Mariscada Salsa Verde

[Rods84]

This is an updated version of Mariscada Salsa Verde from my Recipe Club week, posted for the chef2chef Top 100. The only major change is to reduce the coconut milk by one-half; and some other minor changes are also included. And why am I still making changes? Because: a) mariscada benefits by being a work in progress; and b) I have waaay too much time on my hands. So, from the top:

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Did you ever have a restaurant dish so good, it haunted you? A dish so good, eating anything else -- regardless of how well-prepared -- can’t satisfy you? A dish so good, you would sell your soul to get it?

Of course, I could only be talking about one thing: Swanson chicken pot pies. ... Oh no, hold it: that was when I was eight. Let me fast forward about 40 years and check my notes. ... Just where are my glasses? ... OK yeah, now I remember: I was going to write about Mariscada Salsa Verde.

But to set the stage for this installment of “Mike Rodman's Compulsive Food Disorders and the Elusive Recipes that Fan the Flames,” I must first talk about its origin. And like many of my favorite dishes, it all starts with that Mecca of Great Food, that city by the bay, that toddlin’ town: Newark, NJ.

Now, I don’t want to upset anyone who might live in Newark, but most would have to say Newark isn’t exactly the center of the cultural universe. But there is a section of Newark called “Ironbound” that has a Spanish/Portuguese restaurant on nearly every corner. And on a typical night, it’s not unusual to see luxury cars with New York license plates filling their parking lots.

Of course, most New Yorkers wouldn’t spit on New Jersey if it was on fire -- a combative snobbery I couldn’t quite understand while growing up in the Newark suburb of Maplewood. But then I started to travel the country and said, “Ya know, they're right -- this place does stink.”

However, that didn’t stop me from moving back to my native state in 1983, where I promptly got a sales manager job, covering the eastern seaboard. But regardless of how many great meals I charged to my company as, ahem, “business expenses,” my best meals were when I returned to Newark Airport and drove a couple of miles to Ironbound.

And my dish was Mariscada Salsa Verde every single time I went to one (with a little shrimp in garlic first and some Spanish rice on the side -- recipes that will also be supplied).

When I first started to cook for real -- upon moving to Arkansas in 1991, to jump-start a career in newspapers, left behind years before because $200 a week and all the ink you can steal only goes so far -- I had no illusions about trying to duplicate Mariscada Salsa Verde.

“A chicken dish is one thing,” I told myself, mostly because I was the only person in the room. “But Mariscada Salsa Verde is a dish of the gods (assuming the gods liked seafood).”

But nearly a dozen years later, I set upon the adventure to make this shellfish stew in a white-and-green sauce. And I bravely did so because, well, I’m an idiot -- and the first couple of attempts proved it.

Tackling the project in the Information Age, I reasoned, would give me a head start. All I had to do was jump on the Internet and I’d have dozens of recipes at my fingertips, right? Wrong. Don’t believe me? Try it.

There are no recipes on the Internet for the Mariscada Salsa Verde I ate in Newark. There are plenty of recipes for regular (red) Mariscada, but none for the Salsa Verde version I wanted to make.

Finally, through a Spanish professor I communicated with, I was able to score a recipe for a dish that called itself Mariscada Salsa Verde -- although one look and I knew it wasn’t close to the dish I craved.

I did, however, use that solitary recipe as a starting point because it included coconut milk, which forced my dimly-lit brain to say, “Gee, ya think that’s why it was white?” After contemplating this for a mere few weeks, I decided that might be it.

So I set about creating the sauce that I had one day promised would make a millionaire out of the first person to bottle it. So why am I giving it away for free? Well, I think I answered that with the “idiot” comment.

Before the payoff, a few notes:

1) Use nearly any combination of shellfish you want. One of my ingredients is lobster slipper tails, which are the small guys. I love the way they add vibrant color to the stew -- but don't overcook them, because they'll get tough (time them like shrimp). I also like to use the frozen, pre-cooked New Zealand greenshell mussels, widely available these days. I find them meatier and tastier than regular blue mussels and, again, the color looks great. The more varied your shellfish selection, the closer to authentic your Mariscada will be.

2) The only shellfish that's a requirement is the clams (6 cherrystones or 12 littlenecks), because their juice is needed for the sauce. And obviously, I wouldn't recommend changing the number of them, for fear of also changing the amount of clam juice. But feel free to change the amount of other shellfish, to accommodate the number of people you're serving.

3) There is a lot of sauce in this dish, just like the Newark restaurants that serve it in a stew pot (that’s right -- they just plop it down on your table, giant serving spoons and all). And since I hate wasting good sauce, I recommend you save it and throw-in some sectioned lobsters for Lobster Salsa Verde -- or even, a cooked and sectioned octopus for Pulpo Salsa Verde.

MARISCADA SALSA VERDE

Ingredients:

6 cherrystone clams
6 lobster slipper tails (membranes split lengthwise)
1 lb. pre-cooked New Zealand greenshell mussels, thawed
1/2 lb. shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/2 lb. par-boiled squid bodies, cut into rings

1/3 cup olive oil
1 lb. tomatillos, minced (see instructions)
1 lg. onion, minced
1 large head of garlic, minced (or two smaller ones)

6 cups of fish stock made with wine (a shrimp fumet works great)
3/4 cup (half a 14-oz. can) of UNSWEETENED coconut milk
1 ts. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 ts. green Tobasco sauce (the mild kind; made with jalapenos)
1 bunch chopped fresh cilantro (about 1/2 cup)

Procedure:

Remove leaves from tomatillos, boil for 3 minutes, cool in cold water and mince in a food processor. (Par-boil squid rings in same water.) Combine the minced tomatillos, onion and garlic for a coarse purée.

