Cuttlefish and Chinese rice

A big part of the reason I write is because my dad always made sure my room was stacked with books.  Even when we migrated to the United States and had no money to spare for any wants, he always made sure that he could buy me all sorts of encyclopedias (This was before the world wide web and Wikipedia young people!).  He made sure to push me – I never had Goosebumps , instead I was reading a small print copy of The Three Musketeers.  That Alexandre Dumas classic took me two months to get through.  I had to look up every 10th word.

My father, a scholar, and medical doctor by training, is a poet by nature.  His poetry lies in his cooking.  Over the past five years he has been perfecting a Croatian-Japanese fusion cuisine.  Throughout his twenty years in America, the real challenge for him has been finding the necessary ingredients of the Dalmatian coast in American supermarkets.  But, I can attest to the fact that he has found a variety of native products, and product substitutes.  His dinners are the hottest ticket in town.  To share some of his knowledge with other Adriatic residents, and Mediterranean food connoisseurs  he has started a dual language blog – Dalmatian American Seafood Assistant – with American ingredient recipes, for traditional Dalmatian dishes.  I hear that the fusion stuff will also be included.

The reason I can plug his blog here is because his latest post, a recipe for black risotto, involves a china strain of rice.  With my dad, even a recipe becomes a history lesson.  This makes for very interesting reading, and a fantastically vivid childhood.

In Italian food stores one can buy ink-colored pasta. That works pretty good for black pasta. Why not then use ink-dyed rice? Well, I am not aware that it is available. But I have found a natural black rice and I decided to try it with cuttlefish the very moment I discovered it.

This rice comes from China. It is one of heirlooms plants that produces non-glutinous short-grained rice. Its purple color comes from a natural pigment anthocyanin. Cooked black rice is of deep tyrian purple color, another color extracted from marine animals. In China it was known as emperors rice. Old Greeks knew about this rice and banned it because they believed it gives strength to their enemies.

Please check out his blog – both an English and a Serbo-Croatian version are available.  The Serbo-Croatian version, Americki Dalmatinac,  can be found here, for the English version check out the link above.