Yay for Spain Soup

The perfect storm of events brings you today's Yay For Spain Soup, aka, Paella Soup.  Firstly, Liz's bachelorette party was on Friday, we went out for yummy Spanish food (among other things) and split some paella. I,(stupidly) loaded up on the fantastic Spanish potatoes before the paella made it to the table and was too full to eat all the paella I wanted to eat. Secondly, Spain just won the World Cup (as in 10 minutes ago) and I thought a nice soup-homage to them was in order. Side note - I actually made this soup this morning, before the game was even played, because I was pretty sure Spain was going to win, and because some people have Sunday Fun Days in which they do fun things like drink sangria or get brunch, whereas my Sunday Fun Day involves four hours of cooking stuff or prepping stuff to be cooked for my week. Alas, this is why I am 'No Fun Erin'. Anywho, here's some Yay for Spain - Paella Soup.

For this adaptation of a classic Spanish dish, you'll need: saffron, some dry white wine, 2 red peppers, 1 large onion, 2 cloves of garlic, some rice, some hot smoked paprika, about a pound of chorizo, 4-6 cups of broth and peas. Notably missing from my ingredient list are the classic seafood items found in traditional paella.  I'm not a giant fan of most of the seafood that goes into paella and I hate, hate, hate, hate is when people heat up stinky food in the work microwave. Seafood is always stinky food when reheated so I leave it out. If you want to add it in, be my guest.

To start, grind up enough saffron threads to produce 1/4 teaspoon of crushed saffron.  A few words about saffron: Yes, it is expensive; Yes, you may have trouble finding it; No, you should not leave it out. I found this little package of 0.02 ounces of saffron (which was nicely wrapped in gold paper, how festive!) at Cost Plus World Market for $5. I probably could have hunted through my local international farmer's market to see if they had it cheaper, but the market near me stocks primarily Mexican and Asian foods and the people who work there don't speak much English. For the Atlanta peeps, of course Your Dekalb Farmers Market has saffron, but they hide it in the bakery and you have to ask for it (you all can thank CJ for that tip, I had no idea). I used this fancy mortar and pestle to grind mine, If you don't have one you can probably just use a spoon or something hard and flat. It ground up pretty easily.

Next, soak the saffron threads in 1/2 a cup of dry white wine.  Try your best to keep this liquid off of any light surfaces, unless of course you like to color things an orangey-yellow.

Now, get to chopping. I started with coarsely dicing the two red peppers and one onion. They can hang out in a bowl together.

Then, mince two cloves of garlic. I'm fairly certain that every single recipe on this blog contains this pictures. I may start leaving it out. Or using ridiculous bowls to store the garlic in. I must have something more exciting than this prep cup.

Next, I opted to cook my chorizo, with the intent of being able to slice it into nice even chorizo rounds so that I wouldn't have crumbled bits of chorizo chunks in my soup. As you'll see later, this didn't work out as planned.  Regardless, using the same pot you'll later use to make the soup, cook the chorizo. No need to add any oil to the pot, the chorizo will give up some fat as it cooks so it won't stick.  Mine took about 3 minutes on each side, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't cooked all the way through when I took it off the heat. A few words about this chorizo - it came from the international farmer's market and was prepared freshly there. It is spicy and delicious and quite fatty, but I'm okay with all of those things. If you can't find chorizo where you are, try some other spicy sausage. I would just stay away from the typical Italian sausages that you can find everywhere.

Once the chorizo is cooked, set it aside to cool. Add to the already hot pot the peppers and onion. Yes, this is another action shot. If you look closely in the pot you can see the some little red pools of fat in the bottom from the chorizo. That's good stuff, don't get rid of those fat pools. Cook for about 5-8 minutes

Next, add the garlic, saffron/wine mixture and 1 cup of rice.  I opted for a short grain brown rice today. If this were a true paella I probably would have used arborio because arborio is my favorite but I feared it would soak up too much broth. Cook until the wine is all soaked up.

Meanwhile chop the cooked chorizo.  As previously alluded to, my best laid intention of slicing the chorizo into nice, even, pretty rounds was a failure. I ended up with some sliced pieces and some chunks. I'm okay with this. Clearly I can't cook sausage. Or I can't slice sausage.  This picture makes my cutting board look like a bloody mess, but trust me that's just chorizo spices and fat finding there way all over my kitchen.

By now, the wine should be all soaked up by the rice. Add 4-6 cups of broth and the chorizo to the soup pot. Stir it up, increase the heat to bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for at least 40 minutes or until the rice is cooked . After it has simmered for about 10 minutes give the broth a taste and add some salt, pepper or hot smoked paprika. 

Once you've simmered your soup for what will seem like a ridiculously long time and your entire house has a lovely aroma of chorizo permeating it, possibly to the point at which your husband asks you if you can make that smell into an air freshener (true story, and not the most ridiculous thing Brian said to me this weekend), add in the peas.  I used about a cup of frozen peas. Give the soup a good stir and cook for just another minute or so.

This soup tastes lovely with a little topping of basil chiffonade. It is also a little fatty. Mine probably turned out excessively fatty on account of getting chorizo from the farmers market and not some mass-produced product, but I'm okay with that. I'm going to use a food term I hate here, so please don't judge me on this: this soup has excellent mouth feel on account of the fat. Something about it is oddly comforting despite the fact that it's a quite spicy soup. Enjoy!

After eating this soup for a few days, I've learned a few things: 1) I should have removed the chorizo from the casing and cooked it as ground meat. I think that would have helped prevent little fatty bits of unedibleness from making their way into my soup; 2) People (Brian, CJ, Shmy) have all raved about this soup. Brian has called it the best soup I've ever made; 3) But I don't think I like it very much at all.  I just struggled to eat my one cup lunch serving. I think it's just too rich for this girl's blood. In an highly uncharacteristic move, I may not eat this soup every day for lunch this week because I honestly don't think I can stomach another serving. I may even (gasp!) have to go out for lunch instead.