopa de fideos (pasta soup).
This is a really simple recipe, in fact if you have good homemade chicken or vegetable stock at home you can just add the fideos and, within five minutes, you could be ready to sit down to steaming hot comforting soup, spoon in hand. My mother always has stock in the fridge or in the freezer precisely for this purpose.
It should always be cooked the moment you want to eat, that’s when it tastes best and it takes so little time to prepare that it is totally feasible. This is the soup you eat when you’re cold and need warming up, when you don’t feel so well, when you need cheering up… Ok, by you I mean me but let me tell you, that cup of tea that the British fix everything with…this is my Spanish-style cup of tea. And, yes, being me it includes chorizo (you didn’t expect anything else, did you?).
Now, I like my pasta soups to be very thick, without too much liquid
(otherwise I call them consommés and I’m done with it), so make sure you adapt it to
your taste (don’t panic, it’s easy to do). Fideos are designed for soups so they get soak in the stock in a delicious way.
If you’re vegetarian, ditch the chorizo, use your favourite stock and you’re sorted. I promise you it will still be lovely.
 |
| What I like to see in my cupboard |
Fideos are not easy to find in the UK. In Tesco you can find Lubella Filini no. 2 (a Polish brand), but they’re number 2 (hence much thicker and they don’t soak in the lovely flavours like my absolute favourite: Gallo no. 0 (it has to be, it’s the only fideo brand I’ve been able to find in the UK, there are other brands in Spain of course). You can find the Gallo brand in the Spanish London supermarket R Garcia and Sons (you can order online or pop in for a visit). I’m pretty sure my husband has bought them from the La Plaza Deli in Portobello too. Of course, try any local Spanish shops or market stalls you may pass on your travels and, should you see a Portuguese shop, ask for their pasta soup range, even if they don’t have fideos, you will find tiny pasta dots, stars or teardrops that tend to be really good and work rather well.
Substitutes: De Cecco Stellette nº75 (I’ve seen them in Waitrose), Orzo pasta (I get it from Waitrose and I have seen it in selected Tescos), Tesco’s Farfalline, Lubella’s Filini. You could also break vermicelli into short length cut-at-home fideos.
Sopa de fideos a la Feisty Tapas
Ingredients
Equipment
1 medium pan, 1 chopping board for vegetables, one chopping board for hot food
Method
HINT: Should it be too thick, add more stock. Should it be too watery, just make sure you make it thicker when serving it by removing some of the extra liquid. See? I told you it was easy. If you don’t eat it all straight away, make sure you remove it from the heat and leave the lid either off or only half covering the pan so that the pasta doesn’t go too soft.
TIP: When immediate comfort is required, skip the carrots, add the chorizo and stock cube (if not using your own stock) when the water starts to boil and add the fideos or similar pasta for soup. In 5-10 minutes, depending on the type of pasta you could have a fantastic warming and comforting soup.
EXTRA TIP: You can also make a sopicaldo by chopping any leftover chicken and vegetables you may have.
YET ANOTHER TIP: Try making it with quinoa for a gluten free version, in that case make sure the chorizo is gluten free too (many tend to be but I am of the “you never know” persuasion).
If you’re new to my blog, welcome! You can find out more about in my bio.
When I was little I would leave my favourite ingredients of any meal, namely chorizo and olives, to one side of my plate in order to savour them properly at the end. During the week I would go to school from 9:00 to 13:15 and from 16:45 to 18:45 so in between there was time to go home for lunch. But every Wednesday I would have lunch at my grandparents place and every Wednesday we ate the same two courses in my honour: Macarrones con chorizo and Carne con aceitunas. Every week my uncle Juan would sit at the table in the chair next to mine and, knowing me well, he would eat the chorizo or olives that I left to one side to make me mad and, boy, would I get mad!
With time my tastebuds developed and I learnt that, if certain ingredients belong in a recipe, there probably is a reason for it and I should make a point of eating them all together. Now I’m a mummy it’s eat when you can and always with the certainty that the moment the food hits the plate baby will invariably wake up/whinge/need a nappy change, so it’s eat fast or else eat cold.
Throughout the years my search for good chorizo in the UK has progressed quite nicely, it basically went from not finding any and having to fly back from Spain with vacuum-packed chorizo stashed in my suitcase every time I visited the family to finding basic Revilla Chorizo de Puchero to the great find that is a place in London that stocks the proper stuff. In fact I have never been to this paradise (other than in my dreams), it was Mr Tapas who discovered it a couple of weeks ago and returned home triumphantly bearing remarkably well-chosen goodies and especially proud of the “chorizo gallego” he had managed to find. He was proud of the fact that it was gallego (i.e. from Galicia) because that is the region I come from and therefore the region of Spain we most visit.
When we found out he was going to start working in Portobello, one of the first things I said was: “I’ve heard there is a Spanish supermarket there!”. I meant R García and Sons but instead he found a place called La Plaza and he came home with some of my favourite things in the whole wide world: sliced lomo, sliced chorizo (both sweet and hot), cooking chorizo sausages, white asparagus and (yay!) proper pasta for Fideuá (I had been using macaroni but every time I prepared a Fideuá I complained about macaroni not being quite the right pasta for it).
Everything was fantastic quality, the cold meats were pretty much packed how I would expect them to be wrapped in a charcutería in Spain and the prices were very similar to what we would have paid in any English supermarket, in fact I am convinced that we got more quantity for the same price. I shall report further once I visit it in person.
If you can’t get to London, Revilla’s Chorizo de Pueblo (Puchero) is good to have in the cupboard as it lasts quite a while and it’s fantastic for quick sopas de fideos (soups with filini pasta), potajes (potages) or indeed pucheros. They are basically (pardon the pun) perfect for a quick bowl of comfort food. I have found it in Waitrose and in Sainsburys in the past.
For something more special, Tesco’s cooking chorizo sausages are actually rather good too.
Some of my faux pas have included buying Waitrose’s Chorizo-style sausages (the clue was in the name) and trying to make a lentil stew with them. Waitrose was also a source of disappointment at Christmas when Mr Tapas bought some chorizo and jamón ibérico which tasted mainly of the plastic it was packed in, having worked out the price per slice we were rather outraged. Don’t get the wrong idea, I love Waitrose and have bought plenty of excellent quality ingredients there in the past but it failed us in this department.
I think La Plaza will remain my preferred supplier of chorizo for now.
Have you discovered any good places to buy good chorizo, either sliced or for cooking?
Some of my recipes using chorizo:
Chorizo pasta (Thermomix version here)
Chorizo and red pepper risotto (and the Thermomix version here)
