Last thursday, the Managers of Courtyard by Marriot Hotel in Chennai invited me to meet them and some other hotel guests in a cocktail. I arrived late (working), but my friends Raja, Annang, Mohit, Namrata and Prakash where already there. They introduced me to some new people (Leila from Marocco, Judith and Claudia from Colombia and Waleed from Egypt) and we were all talking for a couple of hours. In one of those conversations, we started talking about cooking... and someone asked me to do a paella, to what I quickly answered: "Of course, why not this sunday?" and in a few seconds the list of people who wanted to tasted it arrived to the dozen; even more, I received an special order "Please, do one for vegetarians!"...
So I asked my friend Bob to help me in this challenge and on friday we prepared the list of ingredients, it was the first time cooking a paella for so many people and in India, so we just tried...This morning was the great morning, the show started at 12:15am... after almost 2 hours in the kitchen we went to the table and finally eat ! It was good, but we can improve !
Thanks to everybody... it was a really nice day !
Thanks Bob for your help, comments and pictures.
For those who want to try cooking in the same way we did it...
Ingredients for 4 people:
- 1 or 2 onions (in cubes)
- 1 red pepper (in cubes)
- 1 green pepper (in cubes)
- 1 garlic
- 150 gr prawns (with heads!)
- 200 gr black king fish (in cubes)
- 8 squids (medium size, in rings)
- 12 mussels
- 20 prawns
- olive oil
- 400 gr rice (short grain)
- 15 olives
- water
- salt
- saffron and turmeric
- Put water in a pan, and let those prawns get boiled.
- Keep that water clean the prawns.
- In parallel, you can put some olive oil in a big saucepan (oil enough to cover all the bottom) and add onions, peppers and smashed garlic.
- Keep slow flame and see how they are going to be cooked slowly.
- When the vegetables are done, you can add the fish, the cleaned prawns and the squids rings.
- When the fish is cooked, add the mussels and some saffron and turmeric.
- Now you add rice using something a cup.
- For each cup of rice, you add 2.5 cups of water (starting with the prawns' water and compliting with normal water) .
- Add olives.
- Using a wood spoon, you distribute uniformly rice and other ingredients in all the sauce pan.
- When done, rise a little the flame in order to let the hole mixture boil slowly. From that moment, take over 20-25 minutes to get the rice cooked.
- Then, put the fire out and cover the sauce pan with a clean cloth.
- About 5 minutes later it is ready to eat
