The Omnivorous Fish

I admit it: I am depressed. This is a fact. I am ready for f___ing christmas to be over. I want this gig over with, I want this holiday over with, I want to get back to my kitchen and back to my friends. I belong to a neat little community in Long Beach, and I miss them; and they miss me, or so they tell me when they call. And I went on a date with this guy, and I want to take him out again. I feel like a 16 year old girl, a little bit, just slightly, since, well… he’s kind of dreamy.

It doesn’t help that I had to do all my christmas prep in 2 days, running around an unfamiliar landscape in a rented car, much of which used to be farm and forest land that has been strip-mined into homes and strip malls as far as the eye can see. I’m broke (a relative term), which is a major cramp in my style, and since I waited til the last minute to shop in a basically ordinary place, my usual toy-shopping bacchanalia was pinched into the stressful last-minute nightmare that it is for most people throughout their lives.

The funny thing is I am in the midst of one of the happier periods of my life, I just want to get back to it. I had a lot going on when I left… and I feel interrupted. Oh well. Gotta head out for the 47 fish dinner. Why don’t we do an imaginary menu? Wait, I’ll do the real menu first:

Shrimp cocktail
Mussels in tomato sauce
Squid stuffed with breadcrumbs
Fried smelts
Lasagne with seafood
Spaghetti with clams
and we were supposed to have sweet and sour salt cod, but I forgot to buy the cod before it was too late to soak… so I blew it.

And let’s imagine what we might have:
Although I love salt cod, I would save the agrodolce (sweet-sour) treatment for octopus (see below), so I might make:

baccala (salt cod) in a salad with potatoes and fennel
baccalaccio

sweet-sour octopus cooked in red wine. This gets cooked for a long time with a fragment of cinnamon stick in it. Don’t laugh.
polpo agrodolce

roasted eel with cipolline onions
anguidda ai cipuddini

shrimp scampi- the real deal with sesame oil, not what they have at Red Lobster
ammari liguriani

clams in white sauce
vongole in bianco

pasta with whole crabs in marinara sauce
pasta ai granchi

panfried smelts with parsely
cicireddi al pitrusinu

Whatever you’re eating, have a good holiday.