Daring Cooks - Spanish Rice with musrhoom, chorizo and artichokes

I don’t cook Spanish food very often so this was exciting to try a style of cooking that I’m not used to! I am somewhat familiar with author of this recipe, Jose Andrese who owns something like 6 restaurants in my home town. I’ve only been to Jaleo, his tapas bar and there I had some of the best spinach I’d ever tasted (sautéed with raisins, apples and pine-nuts) and these awesome ham and cheese croquets. Andres was on NPR a few months ago talking about recipes that cost under 10 dollars, and you must go listen to it, he by far more cute and charming than any middle aged chef ought to be.

One of the best parts of this dish was not just making a recipe I’d never tried before but even within that recipe were all kinds of chances to do new things –making aioli from scratch, making a sofregit, cleaning and cutting up fresh artichokes. I felt so satisfied with the end result which was the product of nearly two hours in the kitchen. The aioli took nearly half an hour of persistent pounding (quite the arm work out!) and I recommend making it while you are doing the sorfegit since the sofregit is a relatively hands off dish. You can even make them both ahead of time. Having never cut up artichokes before I was very slow at it and I put too many tough leaves in the dish, which was the only downside to the completed dish.

I ended up changing the recipe around because I don’t like fish, so I used homemade chicken broth in lieu of fish broth and chorizo in lieu of cuttlefish. I thought the final dish was delicious and the aioli adds a nice creaminess to the dish (all coming from the emulsion of the olive oil, no eggs allowed!) that completed the dish.

For the recipe, go to this month’s host Olga of Olga’s Recipes.