Anyone who has found themselves a bit bored during lockdown should check out Tabatha Valls Halling's TikTok videos on her social media feeds. Her creativity and comedy timing knows no bounds, and are guaranteed to put a smile on your face in these strange times.
Starting her F1 career as a press officer for Hispania Racing before going on to work for several other teams, Tabatha left her role at Toro Rosso in 2017 and now runs Press Play Productions, a video production company she set up to provide original social media content for clients, including some F1 teams. Find out more about Press Play Productions here.
This is Tabatha's taste of home:
“When I first started working in F1 and had to move from Barcelona to the UK back in 2011, it’s the first thing I cooked once I moved into my apartment.
It reminds me of home because in Spain it’s a very traditional recipe and one you can’t find in bars or restaurants around the world. My parents both cook great tortillas and they taught me this recipe. Every time I go back home, you can be sure there’s always a tortilla, some ‘pa amb tomaquet’ (the traditional bread with tomato) and some Spanish jamon waiting for me!
When you work in F1, you spend little time at home so these little things really make you smile. During the flyaways (long haul races) every time there’s a stopover at a Spanish airport like Madrid or Barcelona, I make sure to eat a tortilla sandwich before boarding the next plane!
Once in Austin (I think in 2017) the room had a small kitchenette, so I took the ingredients from the circuit kitchen back to the room one evening and cooked a tortilla for dinner.
Ingredients
2 eggs
2/3 smallish potatoes
Half an onion
Olive oil
Salt
Method
While you heat a big pan with quite a bit of olive oil in it, start peeling and cutting the onion and potatoes. Cut them all quite small – especially the potatoes (the smaller the better)
Add the chopped onion to the pan and cook until it’s golden in colour, then add the potatoes and continue to cook, slow but steady. Keep stirring every now and then, for about half an hour until the potatoes become soft and break easily. Once they’re all golden, soft and broken (don’t be scared to break them on purpose, this way they become even smaller) they will be ready.
While the onion and potatoes are cooking, crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them well, add a big pinch of salt. Once the onion and potatoes are ready, scoop them up with a big spoon and add them to the eggs (you don’t need to put all of the cooking oil in, just the oil that comes with the onion and potato mixture when you scoop it up – don’t pour all the oil into the eggs!).
Mix the eggs, potatoes and onion together and let the mixture sit for a while – a minimum of 15-20 minutes, but the longer you leave it the better. I’ve made this mixture at lunchtime and not actually cooked the tortilla until the evening (it sat for around 6 hours, but there’s no need for that long if you don’t have the time).
Heat the small tortilla pan with a drop of olive oil – just enough so that it won’t stick. When it’s nice and hot, pour the mixture into the pan, it should fit perfectly. Cook one side for a few minutes and then turn it over with the help of a plate, to cook the other side. The first time you turn it, it’s easy to make a bit of a mess as the top isn’t cooked yet. The way to do it is to put a small plate on the top of the pan and turn it over holding both together, and then slide the tortilla back into the pan with the uncooked side now on the bottom.
I turn it a couple of times until I see that the outside is nice and golden…I also like it a bit runny inside, but it’s up to you to leave a bit longer if you like the inside all cooked.