In a large soup pot, heat olive oil until hot and add the coarse purée. Cook, uncovered, for 5 minutes or until onions are tender. Add stock, coconut milk, salt and pepper. Return to a boil, then lower heat and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Add Tobasco (or similar product) and cilantro. Can be made ahead, to this point.

Add clams; simmer, covered, for 5 minutes or until clams just start to open. Add slipper tails, mussels and shrimp; return to a boil and then simmer, covered for 5 more minutes, or until clams are open. Add squid and heat.

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Need a little Spanish something beforehand? Well, you might as well start the garlic trail with some Spanish Shrimp in Garlic:

SHRIMP IN GARLIC

1/4 cup olive oil
4 lg. cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1 lb. medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
2 Tbsp. dry sherry
1 tsp. paprika
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
Chopped fresh Italian (flat-leaf) parsley

In a sauté pan over medium heat, warm the olive oil. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and sauté for 1 minute. Raise the heat to high and add the shrimp, lemon juice, sherry and paprika. Stir well, then sauté, stirring briskly, until the shrimp turn pink and curl, about 3 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with parsley.

(NOTE: For an authentic presentation, serve on a heated fajita platter with plenty of crusty French bread, to soak up the sauce.)

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For the perfect side dish, Dave Nelson of chef2chef, has a great recipe for Spanish rice.

Dave’s Spanish Rice

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons yellow onions, chopped
1 cup rice, white, long grain
1/2 cup tomato juice
1 cup water
2 chicken bouillon cubes
3 dashes bottled hot pepper sauce
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 pinch black pepper
1 Roma tomato, chopped
2 tablespoons red bell peppers, chopped
2 tablespoons green bell peppers, chopped

Procedure:

In a saucepan that has a tight fitting cover, melt the butter and sauté the onions until soft. Add the rice and stir to coat the rice with butter, then add the tomato juice, water, bouillon cubes, pepper sauce, chili powder and black pepper.

Stir to dissolve the bouillon cubes and bring to a boil. Once the liquid reaches a boil, reduce heat to its lowest setting, cover and go away for 25 minutes. Do not stir, do not look under the lid, do not worry!

Once your timer goes off, remove the pan from the heat, lift the lid off quickly and throw in the tomatoes, and chopped peppers and put the lid back on quickly. Again, do not stir, do not taste, do not worry! Allow the rice to steam in the pan for 20 more minutes and you'll have perfect Spanish rice.

[Fred]

Thank you Rod! What a great recipe.

A little background:

Mike Rodman is a free-lance writer who lives on the shores of Beaver Lake, on the Arkansas side of the Ozarks. His first book -- "Beyond the Sea: A Life in Short Stories" -- is available author-direct only at: http://www.mikerodman.com


Fred

[Rods84]

Thanks, Fred. ... And while I'm here, I should say the above replication never would have been possible a few years ago -- before I found chef2chef and learned techniques I never envisioned possible for an amateur like me. My thanks to everyone for all your advice and patience.

[Quietwolf]

Thank You Mike. For being someone that wants to learn and be inspired. People like you are the ones we love to teach. The ones that desire and need the knowledge.

[Rods84]

Thanks for the kind words, JR. ... And while I'm here, I might as well mention some esoteric shellfish I've used in the mariscada. I wrote the recipe with common shellfish because they are universal in their accessibility and familiararity. But if you want to try something different, and have access to unusual items, here's a couple of substitutions you might enjoy:
1) Carving squid instead of the regular squid. For those unfamiliar with the name (as I was, before discovering them), these are thick pieces of large squid on which a cross-hatch type pattern is carved, forcing them to roll themselves into cylinders, about two inches long. I buy them at an Asian market, fully cooked in one-pound bags and use a 1/2-pound in the mariscada.
2) Langostinos instead of the shrimp. Langostinos are from the lobster family and are the South American version of crawfish, with tiny tail meat being the yield (the meat looks like the tail of a crawfish's long-lost twin). The authenticity connection is the Portuguese influence in South America (Brazil). I use them instead of shrimp because: a) the shrimp and slipper tails are similar textures, whereas the langostinos are far more delicate; and b) I often make the Shrimp in Garlic as an appetizer and this makes for more variety. I buy langostinos from an Internet supplier, frozen and fully cooked in 5-pound bags. I use a 1/2-pound in the mariscada, and since they are already cooked, put them in with the squid (the final addition before serving).
P.S.: Don't confuse langostinos with langoustines. It took a lot of research, but I finally found a definitive answer. Langostinos are what I described above; "langoustine" is simply the French word for prawn. If you're interested in a complex dish with giant langoustines (4-oz. each -- they're monsters), check the archives for a recipe I posted about a year ago in the Share-a-Recipe forum. It's called "Sauteed Langoustines in Chardonnay Reduction." (You may have to skip similar-sounding thread titles from the Ask-a-Chef forum, in which I asked many questions over a long period of time, before finally mastering the dish and posting the final recipe. If you can't find it -- or confusion reigns -- let me know and I'll post it again).

[Fred]

I posted about a year ago in the Share-a-Recipe forum. It's called "Sauteed Langoustines in Chardonnay Reduction."

It's right here: http://forums.chef2chef.net/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=recipe&Number=128392


Fred

[Rods84]

Thanks, Fred. I guess I could've thought of that, but my mind is often stuck in technology from the 70s. As a result, I may not think of providing convenient links, but I'm killer on providing advice for quadraphonic sound systems.