Nosh, Nibbles & Nightcaps (aka Food & Drink)

10th November 2011

Fresh tuna steaks & asparagus.


When we created it, we had intended on regular updates on this Nosh, Nibbles & Nightcaps page, but somehow we haven't had the time, partly because we have been enjoying the consumption of the aforementioned! Here then, is an update (albeit a lengthy one!) on our culinary discoveries and experiments aboard and ashore and our observations so far on the cuisines of Spain and Portugal.

In both Spain and Portugal, fish and seafood are eaten far more frequently than in the UK and apparently, in that order, those countries consume the largest and second largest quantities of fish in Europe. The quantity and variety available in their markets and supermarkets is amazing and is less expensive than in the UK. Our non-stick griddle on the Cobb allows us cook fresh fish to perfection, giving beautifully crispy skin but always leaving the flesh succulent and juicy. Cooking fish on the Cobb also saves smells lingering below in the boat... well, fishy smells anyway...

Pork and chicken seem to be the favoured non-seafood meat in both Spain and Portugal. Like their seafood, the quality is excellent and the price is low. Pork spare ribs are very popular, cheap and usually very meaty - we've cooked them several times on the Cobb with great success. chickens are often corn fed, giving that lovely golden colour and extra flavour to the skin and flesh. Again, great on the Cobb, either pieces or the whole bird. In Portugal, it's very common to see whole chickens butterflied in the supermarkets, ready to grill as they do in the churasqueiras. Churasqueiras are a kind of barbecue/grill take-aways serving chicken, pork spare ribs and other meats and their popularity with the Portuguese is evident in the often long but fast moving queues outside. The optional piri-piri sauce for the chicken is a must for chilli lovers.

Corn fed chicken pieces with mushrooms.


To our delight, chillies are available in abundance in Spain and Portugal. We found green chillies called Pimientos de Padron in huge quantities in Spain (also available in smaller quantities in Portugal) - they're about 5cm long and generally not hot, although there is allegedly a Galician tradition to catch out the unwary of adding one very hot one to a plate of them in a restaurant. We bought them in 400g bags and used them to add crunch to salads and anything we could pop them into! Helen from Dakini passed on a simple recipe for an even better way to use them making a healthy and addictive nibble to have with a pre-dinner beer, G&T or glass of chilled rosé. Heat a bit of olive oil in a pan, fry the chillies until their skins start getting crispy and browned, toss in some mixed spices (Cajun spice, garam masala, chilli powder and cumin or anything you fancy!) and some salt, drain any excess oil and serve hot!

Very hot red chillies are the norm in Portugal, as is the fiery piri-piri sauce.

Just looking at the beautiful chillies in the market has to bring a smile to your face!


We obviously indulge in Spanish chorizo, which you all know and is widely available in the UK and elsewhere, but perhaps not often in quite the variety, including softer (but still cured) ones which work really well in casseroles, chopped or sliced into omelettes or scrambled egg (a great idea from my friend Silvio, who remembered it from his tour of Spain over 30 years ago). In Northern Spain (particularly in Asturias, the famous cider producing region) a popular and delicious tapas dish is chorizo cooked in cider. There are also chorizo sausages (uncooked) which we've cooked on the Cobb several times - nice but just mildly spicy sausages really and not as nice as some of the French Toulouse sausages we've eaten.

Another spicy Spanish pork dish is zorza - chopped pork spiced with pimenton (paprika) and garlic. We tried this first as a tapas dish in Ribadeo and found it available in virtually every butchers or supermarket meat section. It comes in various grades of 'chop' from small chunks to julienne type slices, but cooks in a non-stick pan in a jiffy. Fry some finely sliced onions, garlic and red chillies (optional) first, turn the heat up, add the pork and fry until lightly browned and cooked through. Delicious with some salad in flour tortilla wraps, pita breads or over rice. Curiously, unlike most of the pre-seasoned meat you'd buy in UK supermarkets, even the supermarket bought zorza didn't seem to be full of water when we cooked it.

Grilled fish is enormously popular in Portugal and particular favourites with the Portuguese are dorada (gilt-head bream) and sardines. Most traditional restaurants serve these, often cooked butterflied but without removing the bones or head. They really are delicious, quite cheap and particularly popular for lunch-time fare. Some restaurants have half a 44-gallon drum converted to a barbecue outside, and the smell of sardines grilling over coals in these is extremely enticing!

We had some delicious and super crispy squid, very lightly battered and quickly fried, in a restaurant in A Pobra do Caraminal but haven't yet tried cooking it aboard - frying food in hot oil like that just isn't an option in our galley. We have cooked various types of clams and mussels, including razor clams. I think our favourite so far, apart from the obvious French style moules-frites, are clams cooked with onion, garlic, paprika (sometimes perked up with red chilli) and tomatoes (either tinned or fresh, skinned and chopped). We've cooked clams both on the stove below and in the frying dish on the Cobb. They work fine on the Cobb providing we allow sufficient time for the frying dish to really heat up before adding the clams.

So, onto nightcaps and other liquid refreshments that we've discovered. The ubiquitous sangria in Spain can be bought pre-mixed in 1-litre plastic bottles either with or without gas (the fizzy one is surprisingly nice) or tetra packs, and although almost certainly not as nice as freshly made, is quite a refreshing summer evening drink, served with loads of ice and sliced oranges. Equally thirst-quenching and tasty is Tinto de Verano (also available pre-mixed); red wine, mixed roughly half and half or to taste, with lemonade or lemon fanta and served with loads of ice and a slice of lemon. These wine cocktails in Spain are allegedly so popular because they work with quite inexpensive wines as well as being very refreshing and less intoxicating when consumed in the heat of a Spanish summer!

