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Picture it: my seventh-grade Spanish project. It’s a book report, in Spanish, about a Spanish language book. Along with the report, we had to produce a visual aid. For the book report, I, of course, chose a cookbook.
The cookbook featured recipes indigenous to Spain rather than Latin America, much to my chagrin. I was hoping to slap together some tacos, but, instead, I discovered paella on one of the brightly colored pages and began to drool. Could I possibly make such a beautiful dish? There was more sausage and seafood in that illustration than the whole Old Country Buffet. And how did they get the rice to turn yellow? Food coloring? Magic?
I asked my mom to buy the ingredients; she took a hard look and promptly said no. Then, she asked me to find a better, easier, cheaper solution for my book report’s visual aid. So much for making what was sure to be my favorite food ever.
I still nailed my book report, speaking in perfect Spanish (with the proper “usted”) about this wonderful cookbook, and particularly the paella. My visual aid was a poster with a construction paper bowl filled with a variety of paper seafood, sausage, veggies, and rice clipped from the pages of Good Housekeeping and Martha Stewart Living. My paper paella earned me a B+.
Had I been allowed to cook the paella (allergies be damned!) and bring it to school (because carrying around a hot, heavy metal pan is easy, right?) and serve it to my friends (logistically, I could have made it work…) I’m sure I would have gotten an A.
Now that I’m an adult and I can do whatever I want (within reason), I decided to cook what was sure to be my favorite meal ever. Yay for paella!
It wasn’t just me, lots of people in the good ol’ 1980s and ’90s were apparently obsessed with this dish. It didn’t take long to find paella recipes from around the same time, and printed in Pittsburgh, no less.
And I decided to make mine even more Pennsylvanian using Froehlich’s kolbassi from Johnstown, Pa. The recipe I used as a guideline was printed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on Sept. 16, 1987. As you can see, I omitted the chicken and pork loin in favor of some sausage to better reflect the Spanish recipe from my seventh-grade project.
The original recipe calls for:
- ¼ cup olive oil
- 2 medium tomatoes peeled and cut up
- 3 cloves of crushed garlic
- 1 cup of fresh mushrooms chopped
- 1 cup of frozen peas
- 2 red peppers seeded and cut into strips
- ¼ tsp. saffron threads, crumbled
- ½ lb. sea scallops
- 1 lb. shrimp shelled and deveined
- 6 muscles in shells, steamed (reserve water for stock)
- ½ lb. boneless chicken cut up
- ½ lb. pork loin cut into chunks
- 2 ½ cups uncooked rice
- 5 cups chicken broth combined with seafood broth
- salt to taste
- lemon wedges to garnish
Carefully wash mussels. Place enough water in a pot to cover and bring water to a boil. Slide mussels into pot, cover, and allow water to simmer for three minutes or more if muscles have not opened. Carefully remove open mussels from the pot so as to not lose liquid inside shells and set aside. Add shrimp shells to muscle broth and simmer while preparing the paella.
In a paella pan, sauté garlic in oil; discard garlic. Sauté chicken and pork in oil until lightly browned, Add tomatoes, mushrooms, and red peppers and stir together for about one minute.
Add rice to the mixture and while stirring carefully Add boiling broth (mixture of chicken and seafood broth to make five cups) add peas, saffron, and salt. Tuck shrimp, scallops, and mussels into rice. Cover and place in a 325 to 350° oven for 20 to 30 minutes. Remove from oven and serve garnish with lemon wedges. Serves 8 to 10.
As I said, I replaced the ½ lb. chicken and ½ lb. pork with a full 1 lb. of sausage. I also used a dozen pre-cooked frozen mussels from Aldi since they were cheaper than fresh. I also already had homemade seafood stock in my freezer leftover from a crab dinner my partner made over the holidays, so I thawed that out and used it instead of making seafood stock from scratch. I placed it in a stockpot until it got hot. Then, I warmed my mussels in the seafood stock until they popped open. And I chucked my shrimp tails instead of using them in the stock.
If you need to make scratch seafood stock for this recipe, the original recipe above will work totally fine. You can also buy it to cut a corner if need be.
I placed the olive oil in a pan and added my garlic. I did not throw the garlic out because I think that’s insane. Who tosses out garlic?! Then, I warmed my sausage and added my vegetables.
I added the rice and mixed everything together per the original recipe, but I had to turn the heat up to 375° to get my rice cooked through.
This was delicious. But it made a lot. So I’d recommend this recipe for a family party or a holiday or for a family with ravenous teenage boys. My partner is a big eater, and this is quite filling.
I made my seventh-grade dream come true, and so can you if you print this recipe card for yourself:
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.
