Cioppino

I am but 1/4 Italian. If you were to chop up all of my body parts and separate them out according to their country of origin, you would have a lovely pile of my digestive system happily waving this at you. While other girls gorge on chocolate, i can not leave a piece of garlic bread uneaten. give me some kind of tomato based sauce for me to dip it in and it's game over.

My mom's body parts would all be in one pile. she was all Polish, but she cooked Italian like her married last name dictated her to. It confused me when i was younger, to be honest. what do you mean my mom is not Italian? She just made us chicken piccata for dinner! and it was so gooood! i just don't geeet it!

A part of this "no one in my family is Italian but me" tradition was that every Christmas Day, my mom would make us all a big pot of cioppino (pronounced "Shu-pee-no). Cioppino is a seafood stew, invented in San Francisco by Italian fishermen. At some point, all of my cousins either got knocked up or knocked someone else up, so they had kids to tend to on Xmas day. We moved the tradition to New Year's day because, frankly, i was a total pest and was not willing to let the tradition die. It was really the only thing i ever liked about Christmas, and if i just had to wait one more week i could.....as long as i got my yearly cioppino.

And as so many of my stories go, we now come to the "and then mom died" part. There was talk of whether or not we would continue the tradition, but none of us knew the recipe and i think it is just scary to sit down your gaggle of family members and hand them a dish that you are totally winging, when they have been eating the perfected version of it for 2o something years.

A few years ago, i decided to try and make some. Not for my whole family (skeeery!), but just for Neil and I. I looked online for recipes. And that is when i learned that I knew how to make cioppino all along....not because the recipes looked so familiar. it was the exact opposite. Some called for saffron. wrong. that is bouillabaisse. All say that the freshest fish is required (technically, that is true about all fish dishes), but then some add a green pepper. um, if you had the freshest fish ever, would you waste it on a soup? and then throw a green pepper, the most invasive flavor on the planet, in with the soup? red wine? this isn't some heavy stew. it is seafood! i even saw recipes with alaskan king crab. i don't think that is what the fishermen from san francisco used, when they had a whole bay full of dungeoness crab directly under their butts.

So i got to it. i gathered the ingredients from my memories of helping mom for all those years and i made a pretty stellar pot of cioppino. the smell....it is so specific.....it has stages, from the onions and garlic sauteeing in olive oil and butter, to when you add the spices, wine, and tomatoes. then, at the very end, you add your seafood and it all shifts and you know that you have succeeded. i totally did it.

i am sitting here, in Denver, currently breaking another Law of The Cioppino Recipes According to the Rest of The World. it is virtually impossible for me to "use the freshest fish available", but i am at stage two of the smellathon right now....wine, tomatoes, and spices have been added. the longer it cooks, the better it will taste. my stomach is growling already. i will have my yearly cioppino, people. it will be done!

So here we are, at the end of another year. there were some big changes this year and i have no idea what next year will hold. i haven't made a list of resolutions. right now, i am just thinking that my mom left me with so many things that are so ingrained that i don't even know they are there most of the time. they may not be how everyone else would have done it (why so many pets? volunteering is a waste of time. gay people aren't normal. here is a green pepper for your fish!!!), but i like how my mom did it. i really really do.

~~UPDATE~~
it has been brought to my attention that maybe i should share the darn recipe. here it is, from my memory, and not very specific at all...

equal parts olive oil and butter
1 onion
couple of ribs of celery
4 or so cloves of garlic.

chop the above veggies and saute in however much butter and olive oil you need to do that until soft, adding the garlic only long enough to smell it (less than a minute) before you add:

i jar of clam juice (i think it only comes in one size and it seems 8 ouncey)
approx. 2 cups of white wine
a 28 oz can of whole tomatoes with their juice. squish the tomatoes in your hands to break them up.
a box of chicken broth
1 tablespoon of dried basil (or twice as much fresh if you have it)
ditto on some parsley
a bay leaf
salt to taste but i, being a person who salts salad and pizza, rarely need to add salt because of the clam juice

simmer as long as you can. at least an hour or two. you want the broth to stay light and thin. resist all pasta sauce making memories where you urge your food to thicken up. you can add more broth and/or wine as you go if you need. just don't make fishy spaghetti sauce.
add whatever fish you can get your hands on, and dungeoness crab. if your fish dude won't break up the crab for you, get a new fish dude. if not possible, you'll have to bang up the crab a bit before you put it in the pot. add prawns in the shell. you can add clams, mussels, scallops, any firm white fish. i add the crab first, and then everything else according to size; biggest to smallest, as to not overcook anything.

for eating, you will need a nutcracker and those pokey things for your crab, a bowl for shells and used up napkins, and lots of garlic bread to sop up the broth. you may need a bib if you are something of a sloppy eater. i won't judge. the point is to get messy, anyways.

i apologize if the above recipe reads a bit Rachel Ray-ish. Her recipes are vague because she is annoying. mine are vague because i don't have a paid staff to follow me around and write my crap down for me. (there are about 7 million other reasons that rachel ray is annoying, but there are already enough blogs devoted to that subject. google away, fellow haters!)

enjoy the foods and if it sucks, add some saffron or something.