The 12 Weeks of Christmas: Week 2-Spain

Week 2 was supposed to be the Iberian Peninsula, but Portugal's recipe was a huge and incredibly disappointing fail, so it's been left over and now it's just Spain. I'm not going to bother sharing the recipe that failed spectacularly. I'm not going to share the tale of the week I spent making the candied pears that ended up being cold and slimy, or the candied oranges, which did turn out ok. I will share that recipe down the line, if I end up using them for something else that manages to turn out ok. I'm just disappointed and a little bitter that I spent a week prepping for this and all day working on a recipe that is now currently sitting in the compost pile waiting to be taken out. Sigh...Ok, enough feeling sorry for myself. Let me share the recipe that did work out!

(Source: Britannica.com)

 Spanish Tortilla

This is a very simple, basic, and well-known Spanish recipe. It's called a tortilla, but it's really an omelet. A potato and onion omelet. I've never made one over the years, even though I've always wanted to try it. I decided this was the year to make it.

So, you chop the onions and slice the peeled potatoes and sprinkle them generously with salt. The potatoes need to be sliced really thin.

It's supposed to be all olive oil, but I didn't have enough so I supplemented with vegetable oil for the rest. You're not really frying the potatoes, you're basically boiling them in the oil slowly. When the potatoes are that thin, it doesn't take too long to cook them, which is nice.

Post cooking, removed from the oil with a slotted spoon and left out to cool down. I added more salt at this point, as well. I was left with a lot of leftover oil which I couldn't in good conscience just get rid of, so I'll probably use it to make hash browns until it's all used up.

When the potatoes are cool, you pour in the mixed eggs and stir together well.

Then, into the frying pan it goes, with a little bit of oil. Now, I was supposed to use a clean, large nonstick frying pan, but I chose to use the same pan I cooked the potatoes in, which isn't a non-stick pan, and had potato and onion bits in it still, so I knew pretty much the outcome of this. I did it anyway.

As you can see, the result is more of a scramble after you flip it to cook the other side. The good news is, a scramble and a proper omelet taste exactly the same, so it doesn't really matter in the long run!

This tasted really good and would make a good breakfast or brunch dish. I think the idea of a Christmas brunch sounds amazing and a dish like this would be really easy to throw together on Christmas morning.

This made a lot, and I will be eating the leftovers for dinner tomorrow night and lunch throughout the week! 

Well, hopefully next week's recipes won't fail so badly on me as the first recipe did for me today. At least I have some deliciousness to look forward to this week!

Feliz Navidad!