A taste of Spain

As I talked about in my last post, the aim with my cooking at the moment is to use up all my dry goods, cupboard essentials, and odds and sods. It seems to me that the best way to do that is to have meals that involves several small dishes, preferably in a tapas/mezze stylee. Which suits me down to the ground.

A couple of nights ago, I noticed that the new Jamie Oliver series Jamie Does? was, this week, in Andalucia. So, I picked up a couple of my Spanish cookbooks, and came up with a meal that consisted of lambs’ kidneys with white wine vinegar and paprika (that took care of the kidneys I had in the freezer, plus a bit more of a couple of things in my spice cupboard), spring greens with capers (which finished off a jar of the little green taste-bombs that was in my fridge), and puy lentils with peas and mint (dry goods plus stuff from the freezer).

The latter was a recipe I got from the blog by The Omnivorous Bear, who recently posted about making this dish. She actually made it with mint jelly, but as I didn’t have any, I substituted it with a drop of white wine vinegar, some fresh mint I had stored in the freezer, and a wee teaspoon of soft brown sugar ? which are, basically, the ingredients of mint jelly. And, conveniently, took care of a few items I was looking to use up.

So, as I sat down with my supper to watch Mr Oliver cook, eat and drink his way around southern Spain, I didn’t feel too jealous of all the wonderful dishes making their way across my television screen. (Okay, I did?)