Relaxed Sunday Lunch - Spanish Style

We had friends round for lunch the other Sunday - and we're fed-up with winter already, so we decided to bring back memories of a great summer in Andalucia eating tapas and moving from bar to bar.
One of our friends is vegetarian (perish the thought) so tapas are a great answer - a few meaty things and a number of veggie things to graze through over a couple of hours, with a little flamenco on the CD player and several bottles of rioja...

The menu in full: meatballs in a piquant tomato sauce, chorizo in red wine, tortilla, patatas bravas, chickpeas with spinach, marinated peppers, some great manchego cheese, olives and mushrooms with sherry.

The real highlight of all this for me was the dish of meatballs.  These were around 2/3 beef, 1/3 minced pork, mixed together with finely diced onion and garlic cooked off in a little olive oil and finished with fino sherry.  Into this went some breadcrumb and egg to bind and plenty of parsley and seasoning. 
The meatballs (albondingas) were then fried in olive oil.
The tomato sauce was simply crushed tinned tomatoes cooked with onion, garlic and finished with some delicious smoked hot paprika.  The whole lot was cooked in advance and heated through in the oven.

I also thought the chickpeas were a hit, too - cooked with saffron, olive oil, stock and breadcrumbs (to thicken the sauce) and finished off with the spinach stirred through.

And of course - the patatas bravas!  Possibly my favourite of all tapas - the potatoes are meant to be deep fried, but that's a fiddle when you have hungry guests waiting, so instead I roasted them in half vegetable oil, half olive oil.  The 'brave' sauce is crushed tomatoes (again tinned), onion, garlic (there's a theme here), crushed dried chilli and paprika - all cooked to a lovely thick, hot and spicy paste.  The recipe for this one comes from the Moro cookbook - see the sidepannel - one of my all time favourite cookbooks.

I love this kind of eating - lots of little things, everyone dibbing in and helping themselves, great chat, lots of wine... and all finished off with some absolutely great chocolate brownies by Spud!  This is surely the way to spend a Sunday?

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