In the south of Italy, families celebrate the Eve of Christmas with the Feast of the Seven Fishes. For Italian Americans, this feast is large, and usually consists of seven or more fishes. In our family, this is a chance for us to celebrate Christmas, eat a lot of seafood, and have leftovers to last us a few days.
This year, we had six fishes: shrimp, mussels, clams, squid, lobster, and clams. We prepare the shrimp three ways (shrimp cocktail, lemon and garlic shrimp, and fried shrimp). We had 10 pounds of mussels and clams, steamed together in a large dutch oven. We use the crab, squid, and lobster to help the flavor of the sauce, and serve it all with spaghetti.
Here are some photographs from this year’s celebration!
These are the lobster tails.
With the blue crabs.
Frozen Calamari.
Mmm mmm squid.
All 10 pounds of frozen shrimp.
Shrimp production line: deveining and detailing 10 pounds of FROZEN shrimp is a lot of work!
Checking on dinner, making sure everything’s going smoothly, sneaking a taste here and there.
Making use of all the burners…
The fry daddy. We use it one a year to fry the Christmas shrimp. And every year we nearly a) forget to get oil and b) forget to go get the fry daddy from the basement.
Mmm look at those fried shrimp.
And the spaghetti. Delicious.
[addtoany] Yum