Mexican Seafood Soup Recipe

Seven Seas Soup (Caldo de siete mares, o Caldo de mariscos)

It's a fact, Mexicans do love their seafood... here is a classic and easy mexican seafood soup recipe seen mostly in coastal mexican states, and naturally there are dozens of different procedures to make it; here is a simple method that can be made with ingredients that are relatively easy to find at the local fishery...

Mexican Seafood Soup

Ingredients for 4 guests:

* 4-5 Salmon fish heads
* 1 lb. raw shrimp, peeled
* 1/2 lb. of squid
* 4 crabs, or giant crab legs
* 2 lb. Clams, mixed types
* 1 catfish, its fillets
* 4 giant prawns or lobster tails
* 4 small prepared squids
* 1/2 head of garlic
* 2 red tomatoes, washed and diced
* 1 Potato, already boiled and diced
* 1 large onion
* 4 arbol chilies
* 6 scallions
* 1 bunch cilantro, washed, half finely chopped
* black pepper
* 7 1/4 inch pieces of fresh ginger
* salt

Preparation:

1) If you will use fresh clams in this recipe, please make sure you leave them in salted water for a few hours to make them expel the sand they might have trapped inside.

2) Put the salmon heads in boiling water, along with the onion, diced potato, tomatoes, chilies and half the cilantro (the chopped half), ginger, pepper, salt to your taste, until the salmon heads are cooked. Remove the salmon heads and the ginger, save the meat from the fish heads.

3) Blend all these ingredients to liquefy; pour this back to the pot you are cooking this dish with; add more water if the soup is getting too thick.

4) Now turning to our main seafood ingredients, we first put the crabs, squids, octopus, prawns, reserved meat from the salmon heads, fish fillets and bring the soup back to a boil, then put the clams in, and simmer until the fish is cooked and the clams have opened or around 8 minutes; discard the clams that didn’t open; lastly put the shrimp in, and simmer three more minutes.

Divide the soup in the bowls you will be serving, then sprinkle the remaining cilantro leaves over.