My wife, Tara, spent last week in Spain and came back excited all over again about the food and laden with goodies: Marcona almonds, Seville orange jam, roasted piquillo peppers, and bags of dried beans, including the tiniest chickpeas I’ve ever seen. Still, I was a little taken aback when we got to talking about what to cook for two friends coming to dinner the next night and she offered to make paella. “You’re just going to whip up a paella?” “Why do you think I brought back that rice from Calasparra? Besides, it’s no big deal. You’ll see.”
She was right, of course. A look through a couple of cookbooks, including Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz’s The Food of Spain and Portugal, and I figured out that paella feels festive and elaborate without being lots of work. What it does require are three things: a very wide pan, a little bit of saffron, and short-grain Spanish rice. The wide pan is partly so the rice won’t get mushy and partly to help a tasty crust form on the bottom. The other ingredients are flexible; this being a dinner party, we splurged on legs, thighs, and wings from a pastured chicken; some chorizo; and two dozen littleneck clams from Long Island Sound, but some recipes call for mostly vegetables and a limited amount of meat.
At first it seemed like Tara was making risotto: She browned the chicken pieces over medium heat in olive oil, took them out and browned the sausage, then dumped in two cups of Spanish rice and toasted it for a few minutes in the olive oil. She added the saffron, put the chicken back in the pot, poured in four cups of boiling stock, gave everything a vigorous stir, and put the boiling pot into a 350 degree oven. About 15 minutes later she nestled the scrubbed clams into the rice. The rice was done and the clams were open within ten minutes, and she pulled the pot from the oven and let it sit covered for a few minutes before spooning it into wide bowls.
It may have been simple to make, but that paella made our friends very happy. The variety felt abundant, the rice warming on a cool fall evening, the astringent note of saffron a reminder that this wasn’t an everyday meal, even if it was easy enough to cook once a week.
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