Chorizo al vino

Chorizo is fantastically savoury, and makes a great tapas dish just frizzled up in its own oil in a pan, with no adornment. But if you feel like doing something a bit special with it, your chorizo will be even better cooked and marinaded in red wine, creating gorgeously boozy, smoky, spicy, porky juices to dibble lots of bread in.

It's worth preparing a couple of cured chorizos at once, even if there aren't that many of you eating - this recipe keeps well in the fridge, the flavours becoming deeper and richer, so you can bring the dinner table to Spain again in a couple of days' time. Once again, I don't recommend that you use your best wine for this. A Spanish vino tinto (bog-standard red wine) will be absolutely fine.

To serve four to six as a tapas dish, depending on how many other dishes you are serving, you'll need:

2 cured chorizos (I prefer a spicy one, but if you don't like chillies, choose a mild chorizo)
1 bottle red wine

Prick the whole chorizos all over with a fork, and put them in a saucepan with the whole bottle of wine. The pan should be small enough to allow both sausages to be covered with the wine. Bring the wine to a gentle boil and continue to simmer it for twenty minutes with the lid on.

Remove the wine and chorizo from the heat, and set it aside with the lid on overnight at room temperature for the flavours to marry.

When you are ready to eat, remove the chorizo from the pan, reserving the wine, and chop it slantwise into chunks about 1½ cm thick. Put the pieces of chorizo in a large frying pan with half the wine, and cook over a high heat, turning the chorizo frequently, until the wine has reduced to a few tablespoons and the chorizo is crisp from the heat and dark from the wine. Pour the chorizo, the wine reduction and the savoury oil released by the cooking into a dish and serve with plenty of bread to mop up the delicious juices.