Lobster Bisque!

Upon my search for a new recipe to review, I wanted to find something that I knew for a fact I enjoy and could recreate for special occasions. I am a huge seafood fan and so nothing sounded better to me then to make homemade raviolis with a lobster bisque sauce. Though this sounded quite challenging at first, I decided I wanted to see what I am capable of while at the same time, break in my girlfriends new pasta machine and show her what I can do.

The first thing that I did was prepare the pasta dough for the raviolis and the mix that I will be putting inside. Luckily, I already knew how to make homemade pasta so searching a recipe for this process wasn't necessary. I made the ravioli dough with a simple egg and salt mixture added into a pile of flower until it becomes the ball of dough that I covered in a plastic bag and let sit for an hour and a half. While I waited on the dough to settle, I put together a stuffing in which I mixed together ricotta cheese with green onion, crab, sautéed shrimp, and a few seasonings then I put it into the fridge until the ravioli dough was ready. For the remainder of that hour, I marinated the lobster with olive oil, lemon, and thyme and placed that into the fridge as well and then started the soup.

I found a great recipe for lobster bisque at allrecipes.com in a post entitled Annie’s Lobster Bisque. After preparing all of the ingredients, (chopping, mincing, portioning) I put it all together using the order process that the recipe suggests. This process began with cooking the onions first, adding in the wine and cooking sherry, letting that simmer until it has reduced to about half of the amount started, adding in flour for thickness, and then the tomato paste and milk fallowed by the addition of various seasonings to taste. I didn't have all of the seasonings so I used what I did have, (salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce) and substituted cayenne pepper with chili powder. I also added a bit of ground white pepper and onion powder.

While the soup was cooking together all of the ingredients, at this point a tomato bisque, I started cooking the lobster. During this process, I pan seared the lobster tails for a few seconds on each side to start the lobster meat cooking. After, I made a sauce with white dry wine, butter, garlic, lemon juice, and Italian parsley and let the sauce do the remaining of the cooking by continuously pouring the hot mixture over the meat placed on the pan to finish the cooking process with a garlic, citrusy infusion. At this point I saw that I was limited with the amount of lobster meat and so at an attempt to keep all of the seafood I had in the sauce for the raviolis, I kept the soup as just a tomato bisque soup and used the tomato bisque soup as a base to create a creamy sauce. This was a simple process of adding the tomato sauce to a homemade rue to just make it more thick and I added the lobster and sauted shrimp to this.

 

As a side item, I made a light avocado shrimp salad with a sweet and tangy homemade red vinaigrette. I found this recipe at addapinch.com. The final process involved putting the raviolis together and boiling them. Altogether, the meal was excellent. The soup was creamy and flavorful with a small spicy kick. The sauce was filled with shrimp and lobster, which paired great with the shrimp and crab filled raviolis. And the side shrimp salad was basically the icing on the cake with such a heavy dish. I will use this recipe and make it my own for future dinner occasions and ultimately, I am very happy that everything came together without any problems.