Almost Paella, Not Chocolate - Part II
The risks and advantages of trying something new.
Thank you for reading! I’m sharing stories that have led to my upcoming year-long sabbatical to pursue a Masters of New Food Thinking at Slow Food University in Italy. When I start the program in late October, I’ll be sharing my adventures and learnings there.
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So there’s this huge paella pan, taunting me. For a year.
As Kate and I started Tale to Table, Kakao Chocolate was well-established after 12 years, so we had some time and space to explore lots of other culinary interests with classes and tastings and pairings. And I had my own projects, too:
I’ve studied cheese for years now, but I have a long way to go.
I am developing a more complete understanding of salami.
I’ve learned a tun (ha!) about beer, but I have a bunch of gaps to fill there, and even more and larger gaps with wine.
I’ve been making bread, and experimented with (extremely fussy) focaccia.
I love my 800 F pizza oven, but I often feel like I don’t know what I don’t know.
I’m really getting into tinned fish and have been fascinated by what I’ve learned and tasted so far.
And my smoker needs to be lit more often.
Maybe you see a pattern. There’s a lot of food out there, and I want to learn about it — how it’s made, how to use it, the story behind it, and if possible how I can make it myself. More reasons why this masters program is a great fit for me.
But making paella in a one-meter paella pan is a spectacle, and requires practice, and that practice takes 15 pound of arborio rice (an Italian rice similar to and much easier to get here in St. Louis than Spanish bomba rice).
So after a year of taunting from the pan, Kate and I scheduled Tale to Table to serve paella at a 2022 street festival on a Friday in Maplewood, and told the world we were doing it, which is a great way to ensure something happens. And on Tuesday — three days before the spectacle — I got it all set up and cooked 15 pounds of rice for the first time.
A lot of things can go wrong with a giant pan of rice on a propane burner and — in an ironic stroke of luck — a lot of things did go wrong that day, although nothing too dramatic. The flame went out several times, it took more time than I thought to get to boiling, and the rice burned in a couple of places and didn’t cook fully in others, to call out a few of the snafus.
But each thing that went wrong did so in precisely the way they needed for me learn how to prevent them. So the giant paella we made on Friday, and the dozens after that, have gone pretty much without a hitch. We’ve taken it to Tower Grove Park, we’ve made it in more than one rainstorm, we’ve done it in 90+ heat, and we’ve improvised and riffed and made a few unique and decidedly non-Spanish paella. And it’s all been great fun.
(But I still wouldn’t want to do it full time.)
It was so much fun we decided to name the pan. Lediana, which in Spanish (and originally Greek) means “happy.” Because, of course, that’s what it makes me and everyone else.
I’ve a lot more paella stories to share, but this one ends here, with this — don’t be afraid to take a chance, to try something new, to make mistakes, to learn from them, and to do something you’ve never done before.
