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Have you ever made seafood soup? If you haven’t, now is the perfect time to give it a try. I always like to remind people that recipes are guidelines. If you don’t have everything on hand or you don’t like an ingredient, replace them.

A great cold-weather recipe to warm up the soul especially if you love seafood. The arsenal: diced tomatoes, diced onion, sliced garlic, tomato juice, clam juice, bouquet garni, little neck clams, fish, shrimp, bay scallops and my favorite herb - lemon verbena.

Seafood Tobanyaki is what I had for my main course during our dinner at Iron Chef Morimoto's restaurant . Tobanyaki is the Japanese version of Italian's cioppino or the French's bouillabaisse. It has lobster sliced in half, mussels, clams, scallops and bok choy in red miso sauce. YUM!

A perfect winter dish, but seafood is also great during summer. Here's seafood soup with little neck clams, Alaskan cod, shrimp and scallops in tomato and clam juice with diced tomatoes seasoned with pepper flakes, salt, freshly cracked peppercorns, bouquet garni and lemon verbena. Then served with sourdough bread.

A pot of soup for dinner on a cold winter night. Slices of salmon, green mussels, a few shrimp left on the fridge, chopped red onion and vegetables freshly picked from the backyard garden - mustard spinach, broccolini and green onions. Then garnished with thinly sliced lemon, also from the garden. Slurp, slurp... yum!