Turkey Paella

More adventures in fancy cooking! This time around, paella. This is prompted by another subscription box, this time from Hamptons Lane. A few months ago, I received the Spanish Tapas box, which came with a paella pan. I'd meant to make paella when Amelia and I did our week o' cooking, so I bought arborio rice (usually used for risotto) and saffron. We ended up cooking other things, though, so the first paella is now!

I used the recipe for Paella Mixta from Hamptons Lane, but did not want to do seafood. (I grew up with a kind-of kosher-type diet, so while I'll eat non-kosher seafood if it's served to me, I'm not comfortable cooking it.) I did, however, have turkey breast tenderloins and green beans in the freezer, and that seemed a fair substitution. The green beans were locally grown, I think, and the turkey I'd picked up around Thanksgiving. So I defrosted three turkey breast tenderloins using this recipe, adding on a little paprika. I ate one for lunch on Friday, and shredded the other two for the paella.



And I didn't have to defrost the green beans, as I riffed off this recipe from The Kitchn. Tossed them with olive oil and baked them at 425F for about 15 minutes, voila!



Since the farmers' market didn't have tomatoes, I picked up a few at HyVee. They do this thing where they highlight produce that was grown within 200 miles--these tomatoes were grown a couple of towns over.



Again, take a look at the Hamptons Lane paella recipe for specifics. I went ahead and used a grater on the two tomatoes (I do this, too, when I'm making marinara sauce from scratch). The recipe says to discard the tomato skins, but since they had a bit of flesh on 'em, I wrapped them around a slice of Monterey Jack cheese and ate 'em like a sandwich.



I chopped up one shallot and two stalks of green garlic from the farmers' market. These are pretty robust for green garlic--they look more like leeks, but I guess it's pretty late in the season for the more delicate stalks.



While the onions and garlic sauteed in the pan, I assembled the other ingredients and chopped up the pearl oyster mushrooms (about 1/4 pound).






And then more sauteeing!



Then I added the tomato pulp, the rice, the stock, and the bay leaves. And waited.



After about fifteen minutes, with added chorizo.



Then I added the green beans and turkey.



After about ten minutes, I turned the heat off, but left the pan on the burner.



Note, also, that I didn't add any salt or pepper--since the turkey and chorizo had already been pretty well-seasoned, I figured it wasn't necessary. Yum.

More soon!