Anchovy Feast — Where the Wild Things Cook

What do you do when you have an unusually large amount of anchovies at your disposal?

An anchovy feast!!!...obviously...

Now some of you might be wondering how and where I came into the possession of so many anchovies. Long story short, while in Bilbao, a family friend was in the search of the best canned anchovies. During our short stay we rented a car and drove all around Bizkaia and Cantabria looking and asking for the best anchovy. As a result, thanks to the generosity of this friend, I ended up with nine cans of anchovies from three different brands and about two extra kilos in my suitcase. This wouldn't have been a problem if my suitcase wasn't already overweight...thankfully the lady at the counter took pity on me and checked in my cabin luggage for free!

Anyway, I arrived in Edinburgh with all these anchovies that, if I were on my own, would take me ages to finish. I love anchovies and all but, they're definitely not part of my day to day diet. This family friend was going to do a taste test of sorts to determine which one was the best, so I figured I could do the same along with a mini dinner party. After some thought I put together a few dishes, all of which included anchovies, and had a few friends over. We tasted all the brands individually and then ate until we couldn't even smell another anchovy. These are the brands we were testing: Conservas Lolín Anchoas Alta Selección Aceite Oliva Virgen Lolín (Brand 1), Conservas Lolín Filete Anchoa Aceite de Oliva Serie Limitada (Brand 2), Hoya Conservas del Atlantico Aceite de Oliva (Brand 3), Anchoas del Cantabrico Codesa Anchoas en Aceite de Oliva Serie Limitada (Brand 4). Below I've attached links to all the websites if anyone interested (they are mostly in Spanish).

Five of us participated in this taste test and none of us are anchovy experts so we based ourselves only on the taste of each anchovy. We all agreed on Brand 4 being our favorite primarily because the anchovies were the softest, not too salty, and the olive oil they were conserved in was the tastiest. Then the ranking went as follows: Brand 4, Brand 3, Brand 1, Brand 2. But, all in all they were all pretty good; definitely better than those cheaper off-brands.

Since we ended up being less people than I expected I decided not too prepare one of the dishes, but I'll include a recipe anyway along with recipes for the other dishes.

Here's what we had: