Although there are plenty of delicious steaks, pork chops and sausages routinely on offer at Clancey’s Meats & Fish, it’s the more exotic offerings that keep me going back. For example: the time I got my goat. More recently, I was greeted by the sight of fresh — not frozen — rabbits, curled up in their individual plastic bags asking me to take them home. Having recently been daydreaming through my various Spanish cookbooks, rabbit had me thinking one thing: paella. It doesn’t hurt that Clancey’s also sells a kick-ass fresh chorizo.

I usually think of paella as a summer dish (perhaps because I’ve only been to Spain in the summer) but it is a great meal for the fall as well. You can’t get fresh peas or red peppers, but carrots and parsnips can lend a moderate, earthy sweetness to the dish, and brussels sprouts can provide the necessary green. Fall is also the time when a hunter can easily come home with a brace of fresh rabbits.

While the vegetables used in paella can be flexible — indeed, they should be modified to match the season, what makes the paella a paella for me is the flavors of saffron and paprika (Valencians and anyone else are free to dispute this). These spices combine to give the dish deep, floral warmth, complemented nicely by generous squeezes of lemon juice. It can be a challenge to extract a lot of flavor out of saffron, which is all the more of a shame given how expensive it is. For this paella, I tested a technique I saw practiced by an old master of paella on the infuriating yet strangely captivating PBS series Spain: On the Road Again: rather than soaking crumbled strands of saffron before adding them to the broth, I ground them together with salt. This gave the rice a noticeable saffron flavor and brilliant yellow color.

Paella for Fall

• 2 cups small brussels sprouts
• Olive oil
• 1 rabbit, cut into pieces and seasoned with salt and pepper
• 1/2# fresh chorizo, cut into chunks
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 parsnips, diced
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 2 cups short-grain rice
• pinch of saffron
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 2 tsp sweet paprika
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 quarts chicken stock or water or a combination
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• 1 lemon, cut into wedges

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add brussels sprouts. Boil 5 minutes and then transfer sprouts to ice water. Drain and set aside. (You could also cook the brussels sprouts in the broth with the rice and the rest of the ingredients but overcooked brussels sprouts are bad news so do so at your own risk).

Place sea salt and saffron in a spice grinder and grind until pulverized.

Bring the stock/water to a bare simmer in a pot.

Cover the bottom of a paella pan or other large pan in a layer of olive oil and heat over medium high heat. Add rabbit pieces and fry until golden on all sides. Remove from pan and set aside. Brown chorizo pieces and set aside.

Working over medium heat, add diced vegetables. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft and starting to brown. Add the rice and stir to coat grains with oil. Clear an area in the center of the pan and add olive oil. Add the salt-saffron mixture, the paprika and the garlic. Cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir everything in the pan together. Add most of the simmering stock and the reserved meats and bring to boil. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until stock is absorbed. Try the rice; if it still feels underdone, add more stock and keep stirring.

As the last of the stock is absorbed, toasty aromas will start to emanate from the bottom of the pan. Don’t be alarmed! If you’ve kept your heat moderate enough, the rice isn’t burning; it’s reaching a crispy dark brown. This layer of cooked rice on the bottom — the socarrat — is the best part of the paella; it’s really worth turning off your burning rice radar in order to allow it to develop.

When you’ve got as much socarrat as you think you can stand, turn off the heat and stir in the reserved brussels sprouts. Jam the sprig of rosemary in the center of the rice and cover. Let stand ten minutes.

You can serve the paella by placing it in the middle of the table, handing everyone a spoon and telling everyone to dig in, but side plates and forks and knives can be helpful for managing those intransigent pieces of rabbit. How ever you serve it, make sure to squeeze plenty of fresh lemon juice over top.

Last year Tom decided he’d like to start an herb garden on one of our window sills (After my agreement, this went into the grocery budget!). Living in a older brick building, we have the luxury of having large areas outside of every window on which to place planters. It’s true we have a northern exposure, but we have to be thankful for what we have, people. Since we had such a great summer of rosemary, sage, tarragon, thyme, peppermint, and oregano in 2008, this year, we decided to continue the garden.

As in ‘08, we headed for Mother Earth Gardens, where we originally purchased our window box and plants last year:

At Mother Earth Gardens we strive to provide you with beautiful plants and products, but a central part of our mission is also to choose plants and products that have been grown, produced and delivered in a sustainable manner. We talk about the following words in our buying and decision-making: organic, sustainable, local, family, independently and cooperatively owned.

Luckily, tarragon is an perennial. It came back all on its own:

On May 3 we planted (or replanted, the case of the tarragon pictured above):

• Oregano
• Spearmint *new*
• Thyme
• Sage
• Chives *new*
• Rosemary
• Tarragon

As of Wednesday, it will be 1 month since planting. I hope to be able to plot our herbs’ progress as the season goes on so that we can both have a record of their growth and share it with you. And, of course, expect to see [Tom's] entries on how we use the herbs in our kitchen.

Finally, I wanted to share a project from the weekend. Below are my newly acquired pots from my favorite Swedish store with extras from the work at Common Roots. We’re now officially out of soil, so I think this will be it for the season. Given that, I’m hoping these two bell peppers and a small crop of tomatillos will produce fruit. Tom, the doubter, isn’t sure we have the sun required. We’ll see. The first victory is that it is possible to water the plants *without* removing the screen (as long as the watering can is full enough).

Since I make pizza regularly, I am always trying to come up with new ideas for toppings to keep things interesting. I also have been trying to buy food that is local and in season. Those two concepts intersected recently to result in: the beetza.

Beets are not, strictly speaking, in season since everything here is dead, but these beets were local and probably have been stored away somewhere since the fall—as seasonal as I’m going to get in January in Minnesota. To accompany the beets, I thought I’d aim for the classic combination with basil and goat cheese. I bought basil but since I already had feta so I decided to use that in place of goat cheese (I defy you to find a difference between sheep and goats). Almost all the beets I’ve ever eaten have been roasted, but I figured with 9 minutes in a 500 degree oven thin matchsticks of raw beets would be fine. As it turned out, the beets were still pretty crunchy, which I didn’t mind, but some probably would. This was a good pizza, although the beet flavor wasn’t especially strong. The color of the beet juice bleeding out from the beet pieces made it very visually striking; it was probably worth it just to see that.

I also made a couple of other pizzas which were somewhat less exciting. Here’s a marinara pie with capers and rosemary added:

And a pizza with mushrooms and brie (on a side note, I’m pretty sick of brie): 

I did not get the crust on these pizzas as dark as I usually do and I couldn’t figure out why at the time. Same oven, same maximum heat, same crust (Peter Reinhart’s napoletana dough from American Pie). It was only the next day when I remembered that I had my pizza stone set up on a rack in the lowest position, rather than on the floor of the oven. Putting it on the floor gets the stone a lot hotter since the gas burns just below the floor. In fact, it gets too hot for bread, burning the crust before the inside is cooked, which is why the stone was on a rack in the first place. But for pizza, you want everything as hot as it can get, so I have to remember to move the stone. Those 2″ make a big difference!