Albanian Style Snapper, Squid, and Spring Vegetable Soup

We stopped in at a fish shop on the way home from visiting our daughter at the coast yesterday.  I had just bought a half kilo of squid, thinking calamari, when I noticed they had snapper frames at a ridiculously low price.

Snapper are listed as a sustainable catch, and I like the idea that, when you hunt an animal for food you really should eat all of it.  So I bought two head-and-backbone frames for next to nothing, and this is the result.  Of course then we had to invite people for dinner.  The recipe fed four of us, generously, served with crusty bread, and with the spring vegetables from the garden and the rich, smoky paprika flavoured fish stock it was very good.

The Recipe:

I don’t think my fish stock recipe is in the chef’s manual, but it works.  I just put the frames in my large pressure cooker, cover with water, and pressure cook over a very low flame for an hour.  Then I strain the stock, pressing down with a potato masher to get the last of the juice, and leaving the the heads and bones for the compost.

To 1 ½ litres fish stock (from 2 snapper frames), I added:

• 2 onions, diced
• 6 cloves of my new season fresh garlic roughly chopped
• ½ cup shelled young broad beans
• 5 stalks celery, diced
• 1 jar of peeled tomatoes
• 6 stalks of cavallo nero kale diced
• 4 bay leaves
• a heaped teaspoon of smoky paprika

I simmered this for 20 minutes or so, then added

• 3 zucchini, diced
• 6 small new season potatoes quartered
• handful of dill, chopped
• juice of half a lemon
• salt and black pepper

I simmered this for another 10 minutes until the potato was tender, then added the half a kilogram of squid, cut into rings, brought it just up to the boil again, then turned it off.  By the time I had bowls organised, the squid was cooked.

Served with warm crusty bread.