Paella Day
On Saturday, Andrew and I headed to Napa for a day of paella-making with Beth and Nate and the babies. We had gotten a paella pan and ingredients for a wedding gift, but hadn’t yet put them to use; paella is definitely something you have to make for more than two people. It was unseasonably warm on Saturday, in the high-70s (by “unseasonably” I mean “unseasonably for the Northeast”), but nonetheless Napa was beautiful, with the vines changing to gold and red, set against a bright-blue sky. After some debate, Andrew and I decided to adapt a recipe from Penelope Casas’s The Foods & Wines of Spain for our paella. Friday night, we’d watched a video of the NYT’s Mark Bittman cooking a simple tomato paella, and it looked easy enough—it seemed like the kind of dish that, like a soup, you could pretty much just toss anything into. After a trip to the Napa Whole Foods for provisions, we were ready to begin. In theory and in practice, cooking paella is not that difficult—cook some things in...