Fideua

Fideua is halfway between paella and pasta. It's usually made with thin noodles in a paella pan.

Why not make either paella or pasta? Well it's about 45 minutes faster than paella, and it's drier than pasta, and has a special stickiness that only comes from something cooking in its own gluten.

Fideua is usually made with a thin pasta, so I used angel hair. It's also the fastest to cook! The protein is also usually a medley of seafood, which is *also* super fast to cook! Since we lost an hour this weekend, the faster cooking is definitely appreciated.

Make sure to dry all of the seafood in paper towels before cooking. This will prevent burning hot oil jumping up at one's face.

First, lightly cooked the calamari rings and shrimp in olive oil.

Once the shrimp is pink, remove the seafood from the pan.

Time to make a flavor base for the pasta. Sometimes it's good to keep things simple with some garlic and onions.

And some chili, salt, and pepper. You can add white wine, fish stock, veggie stock, whatever you want. I had leftover dashii, which is practically fish stock, so I used that.

The next step is to add crushed tomatoes. I get the whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes from a can and mush them up with my fingers. You have to be a little careful to not squirt tomato juice all over yourself.

Let all that goodness simmer for a couple minutes to marry the flavors. At this step, you would usually add saffron to make everything taste more like saffron and a nice bright yellow. But I didn't have any saffron, and didn't want to pay for ridiculously expensive saffron at Whole Foods.

Then add some fish. Those are chunks of cod pictured above.

And pasta... make sure to add enough stock to just cover the pasta so that it cooks properly. I used angel hair, but you can use linguine, spaghetti, or vermicelli.

It takes a little longer than the box says. Once you have the pasta all mixed in and separated, *stop stirring*. Just like with paella, you want a little crustiness on the bottom. After about 6 minutes, I put the shrimp and calamari back on top, turned off the fire, and let this sit for 5-10 minutes.

A nice light seafood dinner. I guess it would have looked a little more authentic with some saffron, but maybe next time when I want to pay $15 for a gram of saffron!