Mmm, food

[simont]

Cooked mushroom risotto for myself and lnr last night. I had cooked this once before in November, and it was a perfectly edible meal then, but this time I made some modifications to the recipe and it came out distinctly yum rather than merely edible; one of the most mushroomy-tasting things I've eaten in quite some time.

I must rapidly find excuses to cook it for some more people :-)

Comments

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Any chance of the recipe ? I'm always interested in mushroom-based stuff.

[simont]

If I post the recipe here then I'll have less chance of getting lots of nice people to come round for dinner :-) But I suppose I can't preserve my open-source credentials if I refuse on those grounds, so never mind. Let me see.

Disclaimer

I'm not an expert cook, and this recipe is not pitched at expert cooks either; I may explicitly state things that expert cooks wouldn't have needed to be told at all, or indeed recommend things that expert cooks would recoil from in horror. If you are one, just deal with it :-)

Ingredients (to serve 2)

One large onion

Garlic to taste (my source recipes varied between 1/4 clove per person which you took out after frying it a bit, and a more robust 2 cloves per person; take your pick!)
250g fresh mushrooms (I used ordinary button mushrooms but I'm sure other kinds would work if you preferred)
Small packet of dried porcini mushrooms (this is the secret ingredient which I didn't use last time and which made it really nice)
A splash of milk (one of my source recipes insisted on this but I'm uncertain whether it's really necessary; I may try it without next time)
Risotto rice (arborio or carnaroli), somewhere between 1/2 and 1 cup
Vegetable stock (for this particular purpose it's more convenient to use the kind you dissolve in water rather than proper liquid stock)
Herbs (I used a sprinkle of parsley and thyme and my guest didn't complain, but I am emphatically not a herbs expert)

Procedure

Soak the dried mushrooms in a pint of hot water for about half an hour (if this is significantly different from the instructions on the packet then this may require modification). The mushrooms will rehydrate, and will also infuse the water with a lot of mushroomy goodness.

While they're soaking, chop the onion, chop or crush the garlic, and slice the fresh mushrooms.

Drain the dried mushrooms, keeping the water. Pat them dry with kitchen roll or something.

Use the mushroom water to make up a pint of vegetable stock. (This is why it's helpful to use cube stock or other dissolve-it-in-water kind: you just dissolve some in the mushroom water. If you have liquid stock, I suppose you'd have to have soaked the mushrooms in less water and then made it up to a pint with liquid stock.) Don't make the stock too strong; I found one Oxo cube in the entire pint was perfectly sufficient. I've had trouble before with making risottos with too-strong stock; the meal ends up tasting of nothing else.

Heat a little oil and fry the onion and garlic. Then add the mushrooms (both kinds), turn the heat down a bit, and cook until the mushrooms are soft. Then add the rice and fry briefly. Now add the splash of milk and some of the stock. Bring to the boil, turn down the heat, and simmer until most of the liquid has been absorbed into the rice; then add more of the stock (how much you add at a time depends on how patient you are :-), wait for that to be absorbed, and repeat until you've used up all the stock. Then it's ready.

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Sounds good; you could try using chestnut mushrooms instead of normal mushrooms as they tend to have a better flavour.

You could also add dried shittake mushrooms, prepared in the same way as the dried porcini mushrooms.

If you wanted to go to extremes, one of the stalls in the market (the one nearest to the market square Starbucks, next to the stall selling lots of old-style sweets) sells really nice looking wild mushrooms as well. AFAIR they even sell fresh shittake mushrooms, but they are often improved by being dried first.

The milk would be added to give a certain amount of creamyness to the sauce; you can try using a small amount of double cream instead.

I'd also think about using shallots in addition to the onion; they are a pain to prepare (although you can get "Really lazy shallots" now which are pretty good), but they definately add a nice flavour.

[simonb.livejournal.com]

If I post the recipe here then I'll have less chance of getting lots of nice people to come round for dinner :-)

*smile* there is more to dinner than just the food; the company is important as well.

When it comes down to it, there are several sides to a good meal and only one of them is how good the food is. There is also the surroundings and the company to take into account. Often the company you have the meal in is the most important of all so long as the food is edible :)

[simont]

Since I've already made the analogy with open source, I'm amused to note that this is almost exactly the same form of argument that OSS zealots use when arguing that companies opening their source code need not be losing all hope of profit, because there's more to their service than just the software :-)

[lnr]

And this seems like a good point to thank Simon for a lovely dinner. The risotto was indeed excellent. Far better than any I've ever made.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Ooh, so what did you do to make it so yummy? I make risotto fairly frequently so I'm very curious :-)

[simont]

The magic ingredient was a small packet of dried porcini mushrooms. Soaked them in hot water for half an hour prior to cooking, as per the instructions on the packet, after which time they were rehydrated and could sensibly be shoved in the pan along with the rest of the (ordinary) mushrooms.

However, a lot of mushroomy goodness had diffused out into the water I soaked them in, which had become nearly opaque in its sheer mushroomness. So I reused that water during cooking to produce an extremely mushroomy result. (Since I cheated and used a stock cube, that was just a matter of dissolving the cube in the mushroomy-water rather than in any old water; if I'd been using proper liquid stock then I suppose I'd have had to do something more cunning, such as carefully not using too much water to soak the mushrooms and then mixing half-and-half with the stock.)

Other than that, I think, the rest was just conventional risotto technique.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I do sometimes use dried mushrooms but I tend to just throw them in and hope that the stock from the cooking will rehydrate them. Perhaps I should actually try rehydrating them properly. I want to go and make risotto now!

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Oooh, ooh, yes, me, me! I love mushrooms but crazyscot doesn't like them so I never get to make mushroom risotto at home :)

[simont]

You were certainly near the top of my list (if nothing else I probably owe you a meal or two anyway). Mail me and we'll sort out a day :-)

[rmc28]

I adore mushrooms, as does fanf. If you would like to cook it for one or other or both of us, I think you would find willing eaters. Hope that's not too cheeky of me to say. (I am struggling with inner embarrassment about asking you to invite me/him round, I must be reacting to my holiday by being extra English or something, I'm afraid, or perhaps I just need some sleep.)