Vegetable Paella

We loved this dish, a quick-and-easy Paella that is full of great summer vegetables, but empty of fish or meat.

I remember seeing Paella for the first time on Globetrekker, one of my favorite shows ever. They were in Spain and a community was having a town-wide competition on making the best paella. Which is neat, because that means it's a food like Spaghetti sauce...everyone has their favorite, best, most trusted, and it's a handed-down recipe that also gets tweaked along the way to suit modern tastes, adjust to conditions, etc.

At it's base, Paella is regional Valencian cuisine (no, not the national dish of Spain - I think Spain's cultural complexities are such that a national dish would be impossible...they'd probably settle for official regional dishes and let the idea of a national dish be the big elephant in the room), and some versions include meat and snails, while others just focus on seafood. But it's all the vegetables that make it special...along with a few threads of saffron and doses of paprika.

The recipe I used comes from Robin Miller; this is one of my first recipes I've used from her, and was really happy with it. Squash, asparagus, Zucchini, peas, wild rice, broth, tomatoes...mmm...



Herb Garden Update: It died. Seriously, we're on our 50+ day over 100 so far this year. We'll revisit that later in the year.

Squirrel Update: Romeo is still around, but has been absent the past two days. Grete's waiting for him. I think he's starting to get greedy with our ever-ripening pecans...while he's been busy scraping the hotter top layers of soil in our pots for cooler layers to rest on, he's soon going to be doing that to store his winter cache of pecans. Should we game the system? Store extras and periodically lay them around the yard for him? Hmm...

Tschüß!