Recipes from The Perils of Paella

Sole with Hazelnuts, Raisins, and Pine Nuts
Nancy Fairbanks

Noon to 3:00 and 7:00 to 10:00 are tapas hours in Spain, just when we Americans want to eat lunch or dinner, so we, unlike Spaniards, will do just that. I ate at a museum tapas café in Barcelona. It was a cross between a xampanyerie, which only serves cava and tapas, and a cervecería, which serves beer and tapas. The museum had several rounds of tapas, not all of which could be eaten off a toothpick (elsewhere the customer might be charged by the number of toothpicks he accumulated). We got plates of tapas and forks on one order and received a regular bill. Here is the recipe for a dish we liked:

• Soak ½ cup raisins for 20 minutes in a cup of warm water. Drain.
  
  
• Cut 1 &frac21; lbs. sole fillets (around 4) in half crosswise and dust with flour.
  
  
• Heat 3 tbs. ea. olive oil and butter in a large skillet. When butter just turns color, sauté fillets until golden on both sides. You may need to do it in two rounds with nore oil and butter, but do not overcook.
  
  
• Remove fillets to a warm serving platter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and garnish with 4 slices of lemon and 2 tbs. chopped parsley.
  
  
• Cool skillet a bit; add raisinsm 4 tbs. pine nuts, and 30 split hazelnuts* (filberts).
  
  
• Sauté slowly until pine nuts begin to turn golden. Pour this nut mixture along with any oil and butter remaining in the skillet over the fish and serve immediately.

*The hazelnut bush, having sheltered the Virgin Mary from a storm, not to mention later Christians who believed in its miraculous protection, is sacred in Catholic countries.

Carolyn Blue, "Have Fork, Will Travel." Salt Lake City News

More about The Perils of Paella
Nancy Fairbanks

While her husband gives an academic lecture nearby, Carolyn opts to spend time in Barcelona, soaking up the sights, eating out, and visiting her friend Roberta. Her first feast is for the eyes—a modern art museum where Roberta is a resident Miro scholar. There, Carolyn catches a performance art piece about death, planted a little too firmly in reality. One of the actors is not acting—she’s dead—as well as a dead ringer for Roberta. And now Carolyn is in the middle of a new investigation of a very unsavory crime, assisting the very reluctant Catalan homicide detective Ildefons Pujol i Serra, not to mention searching for Robbie’s runaway stepson Sammie and fending off local criminals.

ECard for Perils of Paella

(Culinary Mystery with Recipes)
Berkley (Prime Crime) , January 2004
Featuring: Carolyn Blue
304 pages ISBN: 042519390X
Paperback
$5.99

Also by Nancy Fairbanks:
Holy Guacamole! , November 2004
Chocolate Quake , April 2003
Death À L’Orange , June 2002
Truffled Feathers , December 2001
Crime Brûlée , April 2001

(Notify me via e-mail when Nancy Fairbanks releases a new book.)