Sometimes the most gruesome of things that I cooked in my Spanish kitchen turned out to be the tastiest, and the day I got a surprise in my stock pot is no exception.
As we all know, some English people are under the illusion that Spain is hot ALL year round, which is complete nonsense.
Your ceramic tiles which are wonderfully cool in the height of summer, freeze your toes off in a cold December, whilst that one calor gas heater, that on arrival in Spain, you thought you'd NEVER need, just doesn't reach enough parts of your home.
I remember a freezing cold fog shrouding my town one year. It arrived on New Year’s Day and didn’t leave for a month. The chill seemed to seep right through to my skin, and it was grey, damp and miserable outside, for what seemed like forever.
In winter, I made a big pot of soup almost every day, this was so cheap and easy with bits and bobs of veg found for sale in doorways and the markets, throw in some cheap cuts of meat or poultry and it was like a little cup of comfort!
One thing that made soup making much easier was the availability of bones for stock. Every single supermarket and butchers had bones on display, either pre-packed or loose, pre roasted, or raw.
The Senora’s buy bones like a young English mum buys beans, usually a four pack, and certainly in my local area in Essex, I have never seen bones readily available in any shop.
Yes you can ask your local butcher, but who can find a local butcher these days? If you try asking at the mainstream supermarkets, an assistant looks at you as if you’ve requested arsenic, and walks away never to be seen again.
In England most housewives make stock from an Oxo cube, and does anyone really know what an Oxo cube is made from? No, me neither!
Back in Spain, I also discovered a little gem of a place that sold a bag of 5 large chicken heads for 1 euro. These were of course just the carcases, no beaks or feathers were involved, but my soup making skills cranked up several notches.
I really shouldn’t also admit that once softened from the cooking pot, and with little shreds of tasty chicken meat still attached, I became even more popular with my feline friends that I fed on a daily basis.
I know, I know, I shouldn’t. But I did it under cover of darkness, and nobody got hurt in the process, so please keep my nocturnal activities a secret.
Back to the soup. I must admit at this point that I am Miss Squeamish of Squeamish Towers. I can’t touch offal with my bare hands, and seeing a naked pre-packed rabbit makes me queasy, so getting the chicken head from the bag, into the saucepan involved a pair of tongs and a ‘look away now’ procedure.
Imagine my horror therefore, when one day, as I lifted the saucepan lid to look at my stock, amongst the celery, carrot and onion, a spooky, semi cooked, chickens eyeball stared right back at me.
It wasn’t a pretty sight, but that big pot of soup saw me through a good few days, in more ways than one!