The Best Paella… Ever

A friend of mine has a small cabin on Dabob Bay, which we are lucky enough to be allowed to visit (and even luckier to be invited back to) for a few weekends during the year. These periodic cabin trips are usually packed full of fishing, setting and pulling crab pots, forgetting to re-apply sunscreen, drinking beer, and cooking up indulgent dishes that we would otherwise avoid for health reasons. It has become a recent labor-day tradition for us to have one last summertime excursion to the cabin, during which we go balls to the wall with our menu planning.

As we brainstormed potential crowd-pleasing dishes, my wife brought up a new idea: paella. While we’d both had – and enjoyed – this dish in various incarnations, neither of us had ever tried to make it. This was concerning, as we didn’t want to spend the resources required to make such a time consuming and expensive dish…