Hearty, Chunky Cioppino
/One thing is true about living landlocked: good seafood is hard to come by. Sure, there are special restaurants. Sushi joints, oyster bars, and rainbow trout on most "locavore" menus, but that's about where it ends. Scallops are a freezer-isle item. If they aren't in the freezer-isle, it doesn't mean they aren't frozen, it just means they're at the butcher's counter with the other imported seafood.
I've heard the raving: clam chowder is great, right? I wouldn't know. It's not really something people do when the ocean is hundreds of miles away. Lobster bisque, cioppino, jambalaya? We miss out on those too.
This means I'm sort of a seafood noob. Yup. We buy scallops on occasion and usually we're at such a loss that all we do is fry them in the skillet and add a bit of lemon and a dash of cayenne. Not this time: for once it was going to be better. It was going to be Cioppino.
As a seafood noob I'm not really qualified to review this cioppino. As an eater, I can tell you that I was not disappointed.
What's your best seafood recipe? Do you have a fall-back seafood indulgence?