Sunday, March 25, 2007

A Recipe: "Tell me all your goddamned hopes and dreams" Risotto

Ingredients:
1 and 1/2 c. arborio rice.
1 carton chicken or other stock
1 cup juicy red wine
1 box frozen petite peas, or 2 cups fresh spring peas (cooked and set aside).
1 container sliced baby bella or crimini mushrooms
1/4 cup parmesan or pecorino romano cheese, grated
Olive Oil
Patience

Pour the chicken stock into a small saucepan on low. Do not allow it to boil. Move on.

On the bottom of a heavy saucepan, set over medium heat, drizzle about a tablespoon of olive oil. Dump in the mushrooms. Do not salt. Do you notice how there's no salt in the recipe? The salt is in the stock. No where else. Don't fucking salt anything. Anyway, stir the mushrooms around for about three minutes, until they get resilient in texture and give up their juices to the pan.

Remove mushrooms from the pan, reserving as much of the mushroom liquid as possible. Add about another teaspoon of olive oil to the bottom of the pan, and dump in the rice. Stir the rice around for about two minutes.

Pour in the red wine and stir until the wine is absorbed by the rice. Settle in. Maybe get someone to put on some music, maybe romantic-y type music. Al Green. Put on some Al Green. Love and Happiness...

Now you're going to want to keep pouring stock slowly into the rice. Add a half cup, stir for about...oh, three minutes, maybe five, until each stir reveals the bottom of the pan. Then add another half cup. You've got four cups of stock, so you'll want the stirring to take about a half an hour, total. After there's no more stock, combine risotto, peas, mushrooms, and cheese, and put in a casserole in a 200 degree oven to rest for ten minutes. Have a glass of wine. LOVE AND HAPP-Y-NESS...then serve. Delicious.

Here's a picture. The rice is actually, in person, a really pretty lilac-purple color, not brown. The lighting was not the best.

4 comments:

Roger Williams said...

It was so very delicious. There was love. Also, happiness.

Anonymous said...

Funny... everytime I cook something purple there's hatred. Also, vomiting.

Is my oven set at too low a temperature?

The Dissassociate said...

That could be.

Distrust of purple foods is an important human trait.

Roger Williams said...

So says the woman who got hammered on red wine last weekend!