After all of our trips, we find ourselves trying to make the food of the country we just left, regardless of whether or not we had tried that food. Fortunately for us, The Guardian had a recipe for us: migas.
Migas are Iberian peasant breakfasts, a no-waste preparation of stale bread and any old thing you have left in the fridge. Soak the bread, tear it up and cook it with any number of things: mushrooms, chorizo, eggs, potatoes, garlic, fish. Anything. Everybody has a version, everybody makes it and nobody’s is as good as their abuelas.
I gave this a try this morning. We had some left over shiitakes from the farmers market last week and a head of garlic and some left over bits from a sourdough that Hannah had made this week. Perfect.
I did up the mushrooms and garlic (4 cloves, smashed) in some oil and soaked the bread in the water, as per the recipe. The mushrooms and garlic turned out pretty good, and my mouth was watering.
Drained the bread from the water it was sitting in, squeezed it out, tore it up. I tossed a good two to three tablespoons of olive oil in the mushroom pan, and poured the soggy bread into the already hot pan.
This is where things went sideways.
The bread stuck to the bottom of the pan. Just stuck there. No amount of stirring would get that shit up. The rest of the bread was sitting on top of this newly formed crust. I started complaining about this to Hannah.
“Just let it sit there and make a crust, like bibimbap!” She said, which only served to increase my fuss.
“I’M SUPPOSED TO KEEP STIRRING IT!”
Hannah made a “ oooooookaaaaaay” face.
“The rest of this bread isn’t cooking because it’s just sitting on top of the stupid crust this stupid bread is making and I can’t get it off the bottom and all we’re getting is hot wet bread.”
Hannah started laughing, which got stronger and stronger until she couldn’t really breathe. “Hot…wet…bread…”
“…”
“That’s so disgusting,” she said through laughing fits.
“Yeah, I know, that’s what we have here disgusting breakfast. I feel so stupid. I’m a fairly good home cook, and this is peasant food and peasants make this and I can’t make stale fried bread.”
Anyway, Hannah came in and fixed it and used the oven and while it might not be traditional, at least it’s not hot, wet bread.
Amy wants to point out that there's a recipe for migas in one of our family's favorite kid's books, entitled "Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farmer."