The scent of Venere

Given the recurrent analogy between food and sex, I wonder if trading a fancy homemade dinner for some DIY service could be somehow considered a sort of culinary prostitution? Anyway, yesterday our cooking skills pleased two very kind handy men that came with a drill and a lot of patience (a girl can be opinionless towards the position of a bracket as much as a boy in front of the friday night dilemma: red lipstick and natural eyes or pink lipstick and smoky eyes?)

Yesterday I had a very stimulating challange: a pack of italian Venere rice from Azienda Agricola Falasco (NO). Apparently there are many other benefits arising from S1's north-italian origins, aside her excellent capacity of holding drinks :)

And I failed. You cannot perceive it from the picture but the risotto was SALTY! Thing is that Venere rice takes ages to cook and thus gets thirsty very easily. But my name still shines high in the sky thanks to the second main, the legendary fish-in-a-bed....

VENERE RICE WITH STONE BASS, PETIT SANMARZANO TOMATOES AND DILL

I made a fish stock with salmon bones, tomatoes and onion, but in non-kosher countries (where shrimps are easy to find) I would use the shrimps heads. I chopped one onion, put it in a pot with EVO oil and let it get blondinit. Then I added the rice to toast (one handful per guest plus one handful for the pot, they say) and after few minutes I started adding the fish stock one spoon at time.
When the rice was almost ready (ages later for Venere), I stirred for literally 2 minutes the stone bass minced in cubes with EVO oil and a whole garlic clove (that I eventually removed), one glass of white wine and in the last 20 seconds, the mini Sanmarzano tomatoes peeled (30 seconds in boiling water) and chopped. With the fire turned off, I added fresh dill.

FISH-IN-A-BED

This is way the best way to bake fish in the oven, because the salt creates a hard shell that makes the fish cook in its own juice. And it is supereasy, no one can fail, S2 guarantees!

I mixed 1 kg of coarse salt with 1 kg of fine salt and two whipped egg whites. In this case I also mixed chopped fresh herbs (thyme, dill, basil, rosemary) and chopped garlic. I put one slice of lemon, chopped garlic and mixed herbs in the (emptied) belly of each fish (sea breams) and then make the bed with a layer of salt in a baking tray, then the fish and eventually the salty blanket to cover all the fish. This one of the few moments in which also someone like me, whose parents forgot the maternal instinct app while installing the operating system, gets overprotective: is he covered enough? will he be cold in the oven? Let's put some more salt!

30 minutes @ 180 (more or less, numbers faded away in our stove) and the best fish is ready.

BONUS TRACK BY S1: ORANGE AND CHOCOLATE CAKE

For the recipe, ask her!