03 July 2010
Pork and Paella
(The Maine Avenue Warf, Washington, DC. Photo Amantio di Nicolao)
They can tap-dance around the numbers all they want. The Dutch put the only numbers they needed on the board against Brazil, and I will be damned if America doesn’t seem to be interested. Shoot, I haven’t turned on the television during the day since the pool opened and I have it on now, waiting for Germany versus Argentina.
Someone I know likes #22 on the Deutscher National Team, so I have to stay up on how he does in abwehr.
The news about the big win by the Dutch- the Boers, if you will- in Africa came after the numbers roll-out. The news cycle called for something for everyone to forget about over the long weekend. The numbers on unemployment sucked, even if the Administration tried to put a positive spin on them.
83,000 private-sector jobs were added in June according to the Labor Department, and the unemployment rate declined to 9.5 percent, from 9.7 percent tallied in the month before.
More than a half million Americans left the workforce, and the hundred thousand plus bogus Census jobs evaporated. Housing prices dropped dramatically, factory orders took their steepest stumble in months. All of it smells to me like the start of a double-u shaped recession, and the next reporting period will shape the way the electorate thinks about the mid-term elections.
One of my pals out west wrote to tell me what was happening right here in Our Fair City.
“The Democrats seem determined to comit mass political suicide,” he wrote. “The House of Representatives has refused to pass a budget resolution. They think that will keep them from being held accountable for their reckless spending. No budget, no vote on the record, right?”
I shook my head. I have not been paying attention. Apparently last night 215 of distinguished congressmen voted to "deem" the Fiscal 2011 budget to have passed without their actually being a budget and without voting on the non-existent budget resolution.
I don’t know that a drive to fiscal responsibility is the right thing to do at the moment after the orgy of stimulus spending that does not appear to have had a lasting impact. All the smart people are saying that FDR’s attempt to stop the hemorrhage of deficits prolonged the Depression by years.
But it was irresponsibility and greed that got us here, and it seems implausible to me that allowing the Appropriations Committees to make up a budget out of pork is the way out of anything.
So, pork was on my mind and very much on the menu. I decided to try the communal grill here at Big Pink, and thought about something to cook that would be festive and fun for the holiday and take my mind off the shenanigans downtown.
As you may have noticed, we have been working on a Mediterranean theme of late for the summer table. Matt contributed the best goddamn gazpacho recipe; Joe kicked in a dynamite Sangria recipe to wash it down, and you can’t blame me for thinking the Maine Avenue Warf could kick in a main course.
The "the Fish Wharf" is one of the few surviving open air seafood markets on the east coast. It is the oldest continuously operating fish market in the United States, 17 years older than New York City's Fulton Market. The Warf is still basically where it has always been, and Fulton fled Manhattan and relocated to the Bronx five years ago.
I-395 looms over Maine Avenue, and most of tourists miss the Warf, though it is only blocks away from the museums on the Mall. There are ten barges that line the pier, a tribute to the original distribution system in which fishing boats would shuttle sixty miles up and down the Potomac to Colonial Beach on the Chesapeake, where the fishing smacks scoured the Bay.
In the 1960s, refrigerated trucks became more efficient and the old water highway was abandoned to bun fossil fuel and the "buy boats” of old were replaced by the steel barges that house the fishmongers today.
The original Municipal Fish Market building was razed about the same time the reefer trucks took over the seafood distribution, but the vendors refused to leave and exercised a clause in their leases allowing them to stay for 99 years. To accommodate the stubborn merchants, Congress (which ran the District then) authorized the construction of Municipal Pier for the market underneath the I-395 12th Street off-ramp, to service the new floating barges.
It is a breeze to get to on a weekend, or at least when they are not attempting to rebuild the disintegrating 14th Street Bridge across the river, and I decided to go down and score mussels, clams, shrimp and squid to make some paella for the long weekend.
Seafood paella is probably the most famous and popular Spanish dish around the world. They say it originated in Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, in the area between Barcelona and Murcia known for dishes based on rice. We had several varieties on a long drunken port visit when the Berlin Wall was falling, and I have had a fondness for tapas and garlic mayonnaise and paella ever since.
There are no rules for paella and there are as many varieties as there are cooks.
Here is mine, and it is a perfect diversion from impending market declines and a double-u shaped recession, straight from the Maine Street Warf:
Vic’s Seafood Paella:
(This serves about a dozen drunken people)
1 Vidalia onion, diced
2 medium Beefsteak (or legacy) tomatoes, diced
1 whole chicken or 8 chicken drumsticks
1 1/2 lbs pork loin (fat trimmed), cut into ¾ inch pieces
1/2 lb calamari (squid) cleaned and sliced into rings
Medium grain or "pearl" rice
4-6 cups chicken broth
1 large pinch Saffron
1 1/2 lbs raw fresh mussels in shell (frozen, if you can’t get to the Warf)
1 lb small clams (ditto)
1 1/2 lbs raw large tiger shrimp - shell on- (I like Jesse Taylor’s barge for them)
1 red pepper seeded and sliced
1 10 oz. pkg frozen peas
Extra virgin olive oil
Ground Sea Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste
Preparation:
* The exact quantity of rice will depend on the size of the pan, so just make a bunch. I use the trusty Zojirushi rice cooker on the counter.
Cut the chicken and pork into serving-size pieces to sauté. Take one of the good knives and dice the pork into 3/4" pieces, which is much smaller than what the Congress does.
Clean the squid and remove the tentacles. Make sure to remove the innards and the "spine" and discard. Then, cut the squid into rings.
Slice red pepper and chop onions and tomatoes, set aside.
Now that you have the ingredients cleaned and chopped, it's time to start the BBQ and begin cooking. Assemble all the ingredients on a table near the BBQ, so that you can stay in the area and monitor the cooking. I brought a folding card table, ice, and equipment to construct cocktails as required.
Place the paella pan on the grate and add enough olive oil to coat the bottom and allow the pan to heat up. When hot enough, sauté the onions and tomatoes in the olive oil. Add olive oil as needed to prevent sticking. Once the onions are translucent, add the chicken and cook, stirring constantly and drinking steadily for about 15 minutes. Add pork and squid and cook, stirring often.
Add the rice, sprinkling in the form of a large cross on the pan. Stir for a couple minutes to thoroughly coat the rice with oil and mix with the other ingredients.
Add saffron threads to the chicken broth and stir. Slowly pour broth into pan until pan contents are covered. Spread ingredients evenly over bottom of pan.
Arrange mussels around outside edge of pan, pointing up. Place clams and shrimp in pan, distributing them evenly around the pan. Add slices of pepper on top.
Allow to simmer, cooking rice. Add more broth if necessary. (If fire becomes too hot, raise the pan up, away from the heat and have a drink. You have earned it) When rice is almost cooked, sprinkle peas over the pan.
When rice is cooked, remove from heat and cover with aluminum foil or large tea towel, allowing paella to “rest” for 5 to 10 minutes before serving.
Slice lemons into wedges and serve.
Happy 4th of July!
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!