Hi all,
Working on getting back in the blogging game and picking up where I left off last time.
What’s awesome about risotto is that you truly can easily create quite the elegant dish while having some creative fun with pretty much anything edible sitting in your fridge or kitchen. My trial approach—with white long grain rice, heaven forbid!—is proof! (Never occurred to me to take a picture of it done. Sorry! Please don’t ask what’s up with the formatting on this particular paragraph of text. I am clueless.)
Here’s Jake again–to make up for the food pic I should have taken–he’s so much cuter than a bowl of rice, don’t you think?
Back to the post!
Here’s what I used to make ‘risotto’:
One small to medium onion, finely chopped
One small zucchini, chopped
One clove of garlic, coarsely chopped
About 3 tbsp of olive oil
One tbsp or so of butter/margarine
1-1/2 cups of long grain white rice
One quart of chicken broth
½ cup white wine (I had chardonnay in the fridge—BTW, you can adjust to taste here)
pepper to taste
a few slivers of dried rosemary
Here’s what I did (in a 12-inch, heavy-based non-stick frying pan):
Sautéed the onions and zucchini in the olive oil until tender;
Added the garlic and cooked until golden;
Added the rice and stirred to coat it.
Slowly poured in one cup of broth, stirring lovingly until the rice absorbed it; repeated this process until I used up the wine and 3 cups of broth total. (Somewhere along the way I added the margarine, a dash of pepper and crumbled in the rosemary.) According to the online recipe, I should have been almost done, about 25 minutes in after having added the rice to the veggies.
My rice, however, seemed to have alternate ideas about getting soft. Forget al dente; the grains were downright crunchy. So here’s where I let instinct take over: I added the rest of the broth (about a cup), raised the heat to high and let the liquid come to a boil. I immediately reduced the heat to low and covered the pan tightly, letting it simmer about 15-20 minutes total, and stirring once or twice. Afterward, I took the pan off the heat. Still covered, I set it aside another 10 minutes.
The result was quite delicious. I mean, every single grain of rice was ridiculously infused with flavor. Me, the non-rice girl having seconds AND thirds? Yes, I’ll have to further up the walks and exercise/dance sessions to make up for the extra calories…
Luckily, I’m a lazy kind of cook so I might not make this all that often. Then again, texture and gusto-wise it was so good, the time, effort and resulting carpal tunnel syndrome may be worth the yumminess of this dish. Add a little meat and you’ve got a one-dish meal. For me, the veggie route is perfect for keeping it a side dish.
Leftovers: James suggests frying them up as patties or rissoles. I reheated on a lower setting in the microwave–still good! If need be, one can add a bit more broth to smooth out the remains and serve as an even tastier side dish–that’s one less part of a meal I have to cook!
Have a great day and even greater weekend,
Joanna
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