Parihuela (Peruvian Seafood Soup)

This is very a challenging and time consuming recipe and also please keep in mind not every scout enjoys seafood so it is difficult to prepare at an outdoor event. If you so choose to cook this at a campout all seafood must be frozen, isolated and stowed in a cooler with plenty of ice.

If cooking soley in a dutch oven you may need two sepeared pots. Use a standard number of coals (no specific number) under, to keep the dutch oven hot at all times. It is ok to boil the fish heads in a traditional cooking pot.

Steam fish heads with celery, 2 peeled tomatoes and a whole onion with pepper and 3 tsp of salt. Add cilantro as well as ginger with 2-3 cloves of garlic. Taste it and remove parts after about 55 minutes. Discard the fish heads but pry as much protein as you can from those parts.

Prepare sofrito, basically sofrito is a paste like seasoning that gives the recipe flavor. Chop an onion and tomatoes with garlic and oil, 3 minutes later add a tbsp of aji panca, seafood spices and paprika. When the chopped onion turns transparent you can add the contents of the broth from step 1.

Option 2: If you have a blender availalble add the sofrito and the contents from step 1 (minus the broth) into a blender and liquify it. Add the resulting paste back into the dutch oven.

Do not add the sofrito yet. On a seperate station, clean the octopus, clean the shrimp and chop the calamari and other seafood ingredients. Boil water on the dutch oven or secondary pot. When the water is boiling, boil the octopus for approximately 30 minutes. After it is visibly cooked (you will know when you see it) remove and chop the octupus into smaller pieces.

Using the same water add the fish head broth, the sofrito paste and all the rest of the ingredients into the pot. This process takes 40 minutes. Add 16 coals to the top of the dutch oven. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!