Potatoes "Bravas" Recipe

Today we continue with the tapas theme with Patates bravas. These are zesty, piquant, nicely crunchy and full of potato goodness.

I have a strong bond with the humble potato. A bond that goes all the way backl to when I was a wee bairn in Scotland, well not that wee, I was in school by then.

We had a unique holiday, a week off in October called the tattie holidays. Ok, so it wasn’t officially called the tattie holidays, just everyone called it that. This was a holdover from a bygone age where the kids got a week off of school to help with the potato harvest and earn a wee bit of money for the rest of the term. Oddly enough there were a couple of kids in my class that actually did go and pick potatoes for that week.

Mucky work really. I used to help harvest our own potatoes. I really wouldn’t want to imagine doing it for eight hours straight. Let alone for the 50 pence a bucket most places paid in those days. Then again how satisfying is it to have your hands down in the filthy with the worms and filthy filth. Hmmmm no not this topic again, the last time I got stuck on this I went on about manure for five hundred words.

School, school, school. Well school really was different across the pond. I went to five different schools in Scotland, (With a break in 1980 when I went to a school in Montana while my parents were deciding on the terms of their divorce which would come 11 years later, and then one in Syria and finally one in America. When I finished High School in America it was my fourteenth year of school and my sixteenth year of life. Work that out and I will give you a prize (Not a good prize, but a prize).

I would say that in the UK we had better dress sense. Even that uniforms eliminate crime, lust, gangs and drugs, but I would be talking out of my @$$.

Each School had its own combination of flat fronted gray trousers, black blazers, gray wool cardigans or waistcoats, Doc Martins, white, gray or pale blue Oxford shirts for boys and the restricting world of gray pinefores, pleated skirts with gray cardigans, white, gray or pale blue Oxford shirts.

In my elementary school (Little village school that it was) there was a girl, well there were many girls, but her parents could not afford the uniform. So she was punished constantly, whenever it was reading or fun time she had to sit apart and not participate, She used to cry. I once threw an ocarina across the room so I would be put out too. Our punishment was to copy out the dictionary, first in print then in calligraphy (Copperplate). To be honest we had great times in "Solitary". While our classmates were listening to a teacher read from "James and the Giant Peach" we were learning. After the dictionary was no longer a threat they provided us with "History Sheets" a laminated piece of paper with a story on one side and a set of questions on the other. We would read the sheets and then perform the tasks on the other side. After we had done this to the satisfaction of the Sisters we were given sheets that had no questions. They would then question us at legnth about what we had learned. The more this happened the more "Solitary" we got. The assignments got more and more difficult, but unlike other students we were never caned. I supose the sister thought we were special. We could write, both in the official copperplate and the standard printing style of the Scottish School, when most kids were fumbling with thier ABC's . I was caught once on the Sisters Porch and was approched by a prefect, woh was willing to use violence to remove me from the spot. Sister MacPherson arrived and frightened the sol out of the prefect. She then asked me what I was doing. I showed her. I was reading. I remember her long fingers taking the book from my fingers. I remeber her eyes. I remeber her saying: "Do you understand this book?". I remeber saying "Yes, I am rereading it.". I was given free reign in the Sisters Garden and Porch after that. Though I never understood why. I do now: They were teaching hooligans, idiots and the poor. I fit into none of these categories and I had a single gift I could give back. I could sing.

I could sing, at that time from low tenor to soprano (Hey they hadn't dropped ok!) then in later years from Bass to Alto. Doubleplus my Latin is excellent, memorization perfect. Yes perfect.

This made me the perfect vehicle. The Sisters trained me hard, and got me to a piano. I had been trained on a piano earliar, the sisters made sure it was good. I would only learn how to play the peices on the piano I wanted to play after taking lessons in America. I had ten years under my belt but it was all for the Glory of G@d.

The Perfect Vehicle. A disembodied voice from the soul of a small boy in praise of the Sacred M@th#r, the L@rd; The F@ther, The S@n and the Holy G#@st. A.K.A: Pops, Junior and the Spook.

I only wanted two things from the Sisters of the Sacred Heart; freedom (which I got in small portions) and to glorify G@d as they had taught me.

I got my chance and I aced it. To sing at Saint Macher Cathedral, possibly the oldest Cathedral in Scotland. Not even Catholic anymore, but so old that the arches of the older Cathedral on the site were actually pre-Christian. As it stands the ceiling is a drop wood ceiling below the soaring arches to the side. This ceiling was finished in the reign of Mary Queen of Scots when she was in Aberdeen in the 1550s? In the late 1590's the "Great Cathedral" of St Nicholas ( The central aisle is 135 feet tall, and the granite spire is just over 365 feet tall, one foot for every day of the year) was built near the Castlegate and St. Macher fell into obscurity.

Well I sang, and the cathedral organ played, just enough to clear the air and reverberate around the stone to remind us that we were so small in the eyes of G@d. Then we all sang. And under the glory of that Cathedral, with the soaring arches and coloured windae (Windows), and even the plain windows lost to the bombs of the war. The sound echoed back and yet filled the space I knew at that point that I believed, and yet that I could not believe. With the graveyard outside filled with the returning members of G@d only knows which crusade, I had questions. I still do, questions that the Sisters of the Sacred Heart couldn't answer. Maybe they are unanswerable.

