Seafood "Medley" (or something)

Ok, so the story behind this meal is pretty typical for "how I get my recipes"....

 

Something like three years ago, I was visiting my awesome sister at her home in Lancaster, PA.  I had told her how my daughter enjoys strong flavors: Salt and Vinegar chips over plain chips, Extra Garlic in her spaghetti sauce, how she sneaks raw onions when I'm dicing them, too... and how we had just made shrimp scampi with extra, extra garlic and she loved it.  So my sister asks if I think my kids would eat a seafood mix, and I'm all, "huh? what kind of mix are we talkin about here?"  Apparently, in any town larger than this one, (i.e., any town, anywhere)

you can buy this: (or something like it)

 

 

This bag came with pieces of clam, shrimp, "other mollusks", squid and octopus tentacles, imitation crab meat, and some things I could not identify with my eyes, which didn't even seem to be on the ingredients list.  I seem to recall my sister bought something along these lines...  and the kids loved it.  I mean, really, really LOVED it. 

 

So while I was down in Delaware for our family vacation this year, I stopped in a "Super Fresh"

(Rte 1, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware) for three, yes three bags of this stuff. 

(It was $5.99 a bag, in case you care, and the bag says it contains 5 servings.) 

 

 

To give a little more volume to the meal, I added a fairly large piece of Pollock from this bag.  I put it on my palm to show you the size.  It was one vacuum-sealed fillet, and, I kid you not, this bag of 4 fillets was $1.99, so this tasty morsel was 50 cents! (Jubilee in Coudersport, sale was over weeks ago, folks.  This is why I have a deep freezer.)

I let my oldest boy help tonight.  He's the one who wanted this meal the most, actually.  To add flavor, we used a big splash of lemon juice (probably 1/4 cup, maybe even 1/3 cup), a small splash (1 or 2 tsp) of apple vinegar, 2 heaping teaspoons of garlic, 1/2 stick of real butter, and some salt, pepper, and paprika.  I simmered the whole pan over medium/high heat (a 7 on my oven, for what it's worth) for about 10 minutes.

Our side dish tonight was butter-herb pasta, but instead of making it from a bag, I just boiled some mixed pasta (roughly 1/3 box "tri-color" pasta - the kind used in pasta salad - and a large handful of egg noodles) strained it, then, in the pot it was in, melted the other 1/2 stick of butter and added several shakes of old bay and several shakes of Italian seasoning.  When it was done, I put it on a plate to serve.  You can't see or taste or smell the butter and the herbs but they were there and they were delightful.

Despite how much she liked it last time, my daughter seemed apprehensive about the meal.  But once she started eating, she had seconds... and thirds...

This one is a tentacle piece.  Yum.

and when I was passing tentacles down to my eldest, at the end, she snagged them en route.  Twice.  Needless to say, there were no leftovers.











Mystery meat.  Less yum...

Dessert was vanilla wafer cookies.  Because they were on sale at Best Buy Foods for 79 cents for the whole box.  We ate maybe 4 cookies each, barely 1/4 of the box, so dessert for the whole family was 20 cents.

Our total tonight, then, was... $5.99 mixed seafood, 50 cents extra Pollock, 1/4 of a $2.69 pack of real butter, or 67 cents worth of butter, 65 cents worth of pasta (normally I only buy 99 cent boxes but this was $1.29 for the tri-color) and 20 cents dessert = $8.01 

Even allowing for the cost of the seasonings, garlic, lemon juice, and vinegar, we're not even close to $10.  And I ate octopus.  Booyah!