Chorizo Oats

Marriages might be made in heaven but some blessed pairs are made in my kitchen. Like chorizo oats. I am in love with oats and have been making a savoury oats porridge with various vegetables and spices several times a week, and I'm always looking for new inspired combinations. Adding spicy flavourful chorizo to the mix has been one of the best ideas I've had in a long, long time!

Chorizo Oats

Quaker Oats 3/4 cup
100gm chorizo, peeled from the casing and crumbled
1 small potato cubed or cut into sticks
1 small onion, thickly sliced
1 small carrot cut into discs
1 handful frozen green peas
half a green capsicum sliced into 2inch pieces or 1 bhavnagari chilli chopped
3 tbsp tomato puree or ketchup
salt
turmeric
jeera/cumin powder
dry chilli powder or paprika powder
oil

Heat a little oil in a wok or kadai and put in the carrots and potatoes. Fry on a medium flame so that they cook through. Add the chorizo and mix well breaking up the meat as you go. Cover the wok and let it cook for a few minutes. Now add the remaining vegetables, stir it all well and leave it alone for another five minutes or so. Add salt and the spices too.

Once the carrots and potatoes look nearly done sprinkle the oats on the vegetables and mix well. Let it roast a bit for a couple of minutes and then pour in enough water to cover everything under a centimetre or so of water. Stir and add the tomato puree or ketchup, whichever you are using. Let it come to a boil and then simmer till the water is absorbed and the oats are cooked through.

I reserved a few pieces of the chorizo once they were fried, to garnish the dish. The chorizo tends to disintegrate and blend into the dish so the reserved pieces are nice to bite into as you enjoy the oats.

Marathon Bloggers Project 52

Some Gratitude and a Tray of Chorizo and Onion Pull Apart Rolls

Sometimes when we meet people we have no idea where this first encounter might lead. I've had the good fortune of meeting many generous people, some of whom I haven't met in person but on the Internet - mainly on Facebook. Among these people is Manish, a big hearted fan of food who has made it his mission to ply K and me with goodies whenever he finds someone willing to carry his gifts from London all the way to Mumbai.

Among the many goodies Manish has sent us are some incredibly flavourful Spanish Chorizo sausages. K and I love pork in all its forms and quite high on my list are chorizo sausages, be they the mildly spiced European ones or the rambunctious, tongue tingling, Goan ones. Somehow I manage to always have one version or the other in my fridge.

K loves bread and I try to bake some at home whenever I can. I'd just made a batch of pull apart rolls with a Pesto Rosso filling yesterday and looking at the rich red paste I suddenly thought these rolls would be quite fabulous if I stuffed them with some chorizo and grilled onions. I couldn't wait for today to begin.

We chopped up an entire Spanish chorizo into smallish pieces.

Then K rendered the fat off the chorizo in a non stick pan. The Spanish ones do not release great amounts of fat like the Goan ones so we didn't need to drain off any fat. We added sliced onions to the pan and let them grill nicely along with the chorizo till the onions began to brown. We spread the cooked chorizo and onion mixture on a plate to cool.

And then I used this mixture to stuff my Chorizo and Onion Pull Apart Rolls.

Here's the recipe for the basic pull apart roll. You can fool around with the fillings as you like. This bread is ridiculously easy to bake and so far I have done them with green pesto and cheese, pesto rosso, marmalade, Nutella and now, with chorizo :)

As we bit into the soft rolls with fat morsels of chorizo and the incredibly flavourful onions I gave thanks to the forces that be for giving me friends like Manish.

Marathon Bloggers Project 52

The Triumph of the Toasted Sandwich

The Toasted Sandwich is such an integral part of Mumbai life. Right from school when one begins to discover the forbidden delights of street food, the toasted sandwich has been one of the star attractions.

Since I work from home there's not much street food that I get to eat. What better solution than to bring the street home? Granted, one can never quite replicate those street flavours in a sanitised home kitchen but there are magical flavours to be found at home too.

While the classic road side sandwich is replete with sliced veggies,cheese and spiced potatoes, the home version is more 'gourmet' and can be just as fulfilling.

Bored with the usual oatmeal/ fried eggs and toast/ muesli breakfasts Kurush decided to make something different for breakfast this morning. Of course overcoming the morning inertia took a while and we had brunch instead.

Whole wheat bread with Apple Smoked Mozzarella and slices of Spanish chorizo sandwiched and then toasted in the sandwich toasting contraption that used to be a part of every kitchen in Mumbai. It's not that common these days but it's not that rare either. After all, with the local sandwich wala dishing them out why would you bother making them yourself? But then, he won't be serving these yummy babies that we had for brunch today!

My love affair with the toasted sandwich grew in the years spent in the hostel in Pune. We didn't have the toaster but we were never short of toasted sandwiches. Get the makings together, pull out your trusty clothes iron and a roll of aluminium foil and you're in business. Assemble the sandwich, slather on the butter outside, wrap tightly in foil. Heat the iron up nicely and press down on the sandwich. The heavy irons of our parents' generation would be ideal as you don't have to put on much effort then. Toast both sides nicely, unwrap and take a bite of sheer heaven!

We used slices of salami, boiled potatoes, capsicums, cheese slices, tomatoes, whatever was available and suited our tastes.

Get yourself a simple sandwich toaster and treat yourself today. Simple pleasures in the simple things of life...