Going For All Seven Fishes

Merry Christmas Eve!  For tonight's dinner, I'd planned on holding at four fish like we had last year in a NYC restaurant for the Feast of the Seven Fishes, but once it crept up to five, I decided to try to stuff in all seven.  That would be easy enough to do if you start with a fish soup, where you could put all seven in at once, but that's not my plan.  Our main course adaptation of creamy lobster pappardelle from Cooking Light will be the fish motherlode, with shrimp, bay scallops, and minced clams added to the lobster, getting us to four fish.  As we start cooking, we'll nibble on Whole Foods' wonderful smoked salmon dip, making it five.  For a more substantial appetizer, I'll pop some stuffed clams from the freezer into the oven, making it six.  The seventh eluded me until I found some lovely (and exceptionally pricey) precooked Dungeness crab that I'll add to the salads that will go alongside the pasta.  So for this year, and probably this year only, our Feast of the Seven Fishes will actually have seven fishes (oh no, unless having clams twice makes it not count???).

And an early Merry Christmas, as I don't plan on sitting in front of a computer doing blog posts tomorrow!