If you follow my blog, you know I have a heck of a lot of smelt in my freezer. Having vowed not to repeat the same recipe twice this year, the only way I could think of making it on short notice was to put it in a stew or soup. I basically used my mussels recipe and jazzed it up a bit with tips from Bobby Flay in the Food & Wine magazine (July 2010), so the yummy juice would be heartier. This time I pulled the center bone out of the smelt – what a pain! The best thing about smelt is you just fry ‘em and eat ‘em from one end to the other. But since smelt really isn’t a stew kind of fish and I didn’t want anyone picking at their dish during dinner, I pulled out the backbone which brought most of the ribs with it.
I picked up 1-2 dozen clams from the fish market (they were 39 cents each if you’re curious). This is my first time making fresh clams – before I’ve only used canned clams to make spaghetti sauce. Normally seafood stew would have thicker pieces of fish filet in it, shrimp, and other seafood, but my mission was only to use up the smelt. I call it seafood soup because you have to serve it in a bowl and eat it with a spoon.
Seafood Soup
1 T cooking oil
1 large shallot, thinly sliced
2 crushed garlic cloves
1/2 C white wine
1 can low-sodium broth (~2 cups)
1 bottle clam juice
1 15-oz can drained diced tomatoes
1 t Old Bay seasoning
1 t thyme
1 bay leaf
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
1-2 dozen littleneck clams, scrubbed
1 pound fish filets, cut in 1-inch pieces
2 T unsalted butter (optional)
2 T fresh chopped parsley
Heat the oil in a large soup pot. Add the shallot and garlic and cook over high heat, stirring, about 3 minutes. Add the wine and boil until reduced by half, about 3 minutes. Add the stock, clam juice, tomatoes, Old Bay, thyme, bay leaf and season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil over high heat and cook about 5 minutes.
Add the clams, cover and cook 5 minutes. Add the fish, cover and simmer 2 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove the clams. Discard any that didn’t open. Add the butter if you want it and parsley and cook until butter melts. Ladle the stew over the clams in bowls.
