Good Friday is for many a fasting day. So it is for my parents, both around eighty today. As all-day fasting, like my mother did it in the past, does not come into play today, we had to think of some reasonable alternative. Our housekeeper, understanding well the traditional kitchen, proposed traditional dumplings on mushrooms and sauerkraut (>>>) for dinner. ‘I could make fish soup, the one I made after I came back from New Zealand’ was my response. So quite quickly the choice was clear, for Good Friday dinner we would have fish soup and dumplings as the second course.

What I meant however was not a fish soup that is traditionally prepared around the Baltic, but the chowder, a kind of seafood soup I caught up somewhere in New Zealand. As now I realize, the dish is well-known in many English-speaking countries, but somehow it was New Zealand, where I first tasted it. Funny, I can get all the ingredients needed for a simple chowder around the corner, but never ever before imagined that this combination may be so tasty.

To be frank, that what we ate in New Zealand, we considered a truly bad choice. It was the worst dinner we had there, but on that very evening, we barely had a choice. Restaurant kitchens close early in New Zealand. The chowder was recommended to us as a traditional dish, so I thought to myself, ‘maybe the cook had a bad day.’ After I came back home, I looked through the recipes on the internet and tried to repeat that, what I recalled. The main ingredients I remembered were fish, potatoes, and milk (or cream, or even both). And indeed, the recipe I have chosen and carefully applied, gave back a genuinely delicious as well as a nutritious meal.

Chowder, a traditional seafood and milk dish I tasted in New Zealand. Curious that although all the ingredients are traditional in the continental European kitchen, I needed to go down under to taste it the first time in my life.

The chowder I prepared for Good Friday is for sure not exactly the same I ate in New Zealand. Nevermind. Besides white fish fillet, potatoes, milk, and cream, I also added pieces of smoked salmon and raisins. The other ingredients were butter, onion, garlic, mustard as well as salt, pepper and parsley leaves.