Spaghetti Frutti di Mare

I feel this blog drifting toward food… As a guy who really wanted to have dinner with me in College and would not take no for an answer said, “a guy’s gotta eat,” so I should have some material. The odd thing about that guy is when I said I had to study all day, he proposed that I should roast a chicken for him as I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere anyway. So anyway last night I made a good dinner that was pretty easy and quick, although given that it is based on seafood and I was cooking it in Carbondale, I spent most of the time I worked on it defrosting the main ingredients. I used no recipe; it was very simple. I had this dish (of course it is just Spaghetti with assorted seafood) in Miami earlier this year, and it was good, but I thought “I can make that and it might even be better.” All the seafood was good at the restaurant, but there was a key flavor missing. When I got home, I called my Dad and asked him what herbs or spices he would use to cook this, and he said “nothing but Rosemary.” It works beautifully. I got shrimp, New Zealand Green Mussels, and a little piece of “Alaskan Cod,” all, alas, frozen.

I started the dish by heating Olive Oil and chopping a medium onion and a few little cloves of garlic. When they were going, I added canned whole tomatoes, about 1 and a half cans, and about two tablespoons of tomato paste. I threw in a handful of fresh rosemary. Once the tomatoes were simmering away, I started adding the seafood, starting with the shrimp, then the mussels, and finally the fish. The sauce remained a bit watery, so I removed the seafood in reverse order and simmered it down a bit. I also took the opportunity to shell the shrimp, hoping that I would get the best of both worlds, having the intense flavor of cooking shrimp in shells without the hassle of shelling them. I don’t mind shelling my own shrimp, but when the kids need me to help shell theirs too I don’t get much chance to eat while the food is still warm. The meal was a hit, particularly with my younger daughter whose two favorite foods are spaghetti and shrimp. She was even into the mussels. Sadly, my older daughter is very sick with a virus, and not only did she not get to eat this feast, but she kept waking up in the night complaining that the house smelled weird. At one point she said “Daddy, can you go take a shower so the smell will go away?” But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, it was the lingering scent of Fruitti di Mare.