Paella,... my easy way

- a large pan; the one I use is a 28 cm or 11 inch large cast aluminium one with a glass lid. Works perfectly. You want to buy a real paellera or pealla pan, please do.

- rice; use risotto rice (arboria, carnaroli...) or a good Spanish round rice. The one I use is this Spanish brand "Garrido" who offers what they call "special paella" rice. Garrido also produces a wide range of dried beans.

- saffron; don't go cheap, you need real saffron! You only need the amount as shown in the little box. I bought this Spanish saffron in a Maroccan shop. That's 0,25 gram, for which I paid around 2,5 euro. However, I did use both the paper bags in the picture, they are the oldest in my pantry; they contain only around 0,15 grams, also Spanish origin.

One good advise on paella; keep it simple! Ristrict the amount of other ingredients to be in balance with the amount of rice. Secondly, choose ingredients that really go together well. Chicken and seafood is such a fantastic combination and foodpairing, often used in paellas!! This easy paella has some utterly delicious sweetness and taste coming from the seafood and the peas.

If you have a good fishmonger, do buy seafood from him, but this is not the main purpose of this thread. The objective here is to make your life easy like I did in this recipe; use frozen stuff! What you need from the freezers; peas, a bag of mixed seafood (mussels, calamares, baby squid tentakels, shrimp...). I got the worse I ever bought. Normally it contains what I just summed up, but this one had surimi in the mixture (aaarrrhhhggg) but no calamares. Ah well, even now the paella tasts fantastic! I also had a chickenbreast in my own freezer. The shrimp in their shell was fresh but I'm sure you can buy them frozen as well, even in different sizes like those stunning large gambas. Best to let all frozen stuff thaw a little in your refrigerator, a few hours before you start the paella. It's a good idea to do the whole set-up aka 'mise en place' first. Paella rice needs only 20-25 minutes cooking time, so prep first and the frozen stuff has to be somewhat thawed or they will not be cooked properly!

Ingredients I used; 2 ordinary coffeecups of rice, 5 coffeecups of chickenstock heated with a good pinch of saffron in it, 1 chickenbreast cut in chunks, 1/2 red onion (do minimize the onion and use sweet red onion!), 2-3 cloves of garlic, 1/2 fresh red chili pepper, 1/2 fresh green chili pepper, 1/2 red bell pepper peeled and sliced. Also; 2 fistfulls of peas, 2 large fistfulls of mixed seafood, 10 unpeeled shrimps. s&p. All this is plenty paella for a nice 2 persons portion!

Be sure to start the chickenstock heating up with the saffron well before you start the paella! Bring it to a light boiling and add the unpeeled shrimp for no more than 10 seconds. Remove the shrimp and preserve. When you forgot to thaw the peas and seafood, do the same thing; put them each for 10 seconds in the boiling stock.

Start on high fire to fry the chicken. s&p! When done, remove from the pan.

In the same pan, on lower fire, sweat onion, garlic, green and red chili. When done, move to the side of the pan. Add the rice and let fry just a while. Mix with the onion, garlic and chili. Distribute this mixture over the whole surface of the pan.

Gently add 3/4 of the chickenstock. Do NOT stir!!! Set an alarmclock to 25 minutes, that's how long rice has to cook. So, the whole dish is finished in the next 25 minutes. At half that cooking time (10 minutes), without stirring the rice, spread on top of the rice; the chicken, the red bell peppers, the slightly thawed peas and the seafood. The last 5 minutes of cooking time; gently fold the whole mixture. Add the unpeeled shrimp on top of the preparation.

At the end of the cooking time, do check the seasoning for s&p and acidity, you could add a few drops of fresh lemonjuice! Serve and add a quartered lemon.

This is another thread in which I'm trying to show to people that dishes like this are easier than it all seems. Also check this simple to cook at home 'tajine without a tajine' recipe; http://foodsoftheworld.activeboards.net/tajine-sans-tajine-the-easy-diy-approach_topic2171.html