Calling it a "paella pan" is like saying...

that you want your French Dip "with au jus sauce". You're just being redundant (over and over). A "paella" is the pan, a fact that we learned from the always excellent Alton Brown video.

We don't know what inspired us to make paella on "date night", but Peta did the shopping early and got started with this recipe. It took friggin' hours, but it was soooo good (a four forker on epicurious.com). We used homemade stock but we did not grill the chicken and sausages separately. We also waited until the last minute to add the seafood for fear of over-cooking. We cooked them separately but added the liquid into the paella. I think that the only differences in ingredients between what we did and what the recipe called for was the substitution of

• homemade venison sausage with Moroccan spices and homemade preserved Meyer lemon
• black cod for the fish
• the omission of lobster tails (we're not made of money and you'd have to fly them across the country!)

Things were going great, albeit slowly, but Jim felt as though there was something missing, so we went back to our man with a plan, AB here. Ah ha!!! The Smoked Paprika. Ah-nice.

In retrospect, we could save money on the orange and yellow peppers and just go with red. Perhaps not even roasting them would give a bit of bite and crunch to the finished product. Oh yeah, no hacking at the chicken parts with a cleaver. It creates lethal shards of chicken bones.

Jim and Peta