Claudia Roden's potaje de garbanzos y espinacas

(Chickpea and spinach stew)

For my birthday my Mum gave me Claudia Roden’s fabulous cookbook, The Food of Spain. I love this book because the recipes are real and unadulterated Spanish food. The other Spanish cookbooks I have are full of extravagant recipes that are difficult or very expensive to source ingredients for in London or which are too fiddly to make for anything other than a special occasion. Roden’s book is full of the kind of recipes Spanish people actually cook and eat regularly.

I have tried to replicate this Spanish staple several times before and, until now, it never tasted quite like it does in Spain. I have a good palate for detecting spices, and got close with that, but I would never have guessed that the key to it’s “rich texture” and “intriguing flavour” comes from a paste made of stale bread fried with garlic blended to a cream with hard-boiled egg yolks and stock.

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Cheaper by the oven's sausage, lentil and bacon stew

Updated on Wednesday, February 26, 2014 at 10:16PM by Vix

My fridge is almost completely empty. There are still plenty of jars of things, but nothing fresh other than milk. My cupboards are full of grains, pulse and spices and the freezer is stocked with various meats, but I usually like a bit of green with my red and brown so I am not even trying to be inspired to make a meal out of it.

Monday is usually shopping night, but I had a bit too much to drink over the weekend and was feeling lazy and tired. I also spent too much money, which paired with the big bills this month means I am on a bit of a budget.

In my lethargic state I spent the evening trawling the 100s of blogs in my Google reader drooling over dishes I had no intention of cooking or hope of eating any time in the near future... until I got to Cheaper by the oven.  

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Stephanie Alexander's Moroccan-inspired chicken

About halfway through making this dish I thought I might have another Dalmatian disaster on my hands. Part of me was thinking what a waste of good ingredients, while the other half of me was eagerly imagining the comic potential of another culinary catastrophe. In the end I was left disappointed on both fronts; I was able to save the dish from disaster but not from the dull and the ordinary, the result being that I still felt I had squandered good ingredients on a dish that turned out to be perfectly pleasant, but rather plain and where is the comic value in that?

So why, you may ask, am I sharing it with you? Faith. And a lack of it. 

Faith: This is the first time I have ever been disappointed with a recipe from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. It seems so unlikely that a recipe with so many sumptuous spices could fall flat. Caroline Dewe of the Mostly Undaunted Cook certainly rates it (“Love this dish”) calling her post ‘Thank you Stephanie: Morrocan inspired chicken’.

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