cioppino love

My sweet husband texted me late Wednesday afternoon with “I will make dinner tonite.  I love you.”  Those two sentences actually mean the same to meJ

All day long I had been praying for him, concerned that he was having a tough day given his short emails.  Even though I had taken out some cod that morning to thaw out for dinner, I thought about taking him out to eat instead – somewhere special to make up for his yucky day.  But it turned out he was just really busy.  Whew!

So I came home to a fresh bouquet of flowers from my sweet, sweet husband and all the makings for cioppino!  And how relieved he was that the fish thawing out was cod and not catfish.  Cod would taste better with the cioppino, he tells me.  Which he made flawlessly – filled with lots of chunks of fish, shrimp, squid, mussels and clams and he also added some rice.  We had bought a large jar of cioppino sauce which ended up being excellent (any other time he’d make this from scratch but this jar was pretty good).  To make the soup truly his own, he added some of his home-brewed pale ale for flavor.  Wow!  

He and I love spicy food so we added a healthy squirt of siracha (hot red pepper sauce) and it was a really delicious, filling meal, paired with a nice bottle of sauvignon blanc from Pedroncelli (Sonoma/Dry Creek Valley) and some rosemary/olive bread.  Very smugly, my husband knew I’d blog about his latest creation.

I definitely give him points for patience when it comes to cooking.  He takes the time preparing everything and is very mindful of the time to cook everything perfectly.  Seafood can get rubbery easily and so he cooked everything at just the right time so the fried fish was both flaky and crunchy, the shrimp was tender and the rest of the seafood simply yummy.   A delicious expression of love in my book!