Spain | The Foodie Pilgrim

By John, 6 August, 2025

Spanish Summer Beach Dinner

"openers for the Spanish summer feast" On Sunday, 3 August 2025, we had our friends the Quinlans and the McKinnons over for a Spanish summer beach dinner. We started in the living room with the:

Aperitivo

Licor 43, chilled, in ponies and a pitcher of Sangría
Two chorizo: common and Iberico
Jamon
Three cheeses:
- Manchego, the classic sheep's milk cheese of Spain's La Mancha region
- Ptit-Basque, a sheep's milk cheese in the style of the Basque mountain cheeses of the Pyrenees
- Drunken Goat, a newer tradition, a goat's milk that is liberally bathed in wine after it is made. It is not a washed-rind cheese.
Fig jam and Marcona almonds
Three kinds of tinned Spanish seafood: octopus, razor clams, and scallops. These are trendy these days. They are far superior to the Brunswick sardines on toast of my youth, but they are also quite expensive!

The Main Course

By John, 5 August, 2023

"Spanish Olive Oil lemon cake" I needed a cake to finish a paella dinner, so I searched for something Spanish. I found a whole class of citrus and olive oil cakes (Spanish cooking doesn't use a lot of butter), so I picked this easy Coca de Llanda version from Valencia.

By John, 9 December, 2014

Paella

Paella is a traditional Spanish dish. The classic version is the Paella Valenciana, made of rice cooked with saffron and loaded up with shellfish, chicken, and sausage. You can easily vary the recipe to suit the preferences of your diners.

It's a great dish for sharing with a crowd for a festive occasion. It is easy to make and infinitely flexible.

It's scalable, too. This can be a romantic dish cooked outdoors over a fire with a bottle of wine, or a party dish for 20 people and a bucket of Sangria.

You can cook this indoors in a broad, shallow pan, or outdoors on the grill in the traditional way. I wrote about our annual paella-on-the-beach feast here.

The traditional paella pan is wide and shallow, with sloping sides. This allows fast cooking of all the parts of the paella. Here's a link to a typical pan on Amazon.com.

I have a big paella pan that I got from my mother years ago. It's about two feet across and it feeds an army. It had to - I have 5 brothers and sisters! These days I use it at work, preparing the paella on the gas grill on the back patio. It easily feeds 20 people from 2.2 pounds of arborio rice. You can see a photo of it in action in this great article by David Whitford in Inc. Magazine.