Seafood Risotto

Dear all,   We love Seafood Risotto. Few dishes combine healthy ingredients in such a fabulous way. Although preparing it requires quite a bit of vegetable chopping and cleaning, I don’t mind. It also needs regular stirring but this can turn into a meditative experience. While I am standing at the stove cooking the risotto I am looking forward to a meal that leaves me satisfied on many levels. First of all it tastes great. Then it gives us a hefty amount of the precious omega 3 oils, not to mention all the vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients from the vegetables. To keep it simple, I restrain my use of seafood to squids and prawns. A traditional Seafood Risotto however, sports any kind of mussels, shellfish and fish. If you feel adventurous, add what you like. You just have to know the cooking time or method of your seafood. If you want to include mussels, for example, clean them and fry them in a pan with a little bit of oil. Toss the opened mussels into the risotto at the end of the cooking time (discard the mussels which stay closed). If you wish to incorporate fish, clean it and cut it into bite sized pieces. Add them to the risotto about five minutes before the rice is cooked. There is one setback about preparing this dish though: You absolutely need Italian rice to cook a proper risotto. No other rice will give you the creamy texture of Arborio, Carnaroli or Vialone Nano rice. Seafood Risotto   Ingredients (for 4 servings): 300 grams prawns 1 cup rice 1 red bell pepper 1 yellow bell pepper 1 green bell pepper 2 stalks celery (about 1 cup when chopped) 1 bundle spring onions 3 garlic cloves 1 packet tomato puree (200 ml) 4 tablespoons olive oil salt pepper 2 ½ cups cooking liquid Method: Skin and clean the squids from their insides. You can get this done by your fishmonger. You can also use frozen squids, just give them time to defrost. Cut them into bite-sized pieces. Clean the prawns. Make sure to remove their intestines by cutting along their spine and pulling out the dark strings. You can also use frozen prawns. Just thaw them before cooking and make sure they are properly deveined. Clean all the vegetables and cut them into cubes. Crush the garlic cloves. Remember that onions and garlic need about ten minutes of fresh air to fully develop their healthy properties. When everything is prepped, you can start cooking. Italian rice for risotto needs about 18 minutes to be done. Keep this in mind, when you want to incorporate different kinds of seafood. Pour the olive oil into a medium sized pot with a heavy bottom. The bottom is important because you need the heat to be distributed evenly. When the oil is hot, add the spring onions and the celery. Let them sizzle for around two minutes, and then add the squids and the garlic. Give it a good stir, and adjoin the rice. Mix everything together, then add one cup of water. You could also use fish stock if you have any good one, or chicken stock. Wait until the liquid bubbles and the rice has soaked up some. Then add another cup of liquid. When this has bubbled away for some minutes, incorporate the tomato puree. Again, wait that the risotto reaches bubbling temperature again. You don’t want the cooking temperature drop too much by adding all the liquid at once. However, you don’t need a ferocious bubbling in your pot. A gentle simmering is all that is required to cook the rice nicely. Then add the last half-cup of liquid. About seven to eight minutes before the rice is done incorporate the bell peppers. You don’t want to soften them completely. They should have a little crunch left. At the end of the cooking time, add the prawns. Now season the risotto with salt and pepper according to your taste. Stir the risotto until the prawns have changed colour and turned opaque. Be careful not to overcook the risotto. It should not turn into a stiff cream, but flow gently onto the plate. If you want some zing in your risotto, add some fresh chopped chillies at the beginning of the cooking time. Risotto – a gift of colonialism The veil of times gone by covers a big part of the history of riziculture in Italy, but some facts are known. The Romans knew rice, but they cultivated it for medicinal purposes only, not as a food grain. The Arabian invasion of parts of Europe established rice fields early on in Spain and Sicily. They were exporting rice from the fertile island Sicily already in the tenth century. During following centuries the popularity of rice grew among the wealthy owing to the exorbitant prices of the product. In the 15th century, clever merchants invested heavily into the clearing of the Lombardy plains in northern Italy to grow rice there. The flat lands, abundance of water and humidity, especially in the Po Valley, provided the perfect environment for this crop. The growing towns of Venice, Milan and Ferrara made huge profits. Unfortunately, only the investors profited from this development. The workers, many of them children, were kept as slaves. During the centuries, rice became a staple in this part of Italy. The cooking technique of risotto was invented some time along the way. The most famous of all the risotto recipes is undoubtedly the Risotto alla Milanese. This recipe goes back to the year 1574. The magnificent Gothic cathedral, the Duomo of Milano, was being built. A young apprentice named Valerius was responsible for colouring the glass windows. Because he had obtained a brilliant yellow colour, everybody joked that he had used saffron for the glass. Tired of the teasing, he added saffron to the risotto, which was served at his master’s wedding. The rice tasted so good that saffron remains the essential ingredient of risotto alla Milanese. Even today the fields flooded for rice characterise the countryside only a few minutes away from downtown Milan. Growing rice relied heavily on cheap labour until the 1960s when machines took over the harvesting. Before, thousands of women called mondine left their homes in Emilia and Veneto to work in the rice fields. They became a legendary sight in northern Italy. For eight hours, they worked barefoot in the water, protected from the sun by large straw hats. Dressed in short pants and long sleeves, they slowly walked backward, bending toward the ground to pick up weeds that infested the rice fields. Famous are the melodies they sang—about their tough days and about love and their homes far away. The dramatic Neo-Realistic movie “Riso Amaro” (“Bitter Rice”), produced by Dino De Laurentiis in 1950, revolves around the lives of the mondine, starring his later wife, the actress Silvana Mangano. More recipes at Kornelia's Kitchen Sign up for my monthly newsletter