Whole Foods' Feast Of The Seven Fishes

I have my seven fishes already lined up for tonight's Feast of the Seven Fishes, but here's Whole Foods' take on the feast as well.

Quick Christmas Appetizers

Food and Wine magazine has assembled a slideshow of quick and delicious Christmas appetizers, but I know of one that's even quicker: smoked salmon spread from Whole Foods. Can't go wrong there or with anything else in its vicinity, like the precooked shrimp. And it's a helpful spot for getting your fish count up to seven for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve!

Feast Of The Seven Fishes

The Feast of the Seven Fishes is a lovely Italian tradition for Christmas Eve that I've been getting into ever since having it at I Trulli in New York on Christmas Eve at least two, maybe three years ago. (Leave it to the Italians to turn the deprivation of a meatless "fast" into a sumptuous fish feast.) As a simple home cook, I find it easiest to get most of my numbers from a fish chowder - the two fish often involved, like cod or halibut and scallops, can easily be supplemented with others like shrimp and clams, getting the fish total to four pretty quickly. Starting off with a smoked salmon dip with veggies and crackers easily gets us to five, but incorporating the remaining two can get trickier. Last year I put a bit of cooked crab meat from Whole Foods on top of the salad that went along with the fish chowder to get to six, but I don't remember what I did for the seventh. Guess it's time to start planning. And if you are more ambitious or want to read a bit of the history of the Feast, check out Epicurious' post on Mario Batali's Feast of the Seven Fishes.

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!