Tag Archives: chorizo

Chorizo with butter beans, onion and spinach

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Chorizo, butter beans and spinach

I didn’t encounter chorizo until I left home. And even then, for years it was just a slightly exotic scarlet salami you’d buy in Sainsburys. Never the less, I cooked with it, making red beans and rice or scissoring fleshy slivers into a tomato sauce.

And then, on my 23rd birthday I got taken to Moro, Sam and Sam Clarke’s Iberian-cum-Moorish restaurant in London’s Exmouth Market and had my first real chorizo. My first bite was smoky, spicy, piquant, eye-popping doesn’t even come close. I thought I knew what chorizo was. I was wrong. Continue reading →

Spicy prawn, chorizo and tomato: a blast of Creole heat

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Spicy prawn and chorizo

Summer is hanging in there by its fingernails, clutching desperately at the fading light as nights start to close in. And you have to admire its gutsiness as temperatures remain stubbornly in the high teens.

This dish is an ideal way to pay some respect to the season, but also to bring some heat to your belly after dark. It’s bright, colourful and redolent of heady Latin nights. And, at the same time, manages to be warming and comforting. A dish for all seasons. Continue reading →

Warming chorizo, butter bean and tomato

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Chorizo and butter beans

The weather’s cold, snow is a-falling and we’re all freezing our nuts off (in a non gender specific way). This is the time to head in to culinary battle crying “God for Harry, England and a warming dinner”. Cold brings out the blood thirsty warrior in me.

And in the spirit of dear old Prince Hal, King Harry or whoever he was, I managed to find some chorizo made from English venison. A strong gamey sausage with all the smoky heat of a chorizo. Not quite as zingy or intense as the real McCoy. But interesting and it worked really well with this dish. Continue reading →

Chorizo, prawn and saffron risotto

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Spicy sausage and prawn risotto

I love paella, risotto, and jambalya – all products of very different cuisines, but all equally as wonderfully ricey, gooey and savoury. Ideal for a winter’s night. This dish has something of all of them about it. It’s closest to a risotto and uses Arborio rice for the base because it gives such a creamy-with-bite finish. But the mix of spicy sausage and prawns with chilli is definitely creole influenced and the chorizo and saffron give it a Spanish flavour as well. It probably fits in most comfortably with the New Orleans crucible of Spanish, African, French and Native American influenced cuisine. Continue reading →