Bitchin' Kitchen Thursday

I know I've been MIA lately. Sorry. I mostly PA TV series' and features these days, but lately I've been working a few commercials. The jobs are shorter day-wise, the days are longer hour-wise, but the pay is about $50 more/day than TV or feature jobs and the long hours can easily turn into double days, so the checks go a little further. I can't really go into any of the details this publicly without the threat of getting sued, but I hope that clarifies things a bit. Onto this week's recipe.

I lived in Barcelona for a summer about 7 years ago and have since returned twice, though I wish more. I lived in Segovia the following Spring. My two favorite tapas (Translation: snackies) were croquetas (Translation: croquettes) [Pronounced like the sport croquet with a -TAHS ending] and flautas [fl-OWW-tahs]. This week I will show you how to make two kinds of flautas, one vegetarian and one not.

The name flauta comes from the Spanish word for flute. The Castillian flauta is not to be confused with the Mexican flauta, which is like a large taquito and, incidentally, looks more like a flute than its Castillian counterpart, which is so named after the thin bread used to make it. The Castillian flauta is a bocadillo [boke-ah-dee-yo] or sandwich.

Castillian Flautas

For both kinds of flautas, you will need:

A thin, crunchy baguette 

Very ripe tomatoes

A little olive oil

If it's a long baguette, cut it into halves or thirds. Split the halves or thirds like the above picture, exposing the white. At this point, I like to rub a halved garlic clove on the bread, but that's just me. Drizzle a little olive oil onto the white sides of the bread. Cut the tomatoes in half and mush their centers into the bread and olive oil. Rub the tomatoes up-and-down the bread, covering each slice until they look like the ones above.

For the main ingredient, choose:

Cheese (Idiazabal)

-or-

Ham (Jamon Iberico)

and enjoy!!

I will try to be more blog-involved next week. I HAVE been reading all of your blogs, just not commenting as much lately because I've been reading from my Blackberry. It's a new model that I'm not used to and I have trouble doing much else with it right now, but I'll get better! 

Mahalo.