Seafood risotto for A Thousand Days In Venice

I don't know what to say about this month's Cook the Books book club pick (this month hosted by Debra from Eliot's Eats), Marlena de Blasi's A Thousand Days In Venice. An exuberant American chef with flamboyant taste in textiles falls inexplicably in love with a repressed Italian bank clerk with daddy issues, and through him falls explicably in love with Venice.

For me, de Blasi just couldn't quite convey why she was attracted to her stranger. She herself seems like a glorious broad who I'd love to go drinking with, but he remained a mystery. But then, this is a memoir, not a romance, and other people's relationships are often a bit baffling. I never understand how people who really like food end up with people who don't much care what they eat.

I've never been to Venice, so my impressions of the food are, I suspect, very much clichés - soft shell crab, risi e bisi, linguine vongole; exorbitantly priced Bellinis and carpaccio and tramezzini at Harry's Bar. Paul was very definite though, he wanted me to make a seafood risotto.

I used the prawn shells, with a little lemon, a shallot, a bay leaf and some peppercorns to make a stock for the risotto.

The murky depths of prawn stock

Then I lightly cooked the peeled prawns in butter, with sweated shallots and garlic. I removed the prawns from the pan and proceeded to make a normal risotto bianco. I added arborio rice to the shallot/garlic/butter remaining from cooking the prawns and let it soak a bit before adding quite a lot of vermouth (we tend to use dry vermouth instead of white wine in cooking because we don't feel tempted to drink it), and the hot, strained stock, stirring constantly between additions. When it had almost absorbed the last quantity of stock, I added the prawns back in, and a tub of 50/50 white and brown crab meat.

When it was just done, instead of the normal mantecatura of butter and parmesan, I added a good spoonful of crème fraîche for extra richness and a touch of acidity, and a bag of rocket leaves and garnished it with snipped chives. It wasn't as loose as a traditional Venetian risotto - it didn't flow in waves - and we had it as a meal in a bowl not as a starter. But I still think it was a pretty good representation of Venice.