Paella with Shrimp #Recipe by Maya Corrigan

Paella is a rice dish named for the large flat pan in which it’s cooked. Originally it was farm workers' food, cooked over a wood fire. Rice was the main ingredient, with additions like tomatoes, beans, rabbit, chicken, etc. Seafood paella is now as common as land-food paella. I adapted my recipe from one made with squid that appeared in Gourmet magazine in 1992. The recipe here is for shrimp, but I've made the dish with squid and/or chicken. Paella is often seasoned with saffron, but this version does not call for it.

Ingredients

1 pound shrimp, shelled, cleaned, and patted dry with paper towels
2 + 2 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
2 cups chicken broth
1 10-ounce can of diced tomatoes with green chilies
1 1/2 cups water
2 cloves minced garlic
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1 1/2 cups paella or Arborio rice
1 1/2 cups thawed frozen peas
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a large skillet over medium high heat until hot, but short of smoking. Sauté the shrimp for one minute or until golden. Drain the shrimp on paper towels. Combine the broth, tomatoes with juice, water, paprika, and cumin, and boil the mixture in a saucepan or heat until very hot in a microwave. 

Wipe out the skillet, add 2 tablespoons or oil, and cook the garlic over low heat until softened. Add the rice to the skillet and cook it while stirring for 3 minutes. Add the broth mixture and simmer the rice for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in the salt and pepper to taste and simmer the rice for 10 minutes more without stirring. Add the shrimp and cook the mixture covered over low heat for 5 minutes. Scatter the peas over the top and cook another 5 minutes.

Remove the skillet from the heat and let the paella steam covered with a dishcloth or several layers of paper towels for five minutes. Serve with lemon wedges.

This is such a colorful dish that guests are always impressed when I set the paella pan on the table, and yet it's easy and quick to prepare.

Do you have a favorite rice dish?

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit my website for easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a free culinary mystery story.

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My Mother's Paella

This past week I’ve been trying to dig to the bottom of the piles of papers on my desk. I can now see glimpses of the top (and the floor) here and there, but it’s nowhere near finished. And then I want to make new folders and labels and . . .

Anyway, one of the items that crawled out was an inch-thick bundle of index cards with recipes. My mother assembled these, probably after 1962 (I gave her a decorated file box to hold them for her birthday that year), and other contributors included family members and women my mother knew from her multiple bridge groups, Welcome Wagon, and probably a few more I don’t remember. And even my grandmother’s cleaning woman.

It’s kind of a mixed collection of recipes, mostly geared toward appetizers and desserts (those bridge club members were competitive with their snacks!). I thought I’d try my hand at my mother’s version of paella, unusual for her because she wasn’t particularly interested in ethnic cooking. But this sounded tasty (and my mother’s birthday was in April).

As always, I cut the recipe in half—and it still filled my large casserole! I also tweaked a few things, and guessed at some of the amounts, since they weren’t spelled out in the original. But it’s a foregiving recipe, so don’t worry.


Chicken Paella

Ingredients:

1/2 cup olive oil

1 frying chicken, cut up (or use whichever parts you prefer)
   (Note: the chickens in the 1960s were smaller than those you find in markets today, so adjust accordingly)
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minched or mashed
1 can chopped or diced tomatoes with their juice
1 lb. raw shrimp, peeled
2 cups rice
pinch of saffron (expensive and hard to find, but it makes a difference!)
4 cups clam broth (or use chicken or seafood broth)
1 pkg. frozen artichoke hearts
1/2 lb. green peas

That all-important pinch of
saffron

Instructions:

Heat the olive oil in a large, deep skillet. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper. Brown them, then add the onions and garlic. Cook until the onions are lightly browned.

Add the tomatoes and juice and cook for 8-10 minutes, stirring.

Add the shrimp and cook until they are pink (not long). add the rice and mix in. Transfer the contents of the skillet into a deep casserole with a lid.

The shrimp are in there somewhere

Bring the broth to a boil (in saucepan or microwave) and add the saffron. Pour the broth over the ingredients in the casserole and cover. Cook over low heat for 15 minutes (the mixture will still be soupy). Uncover and finish cooking over low until all the liquid has been absorbed. 

Add the artichokes and peas and cook until heated through. 

I'd like to think that the recipe was inspired by my grandparents' short years of living in Cuba in the 1920s, but my grandmother never cooked so I doubt she carried the recipe with her when they left (because the house blew down in a hurricane). As time passed, my mother simplified the recipe but it was a family staple--and it always included saffron.

Books . . . are coming. One in April, maybe (from Beyond the Page, still searching for a name), one in June (Murder at the Mansion, St. Martin's), September (also from Beyond the Page, and still nameless), and one in January 2019, which may have finally gained a name as of yesterday (The Lost Traveller, from Crooked Lane).

