As you may know, Jennie’s family always does a traditional feast of the seven fishes for their Christmas Eve dinner. Well, this year, Mary, one of my other other halves, wanted to do our own version of this tradition.
Feast of the Seven Fishes is an Italian tradition with roots in the Roman Catholic practice of eating seafood on specific holy days like Christmas Eve because of abstaining from eating meat products. Now, neither Mary nor I are Catholic or Italian, but we thought this tradition sounded like something we needed to get in on. Since we were mostly interested in cooking lots of yummy fish for friends, we thought it would be okay to move the feast to New Year’s Eve and invite our friends to collaborate by making it a potluck.
As usual things got hectic in the kitchen right around meal time, so it was lucky that T.R. offered to help out and take a few photos while Mary and I were juggling hot pans.
Here are Mary and Zak looking very snazzy and transferring Zak’s salmon with mango chutney and pomegranate seeds to a pretty plate for mass consumption.
Meg who is looking cute and sparkly for New Year’s Eve is also being my sous chef for the linguine with clam sauce we threw together in about 15 minutes.
Another kitchen shot of ladies in pretty dresses. This is me and my friend Rose. You’re also getting a sneak peak at my new kitchen. I’ll provide a more thorough introduction at a later date.
And here is a partial view of the complete feast. You can see Zak’s salmon on the far left, my linguine with clam sauce is in the blue casserole dish, there’s a tuna casserole right up front, shrimp risotto in that cooking pot, and some crab dip barely visible at the very back.
From another angle, you can see Mary’s parmesan crusted tilapia in the front, as well as the shrimp cocktail. That other delicious casserole is some incredible mac and cheese. No seafood in that one, just pure deliciousness.
And so our complete feast of seven seafood dishes was
Linguine with Clam Sauce
Salmon with Mango Chutney
Parmesan Crusted Tilapia with Caper Lemon Butter Sauce
Crab Dip
Shrimp Cocktail
Shrimp Risotto
Tuna Casserole
Yes, we cheated a little by having two shrimp dishes, but we didn’t care. After all, that was a 2011 problem and it is now 2012. On to new adventures, right?
T.R. made it a truly perfect evening by providing delicious chocolate orange crème brule to everyone’s delight. We rang in the new year with very full bellies and smiles on our faces. I hope all of you had fun in the last hours of 2011!
[addtoany] Yum