A super healthy and flavoursome recipe combining some extraordinary ingredients that come together to create the perfect comfort food for any wet and cold winter morning.
I never get used to London’s weather. It’s just not my kind of thing. Yet another Sunday morning and here I am, next to the window whilst looking at the foggy horizon and the wet streets… again. Days like today make me miss Spain.
Any positives? Definitely yes. Days like today also make me want to cook non-stop. These days are perfect for slow and earthy comfort cooking. Days to be patient and to squeeze every single drop of flavour that we can sneak from the very bottom of our saucepans.
That is why our recipe today is all about flavour. It combines two very unique products both with extraordinary attributes. Both great and both very different. On one side the beautiful black trumpets, with their subtle flavour and delicate aroma. A very special mushroom that when well cooked, becomes a superb ingredient. On the other side one of the world’s best products, the iberico ham.
With such amazing ingredients our only challenge will be respecting the balance between the two. Alternatively the strong personality of the iberico ham could easily overpower the much milder black trumpets. But fear not. Simply follow the recipe and enjoy this beautiful dish which hopefully you will retain in your memory for quite a bit of time.
INGREDIENTS
- For the stock:
- 1 Brown onion
- 1 Carrot
- 1 Leek
- 2 cloves Garlic
- 3 stalks Fresh parsley – roughly torn
- 4 peppercorns Black pepper
- 100 g Black trumpet mushroom
- For the chickpeas & rice:
- 400 g Tinned Spanish chickpeas
- 150 g Short-grain rice
- 75 g Iberico ham – diced
- 0.5 Brown onion – finely chopped
- 25 g Unsalted butter
- 2 tbsp Extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tsp Dry rosemary
- Salt
- Freshly ground black pepper
METHOD
- Put all the ingredients in a cooking pot and cover with cold water.
- Bring to boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Pour the stock into a saucepan through the sieve.
- Add the mushrooms to the broth and cook for an extra 10 minutes. Then take the mushrooms out, drain them, chop them and reserve both the mushrooms and the stock.
- Heat the oil in a cooking pot over a medium heat and cook the diced ham for a couple of minutes so that the oil becomes infused with the flavour of the ham. Take the ham out and reserve aside.
- In the same pot add the butter, then the chopped onion and sweat it until very soft.
- Pour the rice, the dry rosemary and stir constantly for around 3-4 minutes or until the rice grains becomes partially transparent.
- Then start pouring the stock little by little. The idea is to cook the rice in the same way we cook a risotto. Whenever the rice starts getting dry, keep adding a little bit more of extra stock. Keep stirring at all times in order to achieve the creamy texture we are after. Repeat the operation for around 15 minutes or until the rice is ‘al dente’.
- Finally add the iberico ham, the mushrooms and the tinned chickpeas. Mix thoroughly and cook for an extra 5 minutes so that all the flavours become perfectly blended and the rice reaches the perfect point.
- Serve it with a couple of Basque guindillas or ‘piparras’ on top. They go perfectly well with this recipe and you will love them!
Needless to say, if you do not have the time to make your own homemade stock, you can also use stock cubes.
Similarly, we have used tinned chickpeas for this recipe. I find high-quality tinned Spanish chickpeas fantastic. But of course, if you rather cooking your own chickpeas too, feel free to go ahead and do it.
