Fish Soup

So I tried to make fish soup. Something I had never tried before. And it was so much simpler than I thought it would be and is quite tasty if I may say so myself. I was going through my freezer and found the prawn shells from the other day when I was making pad thai. So I thought I'd give the old fish soup a try. You obviously don't have to go out and buy lots of prawns just to peel them. It just gave and extra dimension to the soup. The fish I'm using is hake but any white meated fish will do. My local fish monger said the best piece for a soup would be the area around the head where the jaws are. So that's the one I bought.

Ingredients:
Empthy, raw prawn shells (optional)
1 clove garlic
1 cup of water
2 carrots
1 leek
2-3 shallots
2 cloves of garlic
1 glass of white wine
1 l fish fumet (stock)
400g hake
200 g raw prawns, peeled
150 g peas
Mini Pasta (Optional)

I fried the prawns in a bit of olive oil. Crushed a clove of garlic under a heavy pot and threw it in without removing the peel.

When the shells had changed colour I poured in the water and let it simmer for 5 minutes, turned off the heat and let it cool off a bit.

Then I strained it and discarded the shells.

I chopped the veggies finely.

I threw them all in the pot except the garlic. Sweated it until the leek and onion started to get translucent. Then I added the garlic, fried that for a minute and poured in the white wine. I let the wine reduce to half.

Then I added the stock made from the prawn shells.

The chicken fumet.

While I waited for the stock to reach a boil, I prepared the fish and prawns. As soon as the stock started simmering, I added the fish.

After about 10 minutes I added the peas, which were frozen. So I waited for the soup to come to a simmer again...

... before adding the prawns.

Then I added the mini pasta and let it all simmer without reching a hard boil for about 5 minutes.

And there it is, my very first fish soup.