May meal #3: Broccoli Risotto

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What have we here then, green rice pudding? The recipe did say it should be creamy and that it was.

My broccoli was frozen, so it required much less cooking, I used vegetable stock instead of chicken broth and, sadly the only type of rice I can get locally (which I already had) is just ordinary rice.

But, even if it did end up looking like Kermit (notice the similarity on the color?) had a nasty accident in my kitchen and the fact that I thought I really had screwed this one up big style, it tasted really great. Color me a surprised shade of lurid green!

On this occasion, I made broccoli risotto just to use a packet of frozen broccoli that I already had in the freezer. If I was going to make a risotto again, I’d rather have mushroom, but that’s just me.

Was it simple? Well, as Kyle Phillips, Guide to Italian Cuisine, says, “Making a good risotto is rather like riding a bicycle: It takes a little bit of practice to begin with, and a certain amount of concentration thereafter.” So, maybe the gooey rice pudding effect isn’t exactly what we should have, but this does not diminish enjoyment of the dish.

Actually, this also brought up an interesting thought when you’re cooking a new dish alone. How do you know what it’s supposed to be like? (Easy, if the recipe comes with an illustration, but this didn’t.)

And who’s going to tell on you if it doesn’t look like it should?

To answer the second question first, lots of people if you’re daft enough to post the results of your failed culinary experiments on a blog!

The first part can be answered by the good old internet too, for instance via this Google image search on the word risotto. There you will notice that, while the professional risotti all have neat, separate grains, the “normal folk” like us, all seem to make “savory rice puddings”. Phew!

The key to the problem, of course, is the type of rice. If I were to go hunting round big stores or specialist shops, I’d get something more suitable, but this is cooking to eat, not cooking for a foodie beauty contest. Despite the appearance and incorrect texture, the results were so tasty, that I really wouldn’t let the food snobs put you off.

It was certainly quick enough to make, at around 20 minutes. We’ll see how well it freezes (or not), when we have one of the saved portions.

Thank goodness, we’ll be back on familiar territory tomorrow, with a very quick Spanish dish, Revuelto con Gambas y Triguero.