shrimp

A Marathon Cooking Session with a Shrimp and Fennel Risotto Recipe

by

Fennel_bulb
I cook an extreme amount of food. When I'm standing in the kitchen and my feet are aching, I wonder why I get involved in making so many dishes. On the day after, looking at a steaming bowl of leftovers for lunch, I have a an inkling why. I love to eat, and I'd rather not face a night of take-out or an afternoon of Midtown lunch specials. I want fresh and delicious food, and I can only afford it by making it for myself.

I find cooking for my family extremely hectic. I'm usually rushing through a recipe hoping to stave off a melt-down, either on the part of Santa Maria or on the part of one of the kids. It's rarely relaxing. Yesterday was different. Santa Maria took the kids to the Brooklyn Museum and I had a couple of hours to myself in the kitchen.

We were on a good roll when it came to taking care of domestic tasks yesterday. Santa Maria and I knocked off the weekly shop, did some laundry, and made chicken soup, all before noon. We were feeling good when we were shopping, and in those cases, the shopping list tends to grow. Waiting to pay, Santa Maria came up with all kinds of things she'd like to have for dinner–fresh salsa and guacamole, included. She ran off to get cilantro and a ripe avocado.

We settled on having an old favorite for dinner: shrimp-and-fennel risotto. The recipe is adapted from "Gourmet Everyday," a great cookbook the sadly closed magazine published a few years ago. All the recipes in it are fast, and most are delicious. This risotto is a perfect example.

When we got home, I realized that I had planned a different dinner for that evening, coq au vin. I had a chicken in the back of the refrigerator that needed to be cooked. Its sell-by date was Monday, and I could tell just from opening the refrigerator that it would barely make it that long.

We were having the chicken soup for lunch, though, and that was enough chicken for one day for me. The old chicken would have to wait.

When Santa Maria went out with the children in the afternoon, I got to work in the kitchen. I started chopping onions and fennel for the risotto. I started to prep the items for the coq au vin, which I would make the following morning before taking Nina to school and going to work. Time is short in the morning these days, and I would have to have all the prep work done in order to finish the dish and get Nina out the door on time.

Also, I wanted to make my weekly quinoa salad, so that meant more and more chopping and roasting. And I wanted to serve roasted cauliflower to the kids upon their return from the museum. And I wanted to chop the onion and the tomato and to wash and chop the cilantro for the fresh salsa and guacamole. In the midst of this frenzy, I suddenly wondered what other men do with their free time on a Sunday. Isn't there something called the NFL? Aren't there college bowl games at this time of year? Who knows? You can't eat them, can you?

Santa Maria and the kids came back from the museum (where, in the photo exhibition of rock and roll stars, Nina saw a singer mooning the camera and has since learned this vital and sophomoric skill herself), and we started eating. We all downed the cauliflower. Santa Maria whipped up the guacamole and homemade salsa, and melted the cheddar cheese on the organic corn chips.  I defrosted a bit of black beans for the children, who I figured would not eat the risotto. Nina tried it, but she didn't like it.

I can't imagine why she didn't like the risotto. It's a marvelous dish, and quite beautiful. The shrimp is pink and the fennel fronds are green. The rice is white and creamy. The fennel lends it a distinctive licorice flavor and the shrimp, when cut up my special way, are curly and tender and filling. The dish itself is low in fat, if you make it my way with just olive oil. The trick to the shrimp is to slice each one down its back into two long pieces. I usually don't have time to do this when the kids are around, but yesterday, I had the opportunity. When the shrimp are cooked at the end of the dish, they wind themselves up into little corkscrews. They are delightful. I thought so this afternoon when eating the leftovers for lunch. The nice thing about the way I cook, upping the proportions substantially, is that I have leftovers from my leftovers. I'll be eating some of it tomorrow for lunch again. I don't mind. It's that good.

Shrimp and Fennel Risotto
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 1 or more heads fennel, cored and diced, fronds reserved.
  • 1 T. Olive Oil
  • 1 cup Arborio or other short-grained rice
  • 1/2 cup or more white wine
  • 1 cup chicken stock
  • 4 or more cups of hot water
  • 1 lb. medium shrimp, peeled, deveined, and sliced lengthwise into two long pieces

Salt the shrimp by layering them in a bowl and putting 1/2 t. salt on them. Put another layer of shrimp on top of that and salt them as well. Continue until all the shrimp are salted. This step can be done as the shrimp are sliced into two pieces.

Heat the chicken stock and the water until boiling and then turn down to a low simmer.

Sauté the onion in the oil until soft.

Add the fennel and continue to cook until soft.

Add the rice and stir to coat each grain with oil.

Add the wine and cook and stir until the wine is absorbed.

Add a ladle of stock to the rice and stir.

Stir (on and off) until the stock is absorbed.

Repeat the last two steps until the rice is almost cooked. If you need more liquid, just add hot water to the stock mixture. The rice should be tender but still firm in the center.

Stir in fennel fronds and the shrimp and cook a few minutes until they are opaque and pink. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

Serve immediately.

Note: you can make this with butter if you prefer a richer taste.

Santa Maria’s Shrimp and Flounder Recipe From Memory

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Corn
For the most part, cooking for kids means introducing them to new foods and flavors. Occasionally, it works the other way around. The introductions are not always pretty when they are being handled by a two-and-a-half-year old, but they happen nonetheless.

