theFIREstarter

Fish broth gumbo ingredients!

I haven’t done a cooking post in so long I can’t even remember the last one! Don’t worry though, we have still been cooking away, mainly all from scratch, being frugal yet still eating delicious meals. We have finally been making headway into eating out the contents of our freezer recently and I decided to knock something together out of a load of old fish that’s been in there for about 8 months ¹. Here is what I came up with. I was going for a fish Jambalaya or Gumbo type of thing and ended up with a nice and spicy thick broth that was good as a soup or served up with some rice. It is very hearty and a perfect warmer for the cold weather that is surely just around the corner. Here is the rough recipe I used, but note the amounts are not particularly important, especially for the fish, just substitute in whatever you have lying around!

Ingredients

2 onions

3 bell peppers (red/green/orange for the colours mainly!)

Some old chorizo I found in the freezer. Maybe 50-100 grams?

3 Chillies off my chilli plant 🙂 (Just use chilli powder if you don’t have any chillies to hand, or none at all if you can’t stand the heat)

Some squid, sliced thinly

Loads of mussels

Small amount of scallops

Home made chicken stock (If you don’t have any then just use a pint of water with a chicken or veg stock cube in it. Note you can make proper stock out of scraps of carrots, onions, celery and so on. I think it was here where I first read about that idea! Give it a go!)

A large portion of Turbo Soup (see below for more info!)

Fresh parsley and thyme plus a spoon of dried mixed herbs (any semi-random combination of fresh or dried herbs will probably do though!)

Paprika, Cajun seasoning and any other spices you want to try chucking in.

Squirt of lemon juice

Extra boiled water to top it up to desired consistency

A few cloves of garlic, chopped up thinly or crushed

Salt and pepper seasoning to taste (you probably don’t need much salt if you use enough herbs and spices and the chorizo because they are all flavoursome as it is)

Method

All the dry ingredients are in, just before we add the turbo soup and water

The method is ridiculously simple and can be summed up in a few lines. My favourite kind of recipe! The short version is you chuck it all in a pan and leave it bubbling away for about half an hour. If you need slightly more instruction than that I would fry off the onions first, then add the garlic and spices and fry for another minute or two, then add in the rest of the ingredients, bring it to the bubble, then stick the lid on and simmer for about 25 minutes. Check on it every 5-10 minutes to stir and add water if necessary.

Bubbling away nicely!

Bonus recipe: Turbo Soup!

As mentioned above I had some premade Turbo Soup in my freezer as well which seemed to be the perfect thing to, ahem, Turbo Charge (sorry) this fish broth recipe.

What is Turbo soup you may ask!? Well those of you who went to the FIRE Escape gathering will already know. Although I actually missed the part where they ate the soup, I heard about it in Huw’s post here and asked for the recipe, which The Big Monkey ² kindly provided in the comments section.

Of course you don’t have to have this premade and ready to put in, you can just chuck in the ingredients of it all in at the same time. Here are the ingredients courtesy of The Big Monkey (Thanks again TBM!):

Sauté a good sized onion, then add the following:-

A can of chopped tomatoes (or fresh)
A cup of red split lentils
3 cups of hot water
1 teaspoon of garam masala
½ teaspoon of turmeric powder
½ teaspoon of chilli powder of a couple of fresh chillies
1 veg stock cube

As you can see there is a bit of a cross over on ingredients there so use your noddle if you are not making this up first and, for example, add in an extra onion at the start of the cooking process for the fish broth. Apart from that, the only extra ingredients are the tin of tomatoes and the lentils that will get added to the fish broth if you are cooking it all from scratch so that is all you really have to remember! Lentils take about 20-30 minutes to cook so make sure you put them in near enough the start to be cooked.

Here is the final result! Lovely with a nicely warmed roll or served over steaming white or brown rice. Half of the above recipe did my lunch and dinner for 2 days straight and I’ve frozen the other half to eat next week 🙂