Paella

Made some paella on the weber kettle tonight.

Here are the soffrito, cooking and socorat pics.

Recipe

Thanks everyone for the kind comments. Here's what I did.

3/4 chimney of Kingsford Blue. Spread that out even, added another 1/4 chimney of unlit on top and 3 chunks of cherry. My goal was to maintain 350-ish at the grate.

I have a 15 inch paella pan, so that meant 2 cups if rice. A 17 inch pan would bump that up to 3 cups of rice and 5 1/2 cups of stock.

Ingredients:
Olive Oil - 4-5 TBSP
1 Red Bell Pepper cut in 1/2 in strips
1 Linguica sausage (cut in 1 inch chunks) Chorizo will do in a pinch. About 6-8 ounces. I get mine at Paulina's Meat Market in Chicago.
1 Green Bell Pepper finely diced
4 Roma tomatoes, cut off the tops and skin. Then dice.
1 Large Onion, grated on a box grater
9 cloves of garlic minced
1 pound mussels cleaned
1 pound shrimp cleaned
4-5 slices of Lemon
2 cups Arborio Rice
3 1/4 cups chicken broth (simmered or warm)
2 bay leaves
1/2 cup white wine
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp saffron


Put the pan on the grill and add 2 TBSP olive oil. Added the red bell pepper and linguica. Let that cook to brown the sausage and soften the bell pepper about 5-7 min.

Remove the Red Bell Pepper and sausage and add the green bell pepper, grated onion, tomato and salt. Cooked that till most of the liquid is reduced and thickened. You want a little carmalization here. This is the sofrito. You may need another TBSP of olive oil here. For me, this took 15 min.

Then add the rice and sausage. Mix it up and get it coated with everything in the pan. After 2-3 min of coating/cooking the rice, add the warmed chicken stock, bay leaves, saffron and wine. Add in the red bell pepper pin-wheel style on the top. Cook uncovered for 25-30 min.

After 10 min of the rice cooking, add in the mussels. 5 min later, add shrimp (peeled, deviened, and seasoned a little? I used Emeril's Essence) and open the vents on your Weber. You need to crank the heat a bit at this point.

With 25-30 min of cooking time, you should see the shrimp pink up and the mussels open. Hopefully most of liquid has cooked into the rice, boiled off and you're getting some crust on the rice. With about 5 min remaining, add in 4-5 lemon slices. Keep a spatula handy and check the rice and liquid content. Through out the cook, you may need to turn the pan on the grill depending if you have hot spots.

Garnish at the end with frozen peas and chopped parsley. Remove to rest for about five minutes and cover with aluminum foil. This will cook the peas. After you remove the foil, any mussels that haven't opened, you need to throw out.

Here's an Alton Brown video on how to store mussels...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr-hMSwZ0a4