Paella

• 500g boneless, skinless chicken thighs
• 500g arborio rice
• 1l chicken stock
• 3 bell peppers
• 1 onion
• 1 Spanish chorizo
• Garlic, paprika, saffron, salt, pepper to taste

Preheat a large frying pan with a lid to medium-high. Chop the chicken into bite-sized pieces, season with salt and pepper, begin frying (stirring to avoid burning, but overcooking isn’t a huge risk with chicken thighs, which stay juicy even at higher temperatures than breast). Add chunks of chorizo (I like to do slices, then cut the slices in half). Dice and add the onion and pepper, and fry until the onion is translucent – no need to brown it. Add the rice and crushed or minced garlic, continue frying for a minute or two, then add the stock, a lot of paprika (I mean it – more than you think), and a few strands of saffron (or turmeric if necessary – it’s mostly for colour). Cover and simmer on medium-low for about twenty minutes, tasting towards the end for seasoning. Serve and enjoy. The crunchy bits at the bottom are the best.

A wise chef with far too many names recently said words to the effect of: “If you’re surrounded by good friends, regardless of the food itself, you’ve already won.” I’m becoming a bit of a foodie, but I hope I never lose sight of how right he is. I love a good dinner party, and I love going to the effort of making a special meal – the more components and the more involved it is, the better. I love making a roast for this reason: it’s a balancing act of fitting all the dishes in the oven, timing everything to perfection, making sure that nothing burns or is undercooked, and managing increasing levels of stress and inebriation as the ETA is pushed back and the bottle of wine becomes emptier.

To date, I’ve not delivered a single roast on time. But that’s not really the point, is it?

But this isn’t about roasts, it’s about paella. My approach to paella is almost the opposite of my approach to carbonara. Carbonara is a food which I make in a highly traditional, authentic way – though that’s largely because it tastes the best, rather than out of any respect for a particular culinary tradition. My paella – the version outlined above – is totally inauthentic, as far as I’m aware. It’s missing some key ingredients, and it’s gained some stragglers along the way. Nonetheless, it’s a truly delicious meal.

More importantly, it diverges from carbonara in the way I enjoy it. For me, carbonara is largely a solitary dish, and represents the Emersonian ideal of self-reliance: it’s important to me that I can cook a proper meal for myself, that I can look after myself and live a good life without necessarily relying on the presence of others. Occasionally I’ll cook a two-portion carbonara, but any more than two people and I simply prepare a different meal. If it must be a pasta with white sauce, I tend to go for a tagliatelle alfredo with mushrooms, served alongside foccacia and pesto – again, not a very traditional approach, but that’s not my priority.

Paella, in contrast, is a social meal. I learned to cook it with friends, and it’s best when friends are there to help throughout both the eating and the preparation. The key ingredient, which every other recipe fails to mention, is Good Vibes.

I should mention at some point – and that point might as well be here, lest I forget entirely – that although I’ll be referring to the dish in question as “my paella”, it’s not really mine at all. In the spirit of this post, it was actually developed with friends. It begin with my housemate and his girlfriend cooking up a storm; that was my introduction to paella. The girlfriend has since departed, but the dish has remained (as did many of her toiletries). This housemate and I, along with another friend of ours, have now co-opted this dish. It’s been the subject of much experimentation, including different ingredients, methods, timings, and more. We’re the sort of friendship group that thrives on projects, and paella has been one of them.

It all begins with the prep. In fact, no – it begins with the trip to Tesco. That probably makes it sound like an errand, but it’s really more like a dance, a delicate ritual which must be undertaken even though the outcome is predetermined. It may not be mentioned in the recipe above, but part of our particular paella tradition is the inclusion of artichokes. Obviously, we don’t buy whole, fresh artichokes, but a jar of artichoke hearts marinated in oil. These ingredients were initially added at the behest of one of our number, insisting that his mother always included it, and it was therefore authentic. The veracity of this claim has yet to be established, but they do taste good, and we enjoy the dance, of which this closing flourish has become an essential component.

So we move to the kitchen. The vibe is, by this point, truly established. The division of labour has become clear. One person handles the meat, another handles the stock, and another the veg. Of course, the stock is quite a low-effort role, so this person will typically also handle the music, and sometimes the artichokes (which are a bit fiddly, because the oil makes them slippery lil suckers, and it’s hard to cut them all into appropriately-sized pieces). The mise en place is thus set, and the cooking can begin in earnest.

