Sea-devil with chorizo , chickpeas and pequillos

I've said it before that when Jan's home I never cook and when he isn't home I usually can eat his delicious left-overs. Somehow he gets going in the kitchen much quicker than I do....while I am still figuring out which ingredients I need (if I already have a dish in mind) he's almost done. And if I do cook when he's at home I don't feel at ease thinking that he'd surely do it differently and quicker with less mess and I feel ashamed to be so dependend on a cooking book or recipe.
But I really enjoyed cooking more last weeks and I seemed to be more in the right rhythm.

Once a month we receive the culinary magazine "Ambiance" which is full of restaurant recommendations, wine critics, interviews with chefs .....and the most delicious modern recipes accompagnied with saliva generating pictures. The fun thing about a monthly magazine as opposed to the many dust-gathering cookbooks is that you always receive something new to discover and to trigger our interest.

So while I was browsing through it at breakfast yesterday I felt the urge to surprise Jan with a big meal when he got home. But then somehow my afternoon made some weird time jumps and by the time I got home with all the groceries it was 5 PM and Jan phoned that they'd be home in 45 minutes and that they'd all go and get some fries to eat (some of them had to still drive on to the Netherlands). Darn, no way I could cook a big meal in 45 minutes and serve for a bunch of hungry men that had their mind set to fries. I felt so disappointed! When I put a renewed bottle of herbs in our herb drawer by slightly bending forward a bit and my lower back muscles totally blocked in a pain flare to tell me that I am not supposed to bend forward like that, my mood didn't quite improve. So we all ate fries together and I had to keep myself still again on the sofa with painkillers again.

Today I kept my lower back nicely straight and warm and I told Jan I was going to make my meal anyway ... and it worked out great and Jan even took his camera out to take pictures :)

Jan thought I was already finished but I still had to add the chorizo

Adding the chorizo


Ready to serve

Ingredients:

700 g sea-devil filets

1 can of chickpeas

1 paksoi (I had chinese cabbage....couldn't find anything closer)

100g fine slices of chorizo

1kg tomatoes

6 pequillos (Spanish peppers in cans or glass containers)

1 clove of garlic

3 branches of thyme

1 knife tip of saffran

2 Shallots

1 lemon

1 knife tip of cayanne pepper


The preparation is really in 3 parts:

1) tomatosauce

Bake the chopped up shallots for a few minutes and then add the tomatoes. Let that cook gently for 30-40 minutes. (I took half fresh tomatoes but since winter tomatoes aren't that great, I actually added 500g peeled tomatoes).
Then you need to pour all of the sauce throug a fine sieve so that only smooth tomatojuice is left. Pressing all the juice out took most of my time really....I was afraid I'd not have enought sauce. I guess you reallly need to take juicy tomatoes if you want a lot of sauce!.

Herb the resulting sauce with thyme, garlic, saffran, salt and cayennepepper and if necessary put it through the sieve again.

2) Chop up the paksoi in little pieces and slice the pequillos. Wash the chickpeas.
Stew the paksoi and pequillos in some oil and then add the chickpeas. Season with salt and pepper.

3) Slice the sea-devil in slices of 2cm wide. Bake them in a hot pan with some olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Don't bake them too long or they'll get dry. It's better to turn off the fire a bit earlier and let them continue to become done in the hot pan.


Divide the vegetables in deep plates and poor the tomato juice on top of them and then arrange the slices of chorizo and sea-devil. Finish with a bit of lemon juice.


Enjoy!