Seafood Pasta

With Joan and Jim Malkin

Take a trip with Joan and Jim Malkin to Larsen’s Seafood Market in the fishing village of Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard and learn how to make seafood pasta. Their version contains fresh clams, shrimp and calamari in a clear seafood broth served with orecchiette, a small “ear shaped” pasta from the Apulia region of southern Italy. This dish is a flavorful illustration of Jim and Joan’s belief that a “one pot” meal with an accompanying salad, a glass or three of wine and a bit of bread and cheese can be a healthy, easy and tasty way to dine. The pasta is cooked much as a risotto – after cooking the pasta in boiling water for about ½ the cooking time, it is drained and stirred over heat while ladles of clam broth are added one at a time and slowed absorbed into the pasta.  They love the way that the sauce is fully absorbed, so that the resulting dish is completely flavored with the salty brine of the clams, rather than the seafood sitting atop a plate of pasta surrounded by broth where the flavors don’t have the opportunity to meld.  While this recipe is for a seafood pasta, the technique can be used with virtually any liquid based sauce.  They first learned of this technique in Naples, Italy where a red sauce was cooked into the pasta.

The shape of the pasta can also make a big difference.  Most seafood pasta dishes use linguine.  But the seafood has an impossible time sticking to the slender noodles.  Using orecchiette (little ears) or another shell shaped pasta means you can have a mouthful of both pasta and seafood with sauce. Although many people are tied to the white wine with fish tradition, the Malkins believe that the day that they can't drink red wine with fish will be the day they give up fish.  They love a Sangiovese, a red Sancerre or a light Cabernet with seafood.  These wines augment the Australian Shiraz that Jim claims constitutes 50% of his blood stream. Piadina is an easy bread like accompaniment that they learned from a friend’s mother in Imola, Italy (small town outside of Bologna.)  The dough of flour, salt, yeast and a bit of olive oil is left to rise for a couple of minutes and then rolled out and cooked on a hot, salted (and ungreased) griddle or skillet.  The dough puffs up and is a good “munch” with the soft textured pasta or as an accompaniment to salad or cheese.  (Leftovers can be warmed for breakfast with jam or a bit of cheese or meat for the continental breakfast aficionados.)

Ingredients

24 Cherrystones
1 cup fresh flat leaf parsley, chopped
18 Shrimp
1 pound squid, tubes and tentacles
1 large clove of garlic
4 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 pound orrechiette (little ears)

Instructions

1. Open up the clams, cut out muscles and body (reserve juices).
2. Cut and chop (do not mince) the parsley.
3. Clean shrimp and remove shell.
4. Cut tentacles and tubes of the squid crossways into small pieces (about 1/4 inch), two at a time.
5. Smash and dice garlic. Place olive oil in a saucepan and add garlic. Add red pepper and over low heat tan the garlic. Add seafood broth reserved from the seafood cleaned earlier.
6. Cook pasta halfway (about 5 minutes) and drain. Place pasta back into pan and add seafood broth and cook pasta again, stirring, until al dente (about 5 minutes). Keep adding broth as needed. The broth will become thick. Add seafood about two minutes before pasta is completely cooked. Salt and pepper to taste. Add parsley at end before serving.

Recipe courtesy of Joan and Jim Malkin, 2010.

Jim and Joan Malkin now live in Chilmark, MA and have been cooking together for the 30+ years of their marriage.  They’ve lived in or traveled to over 50 countries for business or pleasure – everywhere they went they dove mouth first into the local cuisine.

After starting out in Boston, MA, Jim and Joan lived in Sydney, Australia for 12 years – working and raising their two children.  The family discovered the clean flavors of Australian fusion cuisine as well as the complex combination of ingredients in traditional Asian cooking.  They traveled for business and pleasure throughout Asia and, with each adventure, paid keen attention to the bright and spicy flavors of  the different Asian cuisines, all of which they replicated in their kitchen for family and friends.  Living later in London, they discovered that English food had moved from “stodge” to the eclectic food of the gastro-pub.

In the 1970’s they took French cooking lessons from Madeleine Kamman in Massachusetts.    Later, they took cooking classes in Morocco, Wales, India and Mexico.  Along the way, Joan also took Spanish cooking lessons and a class from David Bouley in New York.

Food and wine is fundamental to the Malkin family.  Despite the demands of two careers and the bedtimes of growing children, the family ate together at the dinner table every night.  Many business dinners with work associates and clients were held at home, rather than at a restaurant.  The Malkin Family Cookbook, a collection of personal favorite comfort foods was compiled for the children’s 21st birthdays.  Jim and Joan continue with their tradition of an annual black tie 8-course dinner party for 12 friends in which they share the tastes and flavors they have enjoyed over the years.

Seafood pasta is a flavorful illustration of Jim and Joan’s belief that a “one pot” meal with an accompanying salad, a glass or three of wine and a bit of bread and cheese can be a healthy, easy and tasty way to dine.

Although many people are tied to the white wine with fish tradition, the Malkins believe that the day that they can't drink red wine with fish will be the day they give up fish.  They love a Sangiovese, a red Sancerre or a light Cabernet with seafood.  These wines augment the Australian Shiraz that Jim claims constitutes 50% of his blood stream.