Rock and Roll Paella from guest Clea Simon

Please join us in welcoming our multi-talented and prolific guest author Clea Simon (and feline accomplice Musetta) for this recipe that has us drooling.

This is Musetta, not Clea

Rock and Roll Paella, from Clea Simon

Thirty years and two cats ago, I wrote my first recipe. I was not, as I am now, a mystery writer. Nor was I, as I have been at various points over a long (and somewhat checkered) career, a food journalist. What I was, at that point, was a freelance rock critic – an aspiring “scenester” looking to find my place in my post-college tribe of musicians, managers, fans, and assorted late-night-club denizens who called the Boston club scene home.

But when one of my colleagues decided to put together a “Rock and Roll Cookbook,” I was enthralled. Despite a diet that largely consisted of ramen and beer, I loved to cook. I’m not saying I was good at it, but I was trying, regaling friends with one-pot dinners of chicken stew and pasta and, on one memorable occasion, an absolutely inedible Thai curry (that’s when I learned the difference between coconut milk and coconut cream).

My contribution was something I called “Paella with Cat.” Not that I cooked with the cat, but because my then-feline, Cyrus, had a taste for human food, and anything made with chicken – not to mention shrimp – would have him underfoot and begging. Basically, it’s a simple take on a New York Times recipe – some hot sausage and saffron, shrimp and clams. Step two, though, was my own: “Remove visible fat from chicken. Feed to small cat.”

It’s probably no accident that once I started writing mysteries, both cats and rock and roll played prominent roles. The music is in the background of the books, these days, but “cats and crime and rock and roll” is still my catchphrase, at least for those first few Theda Krakow mysteries.

These days, I still make a version of this paella, as well, although my current feline, Musetta, has nothing but disdain for the human-food leavings that drove Cyrus wild. I’ve upgraded the recipe over the years: instead of water, I use a mix of clam juice, wine, and chicken broth. I like to use Arborio, or some other short-grain rice (bomba, if I can get it), for a proper, crispy socarrat, and I add some hot smoked paprika for zing. But I still blast the music while I’m cooking – Sleater-Kinney or maybe some vintage Bowie. Because that’s what makes it all good.

Revised Paella with Cat

Ingredients:
Olive oil
Two links chourico or other smoky, hot sausage
1 large onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4 teaspoon hot smoked paprika
bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon thyme
2 Tablespoon roasted chopped tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon saffron threads
1 cup white wine
1 cup clam juice
1 cup chicken broth
1 roast red pepper (jarred is fine), skin removed
a dozen littleneck clams
4 chicken thighs
1/2 lb of shrimp, peeled, deveined
salt/pepper to taste (start with 1 teaspoon salt

   and a healthy grind of pepper)

1. Put saffron up to steep in the wine

2. In olive oil, sauté the sausage until it releases its fat

3. In the fat and olive oil, brown the chicken. Remove the chicken after it has browned to make room in the pan.

4. Add the onion and garlic to the fat and sausage and sauté until translucent. Add bay, thyme, paprika, salt and pepper, and rice and let everything toast for a while

5. Add the chicken back, and then the liquids, including the wine/saffron mix.

6. Bring to a simmer. Let simmer 5 to 10 minutes

7. Lay clams and shrimp on top, and top with strips of red pepper.

8. Cover and put in hot oven for 15 minutes, until clams have opened and rice has absorbed all the liquid.

9. Taste for salt and pepper. Open a can for the cat. Enjoy.

Hungry, Musetta?

Clea Simon is the Boston Globe-bestselling author of 19 traditional/cozy mysteries in the Theda Krakow, Dulcie Schwartz, and Pru Marlowe pet noir series, most recently Code Grey (Severn House) and When Bunnies Go Bad (Poisoned Pen). This month, her 20th mystery, The Ninth Life (Severn), launched the Blackie and Care series. A former journalist, Clea lives in Massachusetts. Although her books are getting darker, they still always include a cat. She’s not sure why.

www.CleaSimon.com

 

Praise for When Bunnies Go Bad:

"Once again Simon’s wacky humor—darkish but surely not black—provides more than enough entertainment."
     -- Booklist

"From the wild humor of the title, to the wry conversations between animal behaviorist Pru Marlowe and her cat Wallis, every chapter of this new mystery is jammed with surprises and suspense."
     -- Kingdom Books

Find Bunnies at Amazon

 

Praise for The Ninth Life:

"Forget everything you think you know about 'cat mysteries.' The Ninth Life is a dark and gritty story of life on the streets."
     --New York Times­-bestselling author Joe Finder

"Compelling and utterly unique."
     --Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins
        Clark award winner

"A delight for anyone who relishes cat mysteries."
     -- Library Journal

Find it at Amazon





Or pick up a signed copy of either book at Harvard Book Store or Porter Square Books In Cambridge, MA