romesco sauce

romesco
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

Sometimes I really feel like cooking, but am not sure what. I grab some cooking books on the shelf and start turning pages, flipping from one recipe to the other, trying to imagine the taste as you do so. Then you start combining things, and flipping even more pages, and getting very excited, up to the stage that you want to cook EVERYTHING you just read, mixing dishes in your mind until you become kind of dizzy and have to stop. Then I put the books away and suddenly feel like just making one very simple dish. And.. yes. I found this one in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, which I like, but I never really cooked anything out of. That happens. Quite a lot with my cookbooks actually. Which doesn't mean I bought the wrong ones, but some cookbooks are just for reading, and the others make you cook. So... Madhur said she couldn't live without this Spanish sauce, called romesco. I was intrigued. So.. I toiled in the kitchen for quite some time, roasting 4 onions, 8 garlic cloves, 6 tomatoes in a hot oven for about 30 minutes (take out tomatoes and garlic after 10 mins or so), and simmering a dried chile de ancho in red wine vinegar for 10 minutes, too. The tomatoes and skinned chile were passed through a sieve, and the onions and garlic had to have their black bits removed, and everthing was whizzed in a food processor with about 60 grams of roasted almonds and about 6 tablespoons of olive oil. The mixture smelled delicious, deep, wooden, a whiff of the dark vinegar, the nutty taste of the roast garlic... very special! I turned the oven on again, this time to roast some vegetables - I should have read better, because I could have made it in one go, but ... well. That happens, too. I have a huge bowl of sauce with I froze immediately and which I will take out for a dinner party or other festive occasion! This would be great with no knead bread, too...