In the lead up to dinner today I had
consumed only a small apple and a few dried apricots in terms of
fruit and veg, so I was feeling a bit low on vitamins. I needed to
cook something that would go a decent way to making up this deficit.
We were also both quite hungry so needed to fill up on some
carbohydrates too. Pasta and potato have already featured heavily
this week and I didn't fancy them again. I was going to take a risk
and go for rice. I was going to mediate the risk by making risotto. I
rarely have success with rice on its own, but usually in a risotto it
turns out better.
Matt had done the shopping last week so
we had a large butternut squash. I like butternut squash but am yet
to find a great range of good applications for it, but risotto is a
great application for it. After spending years honing my butternut
squash handling skills I think that I have finally decided that the
best way is to stick it in a hot oven for a while before you want to
do anything with it. This is superior to trying to:
1) Cut it up whilst raw – butternut
squash is surely one of the hardest of all vegetables and its girth
makes this supremely difficulty and leaves you in constant fear of
losing one or more fingers
2) Peel it – the under-skin layer of
the butternut squash is remarkably slippery and again the vegetable's
girth makes this task both challenging and hazardous (a butternut
squash inadvertently propelled at the foot is quite painful).
So the squash went in the oven. I
couldn't tell you how long for exactly, but long enough for me to
have a shower and take a walk around the local shops to gather some
celery (and ready salted crisps). The butternut squash is probably
manageable when it's looking a bit golden and the skin has started to
blister up. Taking a walk to the shops is not really a very slack
thing to do but a risotto without celery is unlikely to be as
pleasurable as one with. Plus it was a nice evening for a stroll.
One of the tricks I have found with
risotto is to use a big pan. Into my big pan (where I had already
heated a little bit of olive oil) went a chopped red onion and two
chopped sticks of my newly gathered celery. They need to cook until
quite soft. Then I added some mushrooms. I would have used the whole
pack but wanted to save a few for the pizza we have planned for
tomorrow. Those few are now considerably less as Matt decided that he
wanted to eat a few raw – so it might be a less mushroomy pizza.
While that was all cooking I returned
to my butternut squash. It was still pretty hot, but easy enough to
remove the skin and then chop. I only used half the squash as I
didn't want to overdo it comparison to the other ingredients –
mainly I was concerned about overbearing the mushrooms. My chopped
squash went into the pan too. The veggies sizzled for a while I got
the washing in (this is a really got recipe for when you've got other
things to do at the same time) and then I added some risotto rice.
The amount of rice can be really flexible depending on the rice /
vegetable ratio that you're after, I like to aim for 50:50 but it's
difficult to tell because of the way the rice swells once you've
added the water. I think that it's good to cook the rice for a couple
of minutes before adding the water. I add water from a boiled kettle
(I'm sure sometimes it's recommended that you use cold water but that
seems too time consuming for me – plus you can make a cup of tea at
the same time if you boil the kettle), enough to just about cover the
contents of the pan. And at the same time I put in a good dollop of
vegetable stock powder (I'm coming to the end of the kilo that I
brought at about this time last year), a couple of bay leaves from
the garden and lots of grinds of black pepper.
I can never remember whether you're
supposed to stir risotto constantly or not at all. Therefore I go for
somewhere in the middle and stir it occasionally. The method I use to
tell when it's ready is when most of the water has disappeared
(either through evaporation or absorption) and it looks kind of
gooey, but not so dry that any of it starts to crisp up. At this
point I added a bit of crème fraiche – it helps to add both a bit
of creaminess and a bit of sharpness. You can always add more crème
fraiche later but I put some in now so that it doesn't have too much
of a cooling effect.
Normally I would finish a risotto off
with a bit of grated parmesan for a good salty kick. But we don't
have any parmesan in the fridge at the moment (we're particularly
depleted on the cheese front at the moment, just some cheddar, cream
cheese and mozzarella) so instead I decided to reconstitute some
dehydrated sun dried tomatoes (another use for some kettle boiled
water). Here's a slack tip: once the tomatoes are rehydrated and
drained, leave them in the bowl and chop with sharp scissors, rather
than faffing around with a chopping board and a knife. And then I
just sprinkled them on top of our portions.
It was a really tasty way of topping up
on our carbohydrates and vitamins. So tasty in fact that we both had
seconds. And there's still enough for tomorrow's lunch – as long as
we're careful with the old rice reheating thing.
As for the leftover butternut squash, I think we might have some soup coming along.
As for the leftover butternut squash, I think we might have some soup coming along.
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