Everyday Experiments

Just made  my very first seafood paella a few hours back... and I managed to make it all from scratch!



I made this for a dear friend's glad-you're-well-from-influenza lunch. I was visiting and she had a whole lot of seafood stocked up in her fridge so I offered to make her seafood paella. I just made this on the fly, based on what I remembered my mom used to do when she makes the dish. Now I'm not really proud of my [selective] memory, but I think I managed to do justice to the meal.




Here's how I made everything:

1. Put in a pot the crabs (just 2 little ones in my case), a handful of mussels, and shrimp. Add about 3 cups water (I don't really measure when I cook) and a pinch of salt. Let boil in medium heat until the crabs are cooked. 
2. Set aside the crabs, mussels and shrimp. Take off the shrimp heads and skin from the cooked shrimp and add it to the broth. Let the broth simmer in low heat.
3. In a heated pan, add about a tablespoon or two of cooking oil. Simmer for a bit and then add about 3 cloves of garlic and sliced onions (we only have the small but tastier local variety here). Add a pinch of salt and pepper to flavor.
4. Saute the garlic and onions till the onions brown a bit. Add the skinned shrimp and sliced small squid and saute till they soak in a bit of the flavor. At this point I turned off the stove and removed the shrimp and squid from the mix. 
5. [Turn on the stove again and then] Add sliced tomatoes to the garlic and onions in the pan. Saute well. Add about a cup and a half of rice grains (you can add more, depending on your company) to the mix. Saute again for about a minute until the grains start to become less opaque.
6. Add the broth (strained, of course) to the pan. Pat the top of the mix so that it's flat. Cover the pan, making sure that it's only at medium-to-high flame. Let the rice cook for about 10 minutes. During this time you should try to move the pan around over the flame to make sure the heat is well distributed.  To make sure that the rice is properly cooked, remove the cover, get a couple of grains from below the top layer, and taste. It should have a hard-on-the-outside-but-cooked-on-the-inside (not raw) texture.
7. When the rice is cooked, remove the cover and lower the flame. Arrange the crabs, shrimp, squid, and mussels on top. Let it simmer for a bit just to get the seafood warm again. Then serve on a platter.

Yeah, I had initially wanted to serve everything straight from the pan. My friend insisted though that if I'm posting it online I might as well present it more nicely in a platter. So we had to take out all the seafoods from the top again and rearrange everything in the big serving plate. I like food better straight from the pan though. Here's how it all initially looked like: