Portugal Day 2010 - Celebrate With Solar Portuguese Paella

Solar Portuguese Paella Celebrates Portugal Day 2010

Casey Angelova at eating, gardening & living in Bulgaria is celebrating Portugal Day 2010 and has wonderful entries from fellow chefs that you really don't want to miss. She invited me to join the celebration and I decided to see how I could make an old favorite in the solar oven.  Well, it turned out just great and delicious, too! Paella has always been a favorite summer dish of mine because it's really so easy to fix, and this Portuguese Paella Recipe was no exception.  I just made a few changes to make it easier for us to eat. I really don't care for the super hot chorizo sausage and used hot Italian sausage instead. But, here's the recipe from Recipezaar that was submitted by Alan Leonetti who was married to a Portuguese woman for twelve years.

Serves 2-4 
1 chicken, cut up, or 6 skinless thighs
1 small onion, chopped
2 ham hocks
salt and pepper
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 cups rice (Spanish)
1/2 lb raw peeled shrimp
1/2 lb littleneck clams
1/2 lb mussels

1/2 lb sea scallops

3/4 lb chorizo/linguica sausage, sliced into 2-inch pieces

1 red bell pepper, sliced

1 cup chicken stock or broth (I used 1-1/2 cups)

3/4 cup white wine (I used Moscato)

1/4 teaspoon saffron or1/4 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 cup frozen peas

1. Rinse chicken pieces; pat dry with paper towels.
2. Season with salt and pepper. Saute chicken and ham hocks in 1/4 cup olive oil until golden.
3. Remove chicken, leaving ham hocks in pot, saute garlic, onion and rice for a few minutes.
4. Add chicken back to pot on top of rice. Tuck in seafood and sausage.
5. Add chicken stock, wine, saffron and bell pepper. Cover and simmer 20 minutes.
6. Sprinkle peas on top, cover again, and continue to cook an additional 10 minutes and serve.

What I did:
Preheated solar oven. It was hot and the oven reached 325F within 10 minutes.
Thoroughly clean clams. Do NOT use any clams that have opened prior to cooking. These are bad. Throw them out.  Place in oven bag, put sealed bag in pan, cover with SolarWear(TM) and bake in solar oven for 20 minutes, or until clams have opened.

If you see any clams that have not opened after baking, do NOT serve. Simply discard. To make sure I have enough to serve, I usually buy 1/2 pound extra clams.

This is one recipe that I used mise en place. There are so many ingredients and steps that you want to have everything at the ready before you get started.

I cut the chicken thighs and sea scallops in half, also, to make sure there was enough for everyone. The wine is a California Moscato and the rice is Arborio. I cheated and bought the shelled mussels, too.

Step 2: Sauteed chicken and ham hocks to golden brown. Then removed chicken and transferred everything over into my 6-quart pot for baking.  Step 3: Added the garlic, onion, rice and sausage and sauteed until the rice began to get opaque and just start turning brown.

Steps 4 and 5: Added the chicken to the pot, tucked in the seafood, and added the chicken stock, wine, saffron, turmeric, and sliced bell pepper.

After bringing everything back up to a full simmer, I covered the pot and put it in the solar oven for 45 minutes; uncovered it and added the peas on top, returned it to the solar oven for another 10 minutes. It turned out beautiful, don't you think?

I knew the sausages were going to be hot, so I made a delicious smoothie from one cup of Moscato, 12 ice cubes and 2 Tablespoons of Kool-Aid punch (I'm still a kid, at heart). Yum, yum. It set it off, just right.