Another new drink we've tried, as suggested by one of the staff during our tour of Taylor's Port House, is white port and tonic, or Portonic as I discovered when I 'Googled' it. Using a white port (we bought a bottle of Taylor's Chip Dry), mix one part port with two parts tonic, serve as a long drink over ice with a wedge of lemon and a sprig of mint. A refreshing summer aperitif and alternative to gin & tonic.

Following a recommendation by Ilona from Calluna, we tried baking bread on the Cobb for the first time after cooking our tuna steaks the week we arrived in Lagos. Ilona said she puts the bread in a silicone pan straight onto the rack, though she now uses Ecobrasa briquettes instead of Cobblestones as she found the Cobblestones burn so hot, the bottom of the bread would burn. I haven't made bread for a couple of years, but my first effort, a white loaf with herb and sun-dried tomatoes, was quite tasty although burnt on the bottom as predicted! The silicone bread pan got a bit discoloured, but shows no other signs of damage, so I'm looking forward to baking some more fresh bread any time we use the Cobb for cooking things like fish, which doesn't take long and leaves enough remaining cooking time to bake the bread. I might try to find a round silicone pan for the bread (also recommended by Ilona) to bake it more like a cottage loaf instead of a traditional brick loaf, which may result in less of a burnt bottom as it should cook more quickly.

My first attempt at bread on the Cobb - not perfect but tasty!


We call the Cobb our 'barbecue', but as often as we have delicious 'barbecue' type meals from it, calling it a barbecue belies its full potential and value. The Cobb really is a versatile multi-purpose cooking implement. Our cooker aboard Pipit is more than adequate, but it does have only two burners, no grill and a small oven without thermostatic control. For anything we would griddle or roast in the oven, the Cobb gives far superior results, and using the frying dish for paellas, clams or mussels gives equally good results without the heat or smells lingering below decks. We haven't yet tried smoking food in the Cobb, nor have we filled the moat with wine to add flavour to the steam, so there are more culinary experiments to do.

Perfect crackling on a pork joint.

Cobb Roast Potatoes are absolutely delicious.


Roasting potatoes is easy with the Cobb. Par-boiled, just like you'd do them for oven roasting, they cook in the fat which gathers in the moat. Sweet potato, pumpkin and butternut squash work equally well. The potatoes need to be of a size, or cut to a size to fit neatly in the moat. At this size, they take 30-45 minutes (par-boil for 5-8 minutes first, a bit less time for sweet potato, pumpkin or squash), so you need to time the cooking of the other food to suit. If the meat or poultry we have to cook will only take a similar time, we add a bit of olive oil to the moat (allowing the oil to heat up for 5 minutes before adding the potatoes) as the fat from the meat or poultry won't have dripped into the moat yet.


17th June 2011

As we enjoy cooking, eating and drinking, we've decided to make a separate web page sharing our culinary experiments, mostly successful... The Cobb barbecue will feature heavily in these summer months. Living aboard and often being some distance from shops, together with limited (particularly cold) storage and preparation space dictates a creative approach to cooking, not to mention conserving gas!

As it's the summer season (ha-ha), we thought we'd start with a bit of Cobb info. Of the genuine Cobb accessories, we have the standard grill plate plus the roasting rack, the newer model of which we bought has a sort of fiddle rail to stop food rolling off. Nothing worse than an escapee sausage... We use the grill plate with the rack to roast joints of pork, beef, whole small chickens, duck breasts, chicken pieces, sausages and vegetables. The roasting rack keeps the food close enough to the heat to cook and brown it beautifully, with crispy skin where appropriate, but prevents it from burning as it may if put directly on the grill plate. We also have the non-stick griddle, which we use for fish, prawns, scallops, chops, steaks and vegetables. This results in perfectly crispy skin on fish, beautifully browned meat or lovely griddled vegetables, with everything remaining juicy, tender and full of flavour. The frying dish is ideal for mussels or paella. It takes a while to really heat up, but to be fair, it is a very large pan.

The non-Cobb 'accessories' we have include a piece of plywood (actually a cupboard shelf 'deliberately' cut short...), upon which we rest the lid when turning food, adding potatoes into the moat for roasting, etc (Cobb now sell a bamboo board with a rebated channel for the lip of the lid which would also work well). The design of the Cobb is such that the bottom does not get hot, so it can be used, as we do, right on the cockpit table. We've found, however, that when you remove the lid to turn food or lift the plate to add potatoes to the moat, you will get cooking fats and juices spattering around a bit. To solve that, we have a large aluminium tray (like pub garden beer trays) which we sit the Cobb on. The final useful addition is the half height flexible builders type bucket, which is the perfect size for cleaning the Cobb (we found these buckets in two sizes, one fits and one doesn't, so measure before you buy!).

Aluminium tray catches fat splashes.

Washing up made easier, so Ann tells me...


We burn Cobblestones which we buy in bulk (and as Tim, who kindly collected our last carton from the Boat Show will attest, bulk is the right word, as they are heavy, well certainly a carton of 36 is!). They work extremely well, with just a bit of flame for the first couple of minutes until the whole stone turns white hot. The big bonus though, is after that you just put your chosen cooking surface on, wait another couple of minutes for that to heat, and it really is ready to start cooking on! It seems that Cobb are constantly improving and developing their product and range. As mentioned above, the roasting rack has been improved with the addition of the fiddle rail, and when we ordered a new non-stick griddle, found the design of that had also been improved with flanges underneath the griddle to locate it into the bowl, and the lid now sits right over the griddle instead of balancing on flanges on the top of the griddle.

We'll add more to this page from time-to-time, so re-visit to see mouth-watering Cobb results. We'll also write about the slow cooker, and seasonal and regional produce as we encounter them. Bon appetit!