Truth be told, you’ll find very few recipes, be it online or in cookbooks, for a New England-style crab stew. Same for crab soups. New England quahogs, lobsters, and mussels are much more popular in New England soups and stews than local crabs. So when I decided I wanted to make a New England-style crab […]

Crab stock is not something many people make at home, at least not here in New England. However, the method for making crab stock is almost identical to lobster stock, a stock that is probably more familiar to New Englanders. And the result is the same – a wonderful, richly flavored stock that can be […]

One of my favorite types of soups to make when I’m short on time are simple meatball soups. All you need are some basic root veggies, some greens, a few herbs and spices and of course, some ground meat and bone broth. It’s amazing how something so simple can be so delicious. In this post […]

There’s so many reasons why you should make congee – cost, simplicity, nourishment, gut health – but one of the biggest reasons is that you can make an almost unlimited amount of recipes from one pot of rice. Let me show you how I do it at home: How to Make a Plain Rice Congee […]

Looking for some unique, fun dishes to cook while we’re all hunkered down at home? Today, I’m going to share my go-to meal during this crazy Covid-19 epidemic – Asian noodle soups without recipes. They’re a truly great way to make a wide variety of quick, cheap, nourishing and ridiculously delicious meals. Sure, you can […]

In case you were guessing, the little-known nutrient in seafood soups is NOT omega-3s. Everyone knows about the health benefits of omega-3s. I know it. You know it. Your mother knows it. My mother knows it. Every doctor, every health website and every major health organization has been telling us this for decades now. Heck […]

For decades we’ve been told mercury in seafood is a concern. On the surface, it sure makes sense. Though mercury occurs naturally in the environment, industrial sources like coal burning power plants increases mercury in the atmosphere which settles in our waterways and gets consumed by fish. Larger fish eat smaller fish and so it […]

What follows is an excerpt from my cookbook, New England Soups from the Sea. Though the book includes 80 recipes for chowders, bisques, stews, and medleys, only one, a Portuguese Shrimp Mozambique, features shrimp. That doesn’t mean we need to stop eating shrimp entirely. But I do want the reader to be aware of the […]

You might think that in New England, with its rich and storied relationship to the sea, there would be a deeper connection to local seafood than in most places. Eating with the Ecosystem, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote a place-based approach to sustaining New England’s wild seafood, set out to find out. In […]

Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs) are the seafood version of the increasingly popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs in which members of a community pay a one time upfront fee for a weekly share in a local farms’ seasonal output of fruits and vegetables. Similarly, in a CSF, community members pay upfront for a weekly or […]

A New England-style scallop stew is basically in the style of a traditional oyster stew. These old-time New England shellfish “stews” are not really stews but rather brothy soups made with a combination of broth and milk or cream. Oyster stew is by far the most famous because in the late 19th and early 20th […]

With all due respect to gumbo, cioppino is America’s most popular native seafood stew. Cioppino originated in San Francisco in the late 19th century with Italian immigrant fisherman who adapted similar native dishes, such as zuppa di pesce, into a unique tomato-based seafood medley. It has ventured far beyond its humble beginnings to become a […]