$4.92 / Serving - Seafood Stew

This warm, creamy, and hearty stew is yet
another great recipe to try in the winter when
you just want something to heat you up without
worrying about the cholesterol from other meat
based stews. This seafood stew limits carbs by
omitting potatoes and also replaces dairy cream
with coconut cream, which adds sweet overtones
to the  dish. For depth of flavor, I also replaced
traditional fish stock with dashi - which is pretty
much Japanese fish stock, but also flavoured
with kombu, a kelp seaweed variant.

Part 1 - Dashi

Cost Breakdown

Ingredients

These really are all the ingredients you need to
make dashi. You're actually supposed to use
katsuo bonito fish flakes instead of niboshi
anchovies (pictured) but I could't find any at the
grocery store. Because katsuo bonito flakes are
smoked, they gives a different flavor to the dashi
than the anchovies but I'm making do with what
I've got at my disposal. 

Start by soaking the kombu seaweed in water for
20 minutes in a pot with the fire off. Then crank
up the heat to high and wait for it to come to a
rolling boil. The seaweed needs to be removed
from the pot just before rolling boil is achieved. 

You should end up with something like this: 

Notice how the liquid has taken on a yellowish
greenish hue extracted from the kombu seaweed.
This alone is called kombu dashi and is used in a 

wide variety of Japanese dishes. But we are not 

stopping here. We are going a step further and

throwing in the anchovies (or katsuo bonito flakes

instead, if unlike me, you were able to find some). 

Boil the anchovies on medium high for one minute.

Then strain out the anchovies and you have dashi. 

The fish introduced a darker colour to the broth.
Now that we have our dashi, which replaces the
traditional fish stock in this recipe, we are ready
to begin cooking the seafood stew!  

Part 2 - Prepping the Stew

Cost Breakdown

Begin by chopping up the onion, leek, and carrot.
Feel free to use other vegetables like celery, any
coloured pepper of your choice, fennel, etc. I just
only had these sitting in my refrigerator. 

Once vegetables are prepped, oil up a stew pot and
heat. When the oil is hot, add in the vegetables. 

Sweat out the moisture from the vegetables. Add
some salt to help draw it out, and to season. Stir

until it looks something like this: 

Notice how the vegetables are looking slightly less
plump than before. Time to re-hydrate them with our
home-made dashi soup stock! 

Bring the solution to a boil to create the perfect
environment for cooking our seafood in. 

In this recipe I used jumbo prawns, salmon, sole
and frozen bay scallops. But you can use any
seafood you like, such as clams, mussels, squid,
octopus, etc. Just be sure to include a kind of fish.
When the dashi soup and vegetable mixture hits
boiling point, add the seafood in all at once.
Lower the heat to low when it comes to a boil
again and keep an eye on the seafood. It does
not take long for it to cook - under five minutes. 

Since this recipe was modeled after the cream based
seafood chowder from Prince Edward Island, I needed
to add some kind of cream element. So I decided to go
with coconut cream for extra sweetness instead of the
traditional cow cream. To my pleasant surprise, the
coconut cream ended up being much richer than I had
anticipated and I ended up using only a fraction of the
can to thicken up the entire stew. This was the brand
of coconut cream I went with: 

And the stew ended up looking like this. 

Yes, my stove top needs a good wipe-down. 

Part 3 - Serve

Notice that this entire recipe, I did not add any
salt to the stew, except for sweating the veg.
Now is a good time to taste the broth and see
what kind of seasoning it needs, if any. I chose
to add a special kind of herbed salt just before
serving. 

The Salt Dispensary is a local Vancouver
company specializing in gourmet salts. I

only came across them at a stall they had
set up at a market my office hosted. Definitely
plan on ordering more from them soon. 

And here's what the final dish looked like!