Shrimp Risotto with Parsley and Asparagus

This was a bit chaotic. Usuallly, on Fridays my husband and I forfeit dinner for booze. We just get olives and cheese and nibbles and a good amount of alcohol and hang out and drink. Today, however, I neglected to eat lunch, and as I was getting ready to head out from work, I got really hungry. I decided I needed a shrimp risotto, which is a weird thing to need, but there we have it. I found this recipe, and printed it and drove home as fast as I could (safely). Really excited about dinner and booze.

I ran to the supermarket on the way home. They have good fresh shrimp, a fabulous grocery section and I had seen arborio rice there recently. However, today they were out of arugula, lemons and fennel. Flipping irritating. I buy the other things I need and dash to another supermarket a few miles away. They are also out of fennel and arugula only comes in a packet with spinach. Fuck it. I got the lemons, I skipped the fennel, and I used a large bunch of curly parsley and some asparagus in place of the arugula. I was winging it.

When I get home, super keen to get on with dinner, I ask my son to help with the shrimp. I am not patient enough to do the shrimp first, and then start the onions and rice, so he peels the shrimp, while I start the ball rolling on the risotto. About five shrimp in, he has a funny turn and needs to lie down. I cannot stir risotto and peal shrimp and chop onions and garlic all at the same time. chaos ensued. Dinner went a bit like this.

First I made three cups of chicken stock. Second, I sauteed an onion in some olive oil and then added the garlic and the rice. I used a lot more rice than I was supposed to, probably about two cups, maybe more, so I added a whole glass of white wine, and upped the amount of stock. Once the wine was absorbed I added the stock little-by-little as it got absorbed in the rice (I kept adding stock until the very end when the rice was cooked). Then I chopped the parsley very finely and stirred it into the rice. It added a good green tint. Then, I added the juice of two pretty small lemons and the zest from both lemons. As the liquid was slowly sinking into the rice, I fried the shrimp in olive oil in a separate pan and then put them to one side. Then I put a little water in the shrimp pan, and about two teaspoons of butter and I cooked a bunch of asparagus (chopped into 2cm pieces). When this was cooked, I added it (and the buttery water) to the rice. Then I stirred in the shrimp, seasoned and ate.

It was good. Very flavorsome and the lemon gave it a good fresh summery taste. Would eat again.

Spinach, Eggplant and Chickpea Curry

I have an arch nemesis called "The Really Big Bag Of Spinach ".  The Really Big Bag Of Spinach, or TRBBOS is too large. It contains more spinach than my family of four can eat before it goes putrid. It is, however, obnoxiously inexpensive. It costs one dollar less, than a normal quantity of spinach, that would just barely go around four people. I'm not an idiot. I'm not going to spend more money, to get less spinach. But I have a grandmother who taught me that wasting food was a terrible thing. The woman was brought up in the shadow of the second world war. She had a solid "waste not want not" attitude.  She taught me that letting food go to waste was a shitty thing to do. As such, if I have to throw away a potato that has rolled to the back of the cupboard and gone-off, I feel bad. As i throw it into the bin, I get a pang of guilt, that is probably not as large as the feeling that Schindler got at the end of the war. I could have done more. I should have cooked and eaten this potato. I get flashbacks to that scene in the Pianist where he only has one bad gone-off potato to eat, and here I am, throwing out potatoes! ARGH! So every time I want to make spinach, I buy TRBBOS and a timer starts in my mind, I've got about three days to eat this absurd quantity of spinach before it goes bad. I've never succeeded, although I have sometimes come close.

Yesterday, I got TRBBOS for a salad. I put as much spinach as possible into the salad, to the detriment of the salad. This barely put a dent in TRBBOS. Today, I decided to find the meal that used the most spinach possible and make that for dinner. I found this recipe for 'spinach, aubergine and chickpea curry' which called for 1KG of spinach. The end of this story, is that I am more than half-way through the bag, with one day to go before it goes weird. I'm pretty sure that if I make a few VERY SPINACHY omelettes for breakfast tomorrow, I'm home free, but we'll see.

I pretty much just copied the recipe exactly, but I went a little too easy on the cumin and coriander, so need to up the quantities on that the next time. I'm also not very good at chilies, I used serrano peppers, and my housemate thought that they were fine, but perhaps I should use more next time, because it could have done with a little more bite. Overall, though, I really liked this dish and it was healthy as well as interesting. I need to make it again, this time with more spices.

Lemon Chicken

This one barely deserves a blog, and I was so hungry I only took a very blurry picture, but here goes anyway.

I made lemon chicken. I read a bunch of  recipes but I mostly used this one. I browned skinless chicken breasts in a pan with salt and pepper, then removed them from the heat and put then in a baking dish. I made a lemon sauce by using the zest of two lemons and the juice of two lemons, a few splashes of cooking sherry, and added oregano and thyme and nine cloves of garlic, which I had put in the pan with the chicken. I then poured the sauce over the chicken and baked for 30minutes. I served it with  cous cous and baked vegetables.

The chicken was really nice and flavorful. I always like roasted broccolli and mushrooms but I don't always know what protein to serve it with. This is a cheap and convenient thing to do with a chicken breast to have it interesting a juicy, without adding butter.

Apologies for the worst food photography of all time.