Home for the Holidays: Spaghettini ai Fruitti di Mare

Ahhh the holidays. A chance to get out from the big city (and just in time, apparently) and head to the suburbs to visit the parents. Our favorite things about the suburbs? Chain restaurants, big(ger) kitchens, and in the case of upstate New York: Wegmans.

We'll go into details on chain restaurants later, and for those of you who have never experienced a Wegmans... well that deserves its own post as well.

The Plan

Bryan's mother tells us it's an Italian tradition to have seafood on Christmas Eve. Whether or not that's true doesn't really matter, and this Christmas Eve we set out with the goal of recreating Mario Batali's Spaghettini with Lobster, Budding Chives, and Sweet garlic. We did this once in New York and it was a big success, so it seemed like a perfect choice for Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, after picking up all the ingredients, we found that the store was all out of fresh lobster. That put a kink in the plans, but we didn't let it get us down and made the game-time decision to switch to the Fruitti di Mare.

The New Plan

It's a very simple dish - just a few ingredients, pretty flexible, and we already had most of what we needed since it was a pretty close match to our original plan. Fruitti di Mare is a seafood pasta dish, generally served over a long noodle, with the variety of seafood mixed together into a basic red sauce.

The sauce is a complement to the seafood, which is the real hero of the dish, so the sauce doesn't have to be too complex - just a simple red sauce of tomatoes, some garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. No need for any wine or basil/oregano.

You can use whatever kind of seafood you'd like, just make sure it's fresh. For this dish we used blue mussels, littleneck clams, shrimp, and calamari - and it end up costing about the same as the lobster would have. You can also throw in scallops, monkfish... pretty much anything you like. Since they're big pieces, you don't need a ton, just aim to have a few pieces of each fish per dish.

Making the Dish

1. Clean everything up (scrub the clams/mussels, rinse off the other fish, peel the shrimp) and bring  a pot of salted walter to boil for the pasta
2. Slice the calamari tubes perpendicularly to create rings about a half an inch thick
3. Saute some some crushed garlic and a teaspoon of red pepper flakes in olive oil in a large sauce pot for a minute or so until they start to darken slightly. Then, throw in the mussels and clams and shake everything around so it all gets coated. Be careful here that the heat is not too high or else the garlic and pepper will burn. After a few seconds throw in about half a cup or so of white wine (it should come up about a quarter of the way on the bivalves), turn up the heat, and then throw the top on. 
4. After a few minutes, take the top off and check on your bivalves - they should have mostly opened up. At this point you can throw in your tomato sauce. Stir everything around, bring it to a boil, and then throw in the rest of your seafood. Stir it all around again so that everything's submerged in the tomatoey goodness, put the top on it, and bring the heat down to a simmer. 
5. Cook your pasta to about a minute shy of the package directions in order to give it a good al dente feel. Drain it and then rinse with cool water. Rinse out the pot and then put the rinsed pasta back into it. 
6. Throw some chopped parsley into your sauce, stir it around, and then taste it. If it needs more flavor or spice, give it a bit more salt or pepper. Once it's ready, ladle some of the sauce (without the seafood) over the pasta, turn the heat up high under the pasta and stir it around. 
7. Serve the pasta into a nice pasta bowl, and then scoop out the pieces of seafood for each plate. Put the mussels and clams around the edges and heap the other stuff over the top. If you want to be real fancy, you can garnish each plate with a bit more of the parsley. 

And that's what we did. The dish came out really well, and was super easy to make. We went a little further under the package directions on the pasta so that is was almost tough, which was a very nice complement to the consistency of the seafood. We also amped up the red pepper flakes just a bit to give it more of a kick. Herbie got a piece of the shrimp and half a string of spaghetti absolutely loved it.

The Result

Give it a try and let us know what you think!