let them eat....Rovellones

So. Ha ha. I'm back at the villa cooking for the staff again.

Because of this new breakfast cereal, Credit Crunch, that everyone is talking about, there are cut backs up there. Quite what they are is difficult to say. Where last year there was only one, there are now 2 laundry women to take care of the 14 unused rooms and all the laundry that they dont generate. There is an extra gardener (You there! Basil! Double handful. Now!) which is nice. There seem to be another couple of dogs and I am fairly sure there are 3 cars I dont remember from last year.

There are less people to cook for cos a few people are away. The Belgians have gone. (I heard that they were there most of the summer though because not 3 days after they had finished and returned to where they had come from, there was an electrical storm, the house was struck and the lightening totalled EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF EQUIPMENT they had installed. EVERY SINGLE PIECE. Three months it took them to install in the first place. All the MASSIVE plasma screens, all the small plasma screens, ALL the speaker systems in ALL the rooms (not just bedrooms but bathrooms, sauna, turkish bath, gym etc etc), all the remote consoles for running all this stuff. ALL OF IT. FUCKED. God I'd love to have seen the bill they presented to the insurers. Come to that, I'd quite like to have seen the insurers receive that bill, poor little darlings.)


But anyway, they're hungry again and it falls to me, Mutfak, to attempt to appease their insatiable hunger for LUNCH. Damn, those chicas can put it away.

It has been really crappy weather so I thought roast chicken would cheer them. (I got into a fight again with my butcher about the appallingly low quality of the chickens available on the island. This is a ongoing battle but now is not the moment to tediousarize you with it except to say that I will win it eventually). Roast chicken and potatoes cos I know they would like it and rovellones for me cos....well, because. And there's an end on't.

Rovellones are a mushroom. Milk cap to be precise. Lactarius deterrimus to be show offy. I have only come across them in Spain. (Which isn't saying much. I am in no way as well travelled gastronomically as I would like to be). They are beautiful fungi bleeding orange when you slice them. They range from the size of a minidisc to the size of a compact disc. They appear at the end of the summer after the early September rains but since there weren't any neither this nor last year they are scarce but none the less delicious for their scarcity. I cooked them with butter, wild young garlic, fino, and chicken stock and them was awful good. Too good for the chicken but what can you do? Recipix to follow.

PD. The below recipix for Pomegranate Molasses is completely wrong. It is however completely right for Pomegranate Jam. Correct Pomegranate Molasses Recipix to follow when I track down some more SOUR pomegranates. Tit.

PD2 re: the pomegranates below again - if you use an orange squeezer with a rotating head you get the nasty bitter taste. If you use one of those one with the arm that you pull down (like the ones you get on the cooler espresso machines) then you wont get the nastiness but will get the juice.