This recipe comes to us from the kitchen of Barcelona New Haven’s Executive Chef, Jodi Bernhard. Chef Jodi served Caparonnes at our October 14th Palacios Remondo Wine Dinner in New Haven. This hearty stew is a perfect cold-weather dish!
A note from the Chef:
In the recipe, I say to use lamb sausage. For the wine dinner we made our own homemade lamb sausage. You can sometimes find lamb sausage at certain gourmet grocery stores, but if you can’t find lamb, please feel free to use a good pork sausage or even a duck sausage would be delicious. You can be creative here — it’s a stew, so you can improvise as much as you want.
1 lb. Dried Red Kidney Beans
1. Soak the beans in cold water overnight. Drain then put into a large pot with 8 cups water, ½ of the onion, and the bay leaf. Bring to a boil and simmer until beans are tender. Leave the beans to cool in the liquid at room temperature.
2. Prick the chorizo and lamb sausage with a sharp paring knife in a few spots and put into a sauté pan with enough water to cover. Simmer the sausages for 20 minutes. Remove the sausages from the water (reserve 2 cups of the sausage cooking water), and cut into 1” pieces.
3. Small dice the remaining ½ of onion. Heat the olive oil in a large pot and add the diced onion, green pepper and garlic. Saute for 10 minutes.
4. Add the sausages, cooked beans, chicken stock and reserved sausage cooking water. Simmer for 30 minutes. Add the guindilla peppers and season with salt to taste.
Brussels sprouts are cold weather vegetables, thus they’re in their prime this time of year. You can pick up some nice ones at the Farmers Market or at Whole Foods. And not only are they flavorful enough