Sunday afternoon, Santa Maria was out at yoga and Nina was wrapped up in bed nursing an ear infection. Pinta was in great spirits, playful as could be. I wanted to leave Nina in peace and to get dinner started, so I asked Pinta to help me in the kitchen. She was eager to join me, and as she turned to head for the kitchen, she ran smack into a door jam. Bam, she had a shiner on her head and she was crying like crazy.

I dashed to the freezer for a cold pack. We don't actually have cold packs, so we use bags of frozen peas and the like. They're more tasty and they work just as well. This isn't the first time that Pinta has encountered the sharp edges of our apartment and had the resulting lump treated with a bag of organic garden peas. She knows the drill. She also knows that she likes to eat frozen peas, something I had forgotten.

I was holding her in my lap with the bag pressed to her head, and she said "pea, pea, pea." Usually when she says this word it would be spelled "Pee," as in "I have to pee." So I asked her if she needed to go to the bathroom. She said no."Pea," she repeated. Finally, I understood. She wanted to eat some of the frozen vegetables.

Her head was feeling better, so I gave her some of the peas. When I first went to the freezer, I had also grabbed a bag of frozen corn, so I had those in my lap, too. I gave her some of the icy golden kernels. She liked them as well, and feeling friendly, she wanted to share some with me. I think I like cooked corn better.

Later that night, when I was roasting chickens for dinner, Pinta helped me to dump some corn into a sauce pan and cook it. I coated the kernels in butter and salt and she gobbled them up. I'm always happy to introduce a new vegetable to one of my girls, and I'm looking forward to eating it off the cob with her come summertime.

Besides the chicken and corn dinner, I haven't been cooking much over the past few days.  It's impolitic to go into the reasons for this at present, but some of them have to do with our living situation, which has become much more stressful in recent weeks, and some of the other reasons have to do with the season. Thanksgiving means family, and that means a roiling of the psyche. Real estate stress plus family stress is very distracting, to say the least.

Family stress led to a filibuster of a fight with Santa Maria on Saturday afternoon. Filibuster in that I was talking and talking and talking and not making any progress. I'm not even sure progress was the goal. Real estate stress led to a sleepless night and an attendant falling-off of productivity in the kitchen on Sunday.

I've been cooking less over the past week, but we've been eating the same. Who's been doing the cooking? Santa Maria (see fight, above).  Her parents stayed with us for Thanksgiving, and went with us to my mother's house for the holiday. She cooked for them, the kids, me, and any other blood relation within ten yards of her. She was relentless. I was impressed, as she was also doing multiple loads of laundry and tending to the kids. Why I became resentful is good fodder for this week's therapy sessions.

But before things went south between Santa Maria and myself, I was on the receiving end of a delightful dinner. The first night her parents visited, I had to work late. She whipped up a flounder and shrimp dish as good as anything I'd ever tasted in New Orleans, a culinary capital of mixing shellfish, white fish, and heavy sauces. (She also make luscious homemade chocolate pudding, in the time it took me to put the kids in their pajamas).

The roots of her dish, which she improvised that evening and which combined shrimp, flounder, and a tarragon-cream sauce in a heavenly fashion, stretch back not to the Big Easy, but to Europe and a childhood memory of hers.

"When I was a little kid, about eight years old," Santa Maria later told me,"I went with my family on a canal boat down the Thames, and we docked in a little town once where there was a place called the Rose Revived Inn. They served a local founder called plaice prepared in this fashion, and it was the only fish dish that my mother ever liked, so I recreated it from my girlhood memory to welcome my parents to town for Thanksgiving."

Santa Maria enjoys eating well but also fitting into her pants so she created a rich-tasting sauce while minimizing the amount of butter and cream (though this is far from a calorie-conscious dish).  There is considerably less butter and cream than in similar dishes.

Santa Maria's mother, who usually doesn't like fish, loved it so
much that when she was done with her plate, she scooped the leftover
sauce out of the skillet with her baked potato skin. Little kids can
really come through in the kitchen, once they get a little experience.

Here's the flounder recipe. Tune in at a later date for her luscious chocolate pudding recipe.

 A la Recherche du Flounder Perdu
  • 4 fillets flounder
  • 1/4 c. flour for dredging (mixed with a few shakes of salt and fresh black pepper)
  • 2  tablespoons butter
  • 1 small shallot, minced
  • 8 ounces chopped shrimp, raw (can be frozen and thawed)
  • 2 shakes nutmeg (less than 1/8th teaspoon)
  • 2 shakes cayenne pepper (less than 1/8th teaspoon)
  • 1/3 cup white wine
  • 1/3 cup water  
  • 1/4 cube vegetable bouillon
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon
  • salt and pepper to taste

Mix the shrimp with the nutmeg, cayenne, and salt.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the butter in a frying pan, and sauté the shrimp.

Set aside the shrimp and keep warm.

Add shallots and remaining butter to pan, and sauté until they are soft.

Dredge the flounder in the flour and sauté on both sides until cooked, about two minutes per side.  If you use a large skillet, you can probably fit all four fillets in at the same time.

Set aside and keep the cooked flounder fillets warm.

Deglaze the pan with the wine.

Add the water and partial bouillon cube.

Reduce by half.

Pour in the cream, and add the tarragon and cook for about three minutes.

Assemble the dish by putting the shrimp on top of the flounder and pouring the sauce over everything. Serve immediately.