My way of Sunday

Laura's Risotto del Mare!

We're enjoying a short stay in the beautiful hills of Oakland. The sky is very blue this morning and the feeling is perfect.
What's for lunch today?
A fresh salad, risotto del mare, and a baked custard for dessert.
We're going to have a dry white chardonnay wine from Sonoma.

To make the salad, I bought a mix of organic baby leaves, and added a thinly sliced cucumber, 1/2 orange bell pepper cut in stripes, two sliced branches of celery, a chopped spring onion, and toppled it with some Italian olives and roasted pine nuts.

The seasoning was simple, sea salt, fresh ground pepper, olive oil (3 tsp), wine vinegar (2 tsp) (my favorite).
The different colors worked out very well.

I prepared the risotto with superfino Arborio rice. I bought at an "all organic" supermarket a fillet of wild salmon , two fillets of red snapper (wild catch), and 1 lb of medium shrimps.
Now, I do not buy salmon at all in Paris to preserve wild salmon, and of course I NEVER buy farmed salmon, but I have read in the NYT that it's good to buy wild salmon.

The shrimps I bought were already cooked (I was lazy), but when I tasted them at home, they had NO FLAVOR whatsoever!
To enhance their flavor, I sauteed them with a spring onion, sea salt, pepper, and olive oil before I used them.

I cut the fish in chunks and sauteed it in olive oil with the spring onions, in order to have a homogeneous flavor throughout the whole meal.
The salmon had a beautiful pinkish color - no color added, it's wild!
The red snapper worked perfectly, as it held well when I cooked it.
Now, you need stock to make the risotto (and a dry white wine) and I never use stock cubes or already made similar preparations. So I took the flank off the salmon fillet and boiled them in a "court bouillon", made with water, sea salt, pepper, a spring onion, a carrot, chopped parsley, and a bit of wine. I let it boil for 20 minutes (cover, because i did not want to reduce it) so that the stock had flavor.

See here the full recipe of the risotto del mare .

The baked custard did not look great ... but tasted so good! I made it with two yolks, two whole eggs (all organic) and with whole milk (alos organic). I double boiled it for one hour at low heat.
I sprinkled red sugar to improve its look ... but that was not a good idea.
Bon appetit!