Seafood chowder - chicken soup for the mind?
I thought I'd note what I did for tonight's rather successful seafood chowder¹ here given recent discussion of such things. I kind of made it up as I went along and it worked really nicely - I love cooking by getting a few ideas from various recipes (often on the net) then coming up with something from that general bunch of ideas.
Making it and sharing it with the housemates helped me feel almost sane for a while, too. On that side note: Sometimes it's really lucky that plans/suggestions don't happen. Like, say, when you're about to basically lose your mind for a while and don't yet know it.
¹ probably not technically a chowder, but close enough.
Soup base:
- Veggie stock (didn't have any suitable fish stock or fish carcasses). Stock wasn't at all salty so added a little bit of salt.
- pinch of really nice¹ smoked paprika
- ground black pepper
- pinch curry powder
- grated nutmeg
Made somewhere around a litre or a litre and a half, I think; I tend to cook by eye.
"Seafood" of your choice, lightly fried/grilled with some garlic and the chopped whites of spring onions (shallots might've been better but didn't have any). In this case this was shelled mussels, squid, small shelled prawns, and a fair bit of hoki. ~700g in all. Drained the juice from cooking periodically into the soup base.
Potatoes (boiled or just nuked, then fairly finely chopped).
Added potatoes & lightly fried seafood to the soup base. Deglazed the pan used for the seafood (just with water), added result to soup pot. Prepared 3 tsp cornflour suspension (maybe should've used roux?), added along with 50-100ml cream. Stirred it in, then simmered the lot until it thickened nicely and the potato broke up a bit. Added the chopped green tops of the spring onions (might've used chives if if I'd used shallots in the base) a minute or so before serving with some hot crusty bread.
Might work with a white wine deglaze, too, need to try that.
¹ Smoked paprika is one area where supermarket spice rack offerings tend to be pretty dire. I use "pimenton los novios dulce"; it's a Spanish import in a sort of cubeoid tin that can be found at some european foods suppliers. It's not even remotely the same stuff.
(Sorry about the dodgy foreground extraction - laptop trackpads are good for many things, but graphics work isn't one of them).
The end result was really rather tasty, and stupidly easy too. A combination I always find appealing. Even had trivial cleanup as a bonus.
Next I think it'll be lemon-marinated fish time, but that'll require a trip to the Freo fish markets for really nice fresh fish.
Anyway, calmed down enough I might be able to sleep soon. Something like 16 hours of barely restrained panic - hooray. Only concentrating on maths, programming, gaming, or the like seems to help. Hasn't happened for months, and I really hope it doesn't again. I'm only now calming down decently and it's near 5am, so I'm tempted to give up on sleep entirely for today lest my sleeping patterns be knocked out completely. As it is I'm still worrying hopelessly about things that're almost certainly all in my head.