Fish soup

My mother often prepared fish soup for family meals, so it is one of those dishes that always brings back very good memories for me. It is also an easy dish to prepare and very tasty, so the recipe that Miguel Ángel, author of the Green Peppers blog, brings us today is ideal for these dates.

Le Creuset ceramic tureen set

The Christmas holidays are coming to an end, but there is still one of my favorite days to celebrate: Three Kings Day.

For this day, I want to suggest that you cook a very, very simple fish soup with semolina but with a lot of flavor. I give you the quantities for 10 people, but you can reduce them by half to make a soup for an average family. I have cooked this simple fish soup in my 28cm tall cocotte , but reducing the quantities by half, you can use a 24cm cocotte to cook it.

This is a first dish that you should take into account since it is quick to prepare and its cost is low. Each serving of soup cost me €4. Taking into account that we are talking about a dish “for holidays”, I think it should be in our closet of special recipes to delight the palates of our loved ones.

Ingredients (for 10 people)

• 3kg of fish for soup
• 750g prawns
• 500g mussels
• 200g clams
• 1 onion
• 1 leek
• 3 small tomatoes
• ½ fennel bulb
• 4 L of water
• 1 glass of dry white wine
• a few sprigs of parsley
• 100g wheat semolina
• olive oil
• salt

Le Creuset round cocotte

Preparation

1. Peel the prawns and reserve the heads and skins. Preserve the bodies for later in the refrigerator.

2. Put a splash of olive oil in a cocotte and sauté the leek, fennel and onion, which you will have cut finely. Add a pinch of salt and wait for the vegetables to soften.

3. Then add the chopped tomato and wait for it to fry well. Don't be in a hurry. The more concentrated the stir-fry is, the more flavor the soup will have. It will take you about 10 minutes over medium heat to have the sauce at its ideal point.

4. Add the heads and skins of the prawns to the cocotte and squeeze them with the help of a spatula.

5. When the skins of the prawns have changed color to red and you have squeezed all their flavor out of them, add all the chopped fish to the cocotte and cover with the water. Also add the white wine and parsley sprigs and let everything boil for 40 minutes. Remove any foam that forms while the broth is cooking with a slotted spoon .

6. While the broth is cooking, you can steam the clams and mussels. To do this, put a finger of water in a saucepan and bring it to the heat. When the water starts to boil, add the mussels and cover. Wait a minute for everyone to open up. Remove from the heat and separate the bodies from the shells. Repeat the process with the clams.

7. When you have the broth ready, remove it from the heat and strain it. With the help of a mortar or a wooden pin, mash all the fish in a large strainer to extract all its flavor.

8. Once you have strained all the broth, add the wheat semolina and let it cook for 18 minutes. Season the soup with salt and also add the chopped prawn bodies. Cook for two more minutes.

9. Distribute the mussels and clams among the 10 tureens or deep plates and serve the soup. Try to distribute the prawns equally so that no one complains!