So lets move on:

Surprisingly school dinners (Lunches in America) in Scotland were not really the culinary Mecca one might think it would be(Do you reminisce fondly of your school dinners?). At Loriston primary as with many institutional British places; boiled silverside beef, sliced thin enough to be transparent, with lumpy mashed potatoes (Hey at least you knew they were real) and mushy peas (those could go either way) were the norm. Though the offering got better the older you were. By the time I was in the equivalent of Junior High we had snack cafes and manyplus options in the dining hall, and at that age no one take thier lunch twenty miles on the top of a double decker bus.

At Loriston Primary in the Disco Age I took my lunch a lot , I had a "Pigs In Space" Lunch box with matching thermos from America, I was cool. However it was only about half a mile back to my house, so some days I would actually go home for lunch. Nellie always had my lunch ready and I could eat in the living room ( One of the delectable sins of youth). Those were always the best: Tomato soup and white bread with butter or a sandwich and crisps (Potato Chips) my favorite crisp flavors to this day; scampi, tomato sauce (Ketchup), chicken, and spring onion followed by beef.

If I did make it home for lunch I could catch the tail end of Button Moon. A rather strange children’s program where Mr. spoon was the hero. He had wooden spoons for arms and his body was a rolling pin. He would travel with his kids, to Button Moon in a rocket made out of an old washing up liquid bottle. Maybe children were less demanding of their television programming.

Looking back I think that some of it was quite horrifying, while possibly being rather influential.

Hear me out. This is a lineup of the shows that I watched all those decades ago:

Sooty: a show about a puppet teddy bear that got his name (Sooty) from having his ears blackened with soot, to make him more visually appealing.

Rainbow: A Bear, a Pink Hippo named George, and a character named Zippy who had a zipper where his mouth should be…ok…moving on that show should not be for kids.

The Pink Windmill: as it sounds it was set in a pink windmill, had a guy in a pink suit with his hand up the backside of an emu puppet, and a witch named Grotbags…just weird.

Blue Peter: messed up show that was really a “How to” for kids, how to plant a flower bulb, how to make a paper hat, how to present a war crimes case to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, how to feed a hamster, how to make a thermo nuclear weapon out of a pint of your dad’s homebrew, the glow in the dark stuff off your alarm clock and a couple of old washing up liquid bottles held together with scotch tape…

Button Moon: I described this above, truly terrible.

Morph: this had two characters made out of plasticine, there were both roughly man shaped one was sort of orangey brown and called morph, he was the good guy, then there was another one that was white. I don’t remember what his name was, he was the mean guy. The lived in some dopey artists studio…I don’t think the show had a point, it was just shiny moving stuff.

Ah-hmmm…ok… Now look back at the names of these shows. Think about it for a moment. Now what do these sound like? Someone said to me at a conference that they sounded like those colorful sticky drinks that come in layers and have half a can of fruit salad on neon swizzle stick. Then someone else pointed out that they all sounded like gay bars.Blue Peter? Zippy with the zippy...ok I have the internet, I know what happens if you have an urge to see something from your childhood and type in "Mouth Zipper". Let me tell you it was not a pleasant experience. I add the caveat to all person reading this: Remember it the way you remember it, because if you seek out those symbols of your youth you might get a great goose...and not in a nice way. I hate geese, they crap all over my sidewalk...and they are mean b!tches.

Back to Children's Programing of the 70's and 80's UK. The titles run like some sort of television version of Vaseline alley. I sat back horrified. Though I know they were terrible shows, I still had some lingering nostalgia about them. Then again this was Scotland, we had both a folk dance and a pub called the “Gay Gordon”. Well then…ahem…moving on.

Well here is the potato recipe. Remember to use waxy potatoes for this, Yukon gold or red potatoes work very well here.

Ingredients:

2 Pounds of waxy potatoes cubed but not peeled

Olive oil for frying

1/2 Onion chopped

2 Cloves of garlic

14.5 Oz Can of chopped tomatoes

1/2 Red Bell pepper chopped.

2 Tablespoons of red wine vinegar

Pinch of sugar

1 tablespoon of chili sauce (Or to taste)

1/2 Teaspoon of Paprika

A little salt and pepper

Method:

Place the potatoes in a pan and add just enough water to cover. Simmer for about 10 minutes or less, till just tender when pierced with a sharp knife. Drain and set aside.

Heat the oil in a heavy bottomed skillet , add the potatoes, and cook over medium high heat till crispy and cooked through about 10-15 minutes or so. .

Meanwhile make the sauce. Sauté the onion till translucent, add the garlic and cook one minute, add the tomatoes, bell pepper, vinegar, sugar, chili sauce and paprika. Cook over medium high heat for ten minutes (Watch out for the spatter!) Mix with potatoes just before serving to stop potatoes going soggy. Serves 6-8

P.S. The girl who also got Solitary with me? That is perhaps a romantic story, stay tuned.