Once the individual components have been fried, the stock is added, and the game becomes one not of activity, but of waiting. In some ways, this is the best bit. We watch the pan to ensure it doesn’t boil over, but sadly, a pan is apparently ontologically distinct from a pot, and watching it doesn’t prevent it from boiling over. This could be achieved by simply adding the stock in two instalments, but that’s less fun.

Waiting for the rice to be cooked through, and for all the stock to be absorbed, is an agonising experience. You may think that doing something as a group is the best way of building camaraderie, but I must respectfully disagree. Doing something as a group is the second-best way of building camaraderie, after doing nothing. Bonus points if you’re all very hungry for this period, and you know that a delicious meal awaits at the end, because you’ve just spent around 45 minutes preparing it for its brief yet tantalising time simmering.

So what do you do for those twenty minutes? It’s simple: you shoot the breeze. Typically, this will essentially be a continuation of the time spent cooking, But sometimes we’re entertaining others – we’ve made paella for a group of nine in the past. On these occasions, the game is important. These twenty minutes give an opportunity to integrate the guests, bring the music through to the dining room, and open the wine (if I haven’t already skipped ahead to this step or, more accurately, brought this step forward). Either way, the breeze must be exterminated with extreme prejudice, or you risk it becoming an icy breeze – and take it from me, breaking ice is much more difficult than shooting a breeze.

Eventually, after an eternity in purgatorio (not that cooking is inferno, though the heat of a kitchen does make this an appealing metaphor), we emerge into paradiso. We bring the pans through, and generous portions are served. Everyone tries to get as much chorizo as possible, while trying not to look like they’re doing that, and while everyone tries not to pay too much attention to how much chorizo they’re taking. More wine is poured, and the music begins to meld into the sounds of laughter – often slightly awkward, uncomfortable laughter in response to a slightly-too-edgy joke, but that’s what friends are for.

Almost every time I’ve eaten paella, it’s been in a house built in the mid-twentieth century and left largely in its original condition (but without any of the charm that would be present in an older house). But, somehow, that’s never mattered. Nor has it mattered when the crispy bits at the bottom have gone slightly beyond crispy and entered the realm of burned. It’s a cliché, but food truly does have the effect of transporting you – in my case, a place I’ve never even been, to a small restaurant on the coast of Spain, where we’re all wearing linen shirts and eating outside in the summer, rather than donning hoodies and preparing to brave the Scottish winter at the end of the night.

Of course, I’d love to be in that place I imagine. But the most important bits of that place are with me already: the friends, and the food. It’s cliché, it’s saccharine, and it’s entirely true. We do the dance, we play the game, and we bring the Good Vibes with us. Paella is important for that, certainly, but it’s just a medium for all of this to be expressed. Its role is almost a social one – if I were to write a novella about this, rather than just a blog post, I’d consider the paella a character. I mean, all the English students would hate me for it, but I’d do it anyway.

Because that’s the thing, really. Food is important to us because it’s a character. Date night meals, midnight snacks, dinner party dishes: in each of these contexts, we’re building a cast of characters, and that’s just as true for the food that we make as it is for the people we invite. If we really stretch this metaphor, perhaps more than it really ought to be stretched, we could even say that this is why it doesn’t really matter if the food is burned, or late. Just because your friend arrives slightly late or poorly dressed doesn’t mean they’re incapable of contributing to the Good Vibes. The meal is a member of the cast, but if the cast is good, you’ve already won.

I think that’s why paella is so important to me. It holds an important place, certainly, in my mental recipe book. But adjacent to my mental recipe book is the volume in which I store my philosophy of life. Food, and particularly paella, features heavily in this tome, too. Paella comes from a time when I was leaning on my friends in a way that was new to me. It’s a supporting character in some of the most wonderful scenes from the past couple of years, and I’m sure it will feature in many more as time goes on. Paella is an intrinsically social meal for me, and it stands as the counterbalance to the independence I associate with carbonara. If carbonara reminds me that I can provide for myself, well, paella reminds me that I don’t have to.