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Una semana de Espana
By Ann | January 22, 2008
This week at Cooking the Books, we take a look at Moro: The Cookbook by Sam and Sam Clark. Moro means moor in Spanish, and it is also the name of the Clarks’ popular Spanish-North African restaurant in Islington.
The cookbook, which I purchased last June, is filled with intriguing recipes for Spanish/North African/Eastern Mediterranean food, “a heady blend of Arabic and Hispanic dishes that offer warm spices and fiery sauces, slow-cooked earthy stews and delicate flavourings,” to quote the back cover. Does it live up to the promise? I devised a Moro dinner party to find out.
We began with tapas, including a potato and egg tortilla (not my finest effort as it initially stuck to the pan, and I had to perform some emergency cooking surgery), some amazing Manchego cheese with quince paste, grilled chicken wings with tahini — very simple, lovely, smoky tahini-cumin-paprika flavor, but very messy — and chickpea salad (photo above), a refreshing, crunchy, picante mix of chickpeas, diced cucumber and tomato, with the heat of chili and freshness of cilantro and mint. I just finished the last of the chickpea salad for lunch, and was quite sorry to see it end. I hesitate to even admit this, but I also served prosciutto instead of jamon iberico, which, though it is no longer outlawed in the United States, is still pretty darn hard (eg impossible) to find.
NEXT: No chorizo or calasparra rice in sight. The curse of special ingredients.
Topics: Cooking the Books |
One Response to “Una semana de Espana”
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January 22nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
To be consistent and remain on message, we tried a Rioja wine to accompany the meal — it was decent and reasonably priced but not super memorable. What are the secrets of Spanish wine? How should we go about finding the right Rioja in the future instead of merely label-gazing? Meanwhile, Ann forgot to mention the incredibly delicious roasted red peppers, which paired perfectly with the prosciutto, olives and other tapas treats.