By Chef Mario
Risotto is one of my favorite dishes, for a couple of reason. One, is, who doesn’t love a big bowl of starch and cheese? Secondly, it can adapt to any season. Just take several seasonal ingredients, put them together, and there’s a good chance it’ll make sense as risotto. Wild mushrooms and parsley. Squash, sage, and balsamic. Or every green vegetable that you can get your little chefy hands on. For the purposes of this recipe, I’m omitting some of the amounts, as it’s really about using what you have around.
Ingredients:
-green garlic, whites sliced thin, greens blanched, then sliced
-asparagus, blanched then cut into inch long pieces at an angle
-half a medium size yellow onion, diced small, or the whites of your spring onions
-3/4 c white cooking wine
-5 cups chicken or vegetable stock
-olive oil
-2 T butter
-1 1/2 cups Italian short grained rice, such as arborio (Echo Hill, may be even Weiss…)
-1 cup fine grated parmesan or pecorino cheese
-a nice handful of mint from the yard, sliced thin
-half a bag Kirchenberg cheese curds (optional)
-salt
Method
-In rapidly boiling, salted water, blanch your apsaragus and place in ice water to stop the cooking. It should still have a snap to it. Take the garlic greens (don’t use anything yellow), blanch them until tender, maybe one minute. Chill then chop.
-Put rice into a heavy medium pot over medium heat and cook, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon. Toast lightly (no browning), until fragrant, then add onion and sliced garlic whites, stirring until they become soft.
-Add wine and cook, stirring constantly, until wine is almost completely absorbed, about 30 seconds.
-Add a ladleful of stock at a time, stirring constantly; wait until almost all of the stock has been absorbed before adding more. The key is to work out the natural starch in the rice, so constant stirring is a must. Continue cooking and adding stock (you may have some stock left over) until rice is tender but firm to the bite, about 25 minutes.
-Off the heat, add your butter and parm; stir vigorously to incorporate. Add cooked green vegetables, cheese curds, and mint; adjust seasoning. Serve with kolsch, pilsner, or crisp white wine.
I’m thinking it should say to toast the rice in th olive oli