[Sca-cooks] OOP - Seeking Latino Seafood Soup Recipe (and name!), 2nd attempt

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Hullo, the  list!

Last night I encountered a seafood soup in a not-necessarily upscale
restaurant. Their big seller is roast chicken, but they sell other
stuff, some of which is pretty sophisticated, and I would say their
general focus is on Dominican and Colombian food (I don't know what,
if any, significance is to be found in this combination, unlike, say,
Cuban/Chinese restaurants, a phenom for which there is a very logical
reason). They also sell a lot of chicharrones (deep-fried,
highly-seasoned pork belly or fresh bacon), arepas con queso
(hand-formed white corn cakes, cooked on a griddle, in this case with
cheese on top), rice and beans, that sort of thing.

Anyway, my son and I split a mixed fry, an assortment of fatty and
lean pork hunks, spare ribs, and chorizo (No, Stefan, not Mexican
chorizo; this is a much more solid and viable meat product, like the
chaurice/linguic' we had at Puck's house) thrown into the deep-fryer
until crispy, served with fried new potatoes, fried yucca, tostones
(plantain chunks fried till tender and mostly cooked through, mashed
like a veal cutlet with some blunt instrument or sometimes a special
press, then fried again until crisp), as well as with a sort of
unseasoned pilaf rice (i.e. cooked like a pilaf, swirled in some oil
or other fat before adding boiling liquid, in this case what appeared
to be just salted water -- a plain, neutral, white rice pilaf, no
onion, no saffron, no bay leaf, nothing to make it bright orange --
neutral, but it goes with absolutely anything and has a different
texture from plain boiled rice), _and_, just in case we were on some
kind of high-carb diet, some very good, if otherwise standard, French
fries. Oh, and a salad to make it all very healthy ;-).

We also split a large bowl of a seafood soup/stew, and this is really
why I'm posting this. I forgot the name (it started with a "c", yes,
this is a lot to go on), but it was extremely good. It was a fairly
light cream soup, with finely chopped onion cooked soft but not
brown, maybe some rice, it was kind of hard to tell. It also
contained some kind of seafood stock from the shellfish (I'll go into
that in just a minute), some kind of pale yellow coloring, probably
annatto and almost certainly neither saffron nor turmeric, sweet red
pepper dice, and cilantro.

I've had this soup before, or a close variant, in a Peruvian
restaurant (another potato-intensive experience, but not a problem or
anything), only this version used tomato dice instead of peppers, and
a different array of seafood, in that case shrimp and scallops.

Last night, I confess I wasn't really clear on all of the seafood
varieties used, because it was all pretty finely chopped into a sort
of forcemeat mixture, then just sort of stirred into the simmering
soup, making rather free-form lumps of
seafood-flavored/colored/textured stuff. It was infinitely better
than surimi or any of that related pseudo-seafood plasticine: this
was clearly real seafood, chopped, perhaps, by hand, and I'm a little
confused about why they did it this way -- it didn't seem to be much
of a cost-cutting measure. Maybe it prevents all of one type of
seafood from sinking to the bottom and having someone get a bowl of
nothing but squid or something. It was probably a mixture of shrimp,
scallops, and squid, from the flavor and texture of it.

Anyway, I've been looking, for the last half-hour or so, for a recipe
for this soup (I could probably recreate something like it, but am
thinking it might cut down on the R&D time if I have an actual
starting-off place). Of course, it would also help to know the name
(suffice it to say that it had already occurred to me to call the
place and ask them but suffice it also to say this option is probably
the least effective solution open to me).

So, has anybody encountered something like this? Vicente? Anybody?

Thank you!

Adamantius