New Year's Eve Cioppino

 I've been looking forward to this meal for months! It looks so seafood-scrumptious! And naturally, we had to wait until New Year's Eve...

I noticed that the recipe calls this a soup. And so I talked with the Resident Archeologist about doing a roux to thicken the soup, since we really wanted to have more of a sauce poured over rice. A roux was "at the ready" but I soon realized that the soup cooks down such that you don't even need to thicken it. 

Not sure why, but I chose to use frozen chopped spinach, where it calls for spinach. We discovered that it is "too chopped" and that it just goes everywhere and wasn't quite the texture on the tongue that we were looking for. Next time, we will buy baby spinach and just gently wilt it at the very end of cooking time, which will look so pretty and lend better flavor than the frozen spinach.

Pay attention to the order of cooking the seafood. Whatever just needs warming, pop into the pot for the last five minutes. Mussels actually took about eight or ten minutes, tucked down into the heat of the sauce, and the scallops were perfect in about the same time. Tossing in the cooked lobster meat and the cooked shrimp (calls for raw, but I was lazy :0) those last three to five minutes. Oh, and we pulled the lobster meat out of the shell, tho the recipe calls for cutting up the cooked lobster meat in the shell and placing it in the pot, which would have complimented the beauty of the mussel shells. But we knew we were hungry and wanted that food as ready-to-eat as soon as possible! 

This marvelous jumble of seafood is very filling and so satisfying. A local wine shop recommended White Blend Evolution to pair with this meal and it was a perfect match! We had enough leftovers to enjoy for supper tonight. My husband chose to pour his seafood jumble over ziti, and declared it as good, if not better than with rice. This is a very versatile meal, and the recipe donor, Louis Fontaine, shares its secret..."use any seafood in the soup, but the secret to a delicious flavor is to combine at least one mollusk with one crustacean."

There is one more recipe in this chapter, which is to be completed as soon as the local seafood shop gets its first-ever delivery of eel. They told me they can't remember ever selling eel, but suddenly this year, there has been a demand for it, so they found a local source. This Cioppino had been intended to round out the recipes for the Bicentennial year, but it turns out it will be the eel recipe that wins that honor.





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