Thursday's risotto

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.