Wednesday, February 08, 2012

Onions and Spanish Tortilla

I always grow onions and I always forget how long they take to be ready! My red onions were a raging success, but I only planted about a dozen ( why?!?) and they took about 10 months to grow to full size. What's that all about! However, they are beautiful.


Last night we had spanish tortilla for dinner and everything was homegrown. All our own eggs, all our own potatoes and our own onion. Things just taste that much better when you know you've done it all yourself, I reckon.
It was the best tortilla in the world.

I have a tortilla story. When I was about 11 or so we used to go to Lanzarote for our holidays - now Lanzarote then was pretty much undiscovered and it was ( and probably still is) beautiful. We used to stay in this villa right on the beach and just across the road was a cafe and every day we went there for a slice of tortilla. We did this for about 5 summers. We tried to replicate the tortilla at home but it was never the same. ( Years later mum and I went back to Lanzarote together and we searched out the wee cafe - it was still there - only now it was surrounded by more cafes and apartments - and it was still being run by the same family, it was lovely! We'd taken a photo with us that showed my brother and I as small kids with the owner and his family. He smiled so much when we showed it to him and there were hugs all round!)

Ok went off on a bit of a tangent there - back to the tortilla.

My best friend in Glasgow is Spanish and Diana taught me how to make a tortilla the proper Spanish way and guess what... it tastes just the same as the ones we had all those years ago.

So here's what you do

Ingredients
14 eggs
1kg of good potatoes
one large onion

Oil

A very large, deep frying pan

Making the tortilla.
Fill the pan to about half way with oil ( yep it's scarey!)
And heat up.

meanwhile peel the potatoes and thinly slice. I use the slicey thing on the food processor for this. Then rinse them to get rid of the starchiness.
Slice onion finely too.

Then add whole lot to the hot oil. and cook till potatoes are soft. You'll need to turn them around because you don't want them to go brown.

While this is going on put all the eggs into a LARGE bowl and beat.

Once the potatoes are soft remove them from the pan and drain off all the oil.

Then add the potatoes to the beaten eggs and mix. ( this is why it needs to be a LARGE bowl)
After that add the whole mixture back into the frying pan ( take all the oil out first!) low/medium heat
Cook till golden brown. About 5 minutes or so. You can finish the top off under the grill.

Flip out onto a huge plate.

In an ideal world it should still be slightly mooshy in the middle. You can also eat it cold. Totally wonderful!



8 comments:

  1. Your onions look wonderful. My oldest pal (from Edinburgh, but she has spent more of her life in Spain than here) makes awesome tortillas ("potato cakes", as we call them) which are as thick as slices of Victoria sponge, and great for lunch boxes. She chucks in a load of garlic and olives & equal quantities of potato/onion but you can include any of your favourite ingreds. The tortilla keeps well in the fridge and is delicious cold, but warms up well in the micro. The oil has to be spooned off before you try turning it upside down while hot onto a plate if you want to avoid your local Burns Unit :-)

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  2. Gorgeous photos Laura - I cant believe an onion could look so delicious!

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  3. It certainly looks delicious! And the beautiful red onion, now I can not wait to begin gardening!

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  4. Totally delicious! Pinned it!

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  5. Very impressive onion! And yes, I imagine it would be very scary to use half a pan of oil....what sort of oil did you use?

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  6. Loulou, you can use mild olive oil, I wouldn't use an expensive heavy one as it makes it taste too olive oily!

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  7. Mmmm... the tortilla looks yummo. I love your chairs Laura, colours are great too. Susan

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  8. Lanzarote has various tourist spots which you definitely shouldn't miss and AllThingsLanzarote.com could help you plan out your itinerary so that you could get to visit all of these during your stay at that beautiful island.

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Laura x