Pushing My Cholesterol With Crab

Awhile back I had a lot of shrimp shells after making a shrimp dinner so I decided to make stock. It’s really simple because you don’t need to cook the shells as long as you might cook cow or chicken bones. I added the typical carrots, celery and fennel (because I love it) with a few peppercorns and froze the stock in containers.

So that took care of my shrimp shells. Now I have containers of shrimp stock in my freezer.

I realize I don’t really use shrimp stock that often, always going with chicken broth. So I tried to think what recipe would benefit from shrimp stock, and that’s how I ended up making my crab risotto.

Risotto requires a lot of stock for the rice to absorb as you cook it, and crab comes from that same family of shellfish (please, don’t Wikipedia this!) so I figured it’s probably better to make crab risotto from shrimp stock than chicken broth. To jazz up the dish (although I’m sure the crab would have been fine alone) I added radicchio, mostly for color and aforementioned jazzing.
We’re getting near the end of crab season so the crab I got wasn’t as sweet as I hoped. But I still love the texture of crab meat in any dish. This will probably be my last crab post until next season. Enjoy!