A couple of days ago, Jennifer had a great idea when she asked “instead of cooking a New Year’s Eve dinner like we usually do, how about we cook dinner on New Year’s Day instead?” Awesome I thought – that means we can do it together! We talked a bit about what we would like to have, and Jen suggested that she always wanted to give a go at a good, steaming pot of Cioppino, an American version of the Italian Zupe de Pesce, or quite literally, “Soup of Fish.” Evidently the story goes that transplanted Italian fish mongers in San Fransisco invented this dish utilizing the remains of day: all the fish that they could not sell in the market. Who knows if that is true, but every time I have eaten it at a restaurant, it is different, and looking at countless recipes on the internet did not help too much narrow down how to make it. Probably the most helpful thing I read came from my favorite cooking resource “The Silver Spoon,” which is really more like an Encyclopedia of Italian cooking rather than a regular cookbook. It does not exactly tell you clearly how to prepare dishes, but it does give quite a bit of background on why things are the way things are, which probably more important in Italian cooking anyway.

“When making fish soup, there should be at least three different types of fish in the soup: one stock making fish, one sauce making fish, and a sliced fish for body.”

Easy enough. I headed to the Dekalb Farmers Market, careful not to check exactly when their fish delivery came in. I sure it was moments before I arrived. At the market I picked up some medium shrimp, small scallops, mussels, little neck clams, and some halibut. In the spirit of the dish, I really wanted cod instead, but they were all out. Jennifer made an awesome tomato sauce for the base stock, and I used clam sauce and vegetable stock for the fish base – I did however freeze all of my leftover shrimp shells and fish parts to use making a good fish stock next time. finally just for luck Jen improvised on a tasty black eye pea salad  – feta makes everything good! On top of that we had sushi on New Year’s Eve – there has got to be something extra luck about fish two days in a row – right?

Paired with a loaf fresh Italian bread from the market and stacked on top of a long run this afternoon – this was one hearty and tasty start the new year To top it all off – cooking together is fun – not to mention efficient. As soon as the cooking was done, there was not a dirty dish in sight!