Paella

BF and I have made Paellas on several occasions, using two different recipes from two different books (The Essential Seafood Cookbook being the other one). Now, if only I could remember which one was which. But may be that doesn't matter at all: both were excellent, and judging from the recipe the main difference is that this one contains poultry, shrimp and mussels while the other one contains only fish and seafood.

Making a Paella can be a lot of work because of the various ingredients involved; the good news, though, is that you can prepare a lot (basically, everything you need to do before adding the rice), and once your guests have arrived, you only need to warm your pan, boil the rice and add all other ingredients.

Edited 16 december 2012: I'm not so sure anymore we ever prepared this recipe. Maybe we only did the other one? Either that, or our standards have risen enormously, now that we have a lot more experience :)

We made this dish yesterday, and a lot of things didn't work out properly. The rice was slightly undercooked; the chicken thighs was very obviously undercooked (and one of our guests was pregnant, eek!), the peppers weren't exactly an exciting addition, and the whole dish overall just didn't look very appetizing. We'll have to see if we manage to prepare the other recipe soon to compare.

One thing to note: this recipe is for 6-8 persons. Don't even think about using only one pan, unless it's really enormous. We have a 4.1 litre Le Creuset pan, and that was definitely too small. I had to use a wok as well.