Today is National Paella Day so this calls for a Spanish cookbook. I have a bunch of the cookbooks in this series from HP Books. They were all brand new and only $2 each at sale for school text books. For some reason they had lots of food related books and I stocked up.
Paella is a lovely dish, I don't make it often since I don't have a traditional pan and the seafood can be a bit hard to gather. I should give it another try, I have the saffron it calls for. Right on the little jar it says that saffron is the most expensive spice on earth. It takes more than 75,000 crocus blossoms to make a pound of saffron. Of course a pound would be a lifetime supply for me and probably half of Canada. Each strand then has to be hand picked from the flower and there are 225,000 of them per pound. So that's a lot of saffron pickers. You figure minimum wage, picking 8 to 10 hours a day, well you do the math, it's expensive. You do only use a few precious strands but it does add it's own unique flavor and that beautiful yellow color. You could get the yellow from turmeric but it's just not the same. All those clams, shrimp, mussels and whatever else you throw in deserves the best.
My sister has been planting many different varieties of daffodils, see photo, maybe she should switch to crocus. She could probably get enough saffron for her own personal use and sell a bit on the side. Two or three hundred plants and you could put the kids through university. By the way, go KU they're playing today! So cookbook #74 is The Book of Spanish Cooking by Hilaire Walden.
I've thought about harvesting some of my crocus stamens. Do you think it has to be a special variety? Also each blossom only lasts a day so it would have to be a quick pick too.
ReplyDeleteWe must be on the same "wave length" today; my book review is on a Mexican cookbook!
ReplyDelete