RISOTTO with SALMON and SCALLOP

Delicious memory back in the early days.

I can’t remember the exact date that me and Wingsi, my former roommate, decided to go long with this dish. It was definitely a sunny and breezy day in 2009, in our little pretty basement near Leslie station, Toronto. Since the date I stepped my foot on Toronto, she had been a great kitchen buddy who, besides me, usually felt excited about new dishes to try and new cakes to make. We actually cooked and baked together almost every weekend when we were living together.

This is where it all began.

The kitchen didn’t look so glamorous with fully-equipped tools or a wide tall island, but we did try our best with what we had and had done some nice jobs. Then one day, Wingsi and I decided to make a special dish for dinner out of the remaining ingredients left that we had bought for the week.. And we made this mouth-watering, yet very simple, risotto with the baked salmons and scallops and wrapped around with bacon. The salmon was actually planned to be baked plain. Luckily we found some of the remaining bacon in the fridge and decided that we could wrap it around the fish cubes and scallops so that they wouldn’t dry during the baking. That was how we got the pretty bacon wrapped salmon and scallop pieces.

And this is what the risotto looked like. Pretty simple with veggie stock and veggie ingredients to balance out the protein from the wrapped cubes.

And final product (one of the best pictures I’ve taken with Sony T100 – I know it’s not the best camera but that was our only choice)

This is actually my own recipe so there should be some problems with the wording and understanding of some steps. But the process was simple and easy to follow, as I think. But if you like this dish and want to try it out, just ask me questions in your comments and I’ll be happy to help. There are lots of ways you can do to perfect this recipe. And please feel free to do so and share it with me. I’d love to improve my recipe if there’s any chance.

Servings: 3

Cooking time: 1 and a half hour

Risotto

Ingredients:
– 1 1/2 cup of risotto rice (Should be enough for 3)
– Diced veggie (carrot, pea, corn, zuchini…). We happened to have a bag of frozen mixed veggie so we used it instead of making our own mix. But it’s totally up to you on what veggie you prefer.
– Hot water. You could use beef or chicken or whatever stock to enhance the flavor.

Process:
– In a hot pan, put in some oil. Turn the heat down a bit if the oil is too hot.
– Put the diced veggie in and stir fry for 1 minute. Season with a bit of salt and pepper
– Add the risotto grain after 1 minute and stir quickly for one more minute. Try to coat the grain with the oil in the pan so we can have a shiny and glossy-looking risotto
– Slowly pour in hot stock and let the rice absorb the stock before adding more. It should be 1 cup at a time.
– Continue until the rice becomes soft and grainny.I would take about 30 to 1 hour with this much risotto.

This is not actually hard but you’ll need patience since the stirring part takes themost time when it comes to risotto.

Salmon and Scallop:

Ingredients:
– 2 pieces of salmon steak, skin on. The 2 pieces of steak we bought weighted around 1 and a half pound. – 6 pieces of jumbo scallops.
– About 10 strips of bacon

Process:
– Preheat oven to 375F – 190C
– Carefully remove the salmon skin from the steak. Dice the salmon into scallop-size cubes.
– Wrap the salmon cubes and scallops with bacon and lock them with a toothpick so they won’t come off during baking
– Arrange the cubes on a tin foil with a bit of oil at the bottom. Season lightly with walt and pepper on top. There are some more kinds of herbs you can sprinkle on the pieces to enhance the flavour (such as dried rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage…), but again, we would like our dinner to be simple and easy, so we skipped the herb part. Also, put the salmon skin on the tray (skin side down) so they can be cooked and crisp up as well.
– Put into the preheated oven for 20 minutes or until the top of the cubes turn light brown, and the skin is crispy.

Take the cubes out and serve on top of the risotto. Top with piece of broken crispy salmon skin. Finally, garnish th dish with some good extra virgin olive oil. and there we go, the simple and beautiful dinner is ready!