Photo by eatallthethings
One of my favourite cook books is Cook With Jamie. I love the pictures and the instructions are rather simple to follow. So I decided to try it out.
Ingredients
For rice base:
3/4 cups of carnaroli rice
1/2 celery, finely chopped
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp of butter
2 tbsp olive oil
1L chicken/vegetable stock
For the Mushrooms:
100g of mushrooms, sliced
2 garlics, chopped
2tbs butter
some thyme
salt and black pepper
1 tbsp chopped parsley
1L stock
grated Parmesan
an extra knob of butter
To make the rice base, melt the butter in the olive oil and fry the onion and celery over medium heat for about 15 minutes until the onions are soft but not coloured.
Add in the rice and keep stirring so that the rice won’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Add in the stock, a ladle at a time and keep stirring until the rice has absorbed all the stock. Keep adding the stock and stirring until the rice is about 3/4 cook (or as Jamie refers to it as al dente).
Remove the rice from the pan onto an oiled tray and let it cool. If you make large portions of the rice base, you can store it in an air tight container in the fridge so that you can use it for other risotto recipes.
For the mushrooms, melt the butter in the same pan that you used for the rice. When it’s nice and foamy, drop in the mushrooms. (You can use a mix of mushrooms like porcini, golden trumpet or even other wild mushrooms. I used Portobello) When the mushrooms are tender, add in the garlic and season with salt and black pepper to taste.
Add in about half of the stock and put the rice back into the pan and stir until all the stock has been absorbed into the rice. Make sure that you keep stirring the rice as you add in more stock ladle by ladle so that they don’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
When the rice is nice and soft but not soggy, turn off the fire and stir in the extra knob of butter, parsley and grated Parmesan. Now it’s ready to eat.
Serves 1-2, depending on how much you eat.
Personally, I think there’s so many things that you can do with the rice base, so many different types of risotto. Even this risotto can be modified to how ever you want it to be, like adding bits of ham or bacon into it. So try it out.
If you want to try something even more interesting, head on to Rinaz’s site and try out her Strawberry Risotto recipe.
Oh Look, Krill! 