Mediterranean Meal Mutations: gumbo, chili

We've got a lot of "go to" seasonal meals we're used to cooking in The States, and they feel comfortable to return to, here in Barcelona. But it doesn't seem right to cook with East Coast ingredients when we have access to a wealth of Mediterranean produce, fish, spices, etc.  "Why not both?"  

We've done a couple dinners now of our "comfort food" dishes, but with local ingredients. Perhaps a bit contrived, but both were tasty and worth doing again. These aren't recipes, just variations on ones we've used -- it's just a style, it's improvisation.

As Rod Serling said on The Twilight Zone: "Submitted for your approval..."

Gumbo with squid and chorizo

We do a pretty credible gumbo, using whatever proteins we have or that scratch our itch. In Barcelona, we've got easy access to great sausages and fish.  The usual Cajun holy trinity employs celery, onions, and green peppers, and we swapped in the giant sweet red bell peppers from our markets. We switched our usual Andouille for both cured and fresh chorizo, and our usual shrimp for calamari.  We used the trimmings from the calamari to supercharge a fish stock. But the standard process -- dark roux, trinity, stock, proteins -- was the same.  

We served it with a long grain rice rather than US southern white rice, and topped with boiled quail egg halves.  It turned out well. I think gumbos, like many traditional dishes, are foods of convenience -- you use what you've got; if a Cajun were to cook here, I think he'd easily recognize and enjoy this adaptation.

Chili con carne, with Spanish chilis

Funny, isn't it, that "carne" means meat... in Spanish? :-)  Yet another dish that has tremendous regional variations. We've gotten pretty good at our chilis in the US, winning first and second places in all three (friendly) competitions we've entered.   It shouldn't be a stretch to tweak it to use local ingredients. 

The thing that makes our chilis successful is using a generous amount of dried, flavorful chili peppers; these are toasted, hydrated, blended, and form the base of the chili -- we have almost no powdered seasonings. We took the same approach here but replaced our usual New Mexico, Ancho, Poblano, and Pasilla with Spanish ones: Choricero and Ñora. We eschewed standard US chili spices like cumin and oregano, but used Spanish Pimentón Dulce and a bit of Cayenne for a touch of heat. Of course we kept the the garlic: Spanish food loves garlic!  We used some tomato, but grated it like Catalans do for Pa amb Tomaquet (tomato bread). To boost the umami, we didn't use our usual Marmite or Soy, but did add a couple salt-packed anchovies and some Choricero Chili paste which comes in convenient flavor-packed jars here. We browned a ground beef + pork mix available at our grocery stores, added the chili base, and -- another nod to Spain -- a sofrito of onions, garlic, etc. As usual, everything got cooked for a while to blend flavors. 

Folks here in Barcelona eat a lot of beans, mainly the large white variety called "mongetes". To be authentic, I should have used these, but thought the white color would be off-putting, so I punted and cooked up some dried black beans.  I added some of these (and their rich liquid) to the nearly-finished chili, and reserved the rest for serving. 

I love Chili Mac, chili served on spaghetti. Catalans do eat a lot of pasta (they ruled major portions of what's now Italy, back when) and they have "fideus" which are like very short spaghetti, which are typically used to replace paella rice to make the dish "fideaù". I cooked these up, and used them as a base when plating, topped with the remaining black beans, then the chili con carne. 

It was really quite good. The flavor profile was different than our New World chili based dish, but this would easily be recognizable by any "chili head" as real chili. It seemed maybe a bit brighter, perhaps lacking the expected brooding smokiness from cumin and oregano, and it had a bit more of a zing from the different chilis.  Definitely worth doing again.