RECIPE: Tomato-Seafood Soup of Solitude

Once upon a time, I spent two months hopping from house to house, leaving groceries everywhere in my wake.  Groceries that often simply disappeared, never to be seen again.  HOWEVER, there was once a lovely lady who brought some back--two weeks later, when they were on the verge of going bad.  So, in my desperation to avoid letting good food meet a bad end, I delved into the cookbook my sister gave me for Christmas (Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything) and found a soup recipe that incorporated most of the ingredients I had to use.  I followed its instructions to make a shrimp/fish stock, and then I decided to go rogue and throw in my remnants.

INGREDIENTS:

2 fresh roma tomatoes, cubed
4 oz tomato paste
3/4 lb shelled frozen shrimp
1/2 lb frozen uncooked whiting
3 cups water
1/4 cup white cooking wine
3 blocks Golden Curry (available at WAL*MART)
herbs & spices to taste (I used sage, thyme, fresh ground pepper, cardomam, turmeric & lots of ginger)
1 can coconut milk

This may be the simplest recipe ever invented.  First, I threw the fish & shrimp into a large metal pot with the water and brought it to a boil, letting it simmer for half an hour before adding the tomatoes and the tomato paste.  Then I added the other ingredients in order, leaving the coconut milk until the very last moment, and letting the other ingredients heat until the seafood was thoroughly cooked and the wine had boiled off.  I served it hot over a fifty-fifty mix of jasmine and wild rice.

Now, rice thickens whatever liquid it may be stored with, so after being stored overnight and reheated, it resembled something more like gumbo than soup--but it still tasted absolutely delicious to my curry-loving self.  I didn't think to use my phone to photograph the soup when I first cooked it (my "real" camera being kaputt), but here is what it looked like this afternoon for lunch:

And yes, I cooked this without salt.  There was probably some salt in the Golden Curry to start, and I'm not a fan of overly salty curry.

VERDICT: a win!