How to Make Shrimp & Coconut Milk Risotto

Video Transcript

"ANNE MOONEY: Hi, I'm Anne Mooney. I'm a personal chef in Orlando in Winter Park, Florida, and I'm here today on behalf of Expert Village to talk some more about risotto. Risotto is probably one of the most versatile dishes available to us right now, and I'm going to talk about different ways that we can dress it up, and it doesn't always have to look Italian. We can take pages out of a lot of people's books in order to make this more flavorful and more interesting. And the people that I'm going to think about today are the Persians who are very fond of dried fruit and nuts. And so we're going to make a kind of a pilaf-style risotto. Now, I have the rice pretty much cooked, so we'll start here with a pat of the secret ingredient, butter, which makes everything taste better. I don't care what it is. And we'll melt the butter, and then what I'm going to add is slivered almonds and dried apricots, and I'm going to saute those in the butter with just a hint, I mean, a very, very small amount, like that, of cinnamon. So the cinnamon should be barely recognizable. So we're going to saute those just until they begin to absorb the butter. And then, we're going to add the risotto to that pan. So the risotto is going to soak up all that wonderful butter and just a hint of the cinnamon and the flavors of the nuts and the fruits. So it will look like this. And you can see I'm sauteing these ingredients for probably 60 seconds. You don't need much more than that, and certainly, you don't want them to brown. So here we have either a nice vegetarian main dish or a perfectly beautiful appetizer, like so, which you can garnish with a little fresh cilantro, and voila. I wish you could smell it. It's wonderful."