My third ever risotto!

Yesterday at lunch, I was filled with ricey inspiration by the risotto queen, @anglikebang, so today I decided to try making risotto for only the 3rd time in all of my 33 years.  I turned to twitter for support...and found NONE.  Jeez, they're all sticklers for tradition!  So annoying.  All I asked for was a shortcut, but no.  Twitter did not deliver (well, they did not deliver what I wanted, everyone was actually very helpful) and I was told that dumping all the stock in at once was simply not permitted.

So I got home from work tonight and, despite feeling like a big pile of poo (thanks penicillin you complete git) I made risotto!  Here's how I did it.

Chicken, mushroom and pea risotto (2 servings)


Ingredients
150g risotto rice
1 small onion, very finely diced
1 clove of garlic, crushed
A splash of white wine or dry sherry (I only had the latter)
15g porcini mushrooms
Regular mushrooms
Peas
Leftover roast chicken
Chicken stock (I used a Maggi stock cube)
Olive oil

Firstly make up the chicken stock with around 500 ml of boiling water, add the porcini mushrooms and leave it on a very low heat.

In a large saucepan, add a little bit of oil - literally only about 2 tsps - and very gently sweat the onions and, a few minutes later, the mushrooms.  Once they have softened, add the rice and stir so that the grains are covered in the oniony, mushroomy, not-particularly-oily-but-let's-try-not-to-be-sad-about-that mix.

Mmmmmm!  Looks good, huh?  I threw in a glug of sherry (I would have used wine but it would have been a DISASTER if I'd opened a bottle - I am not very good at drinking wine in moderation...it just tastes too darn good) and, once that was absorbed, I started adding the stock, one ladle at a time, making sure each was absorbed before adding the next.

Check out the colour on that stock!  Porcinis are ACE.  Hmmm...it would seem that I added the peas at some point during the process too.  With the benefit of hindsight, I will add these much closer to the end of cooking next time as they were a bit squashy.  So, on and on and on it went with the stock.  It was around this point.....

.....that I got incredibly bored.  Uber, massively, mind-numbingly bored.  So I sort of left it to its own devices and did the washing up and fed the cat with the occasional stir going on.  When the rice was basically cooked, I added some leftover roast chicken and HEY PRESTO!  The risotto was done.

Genuinely proud!  And, given that I finished eating it nearly 2 hours ago, it's brilliantly filling.  I'm taking the second portion into work for lunch tomorrow although I should hasten to add that this is not technically advisable.  Rice is one of the main causes of food poisoning.  However, I chilled it down very quickly (which is apparently the danger zone in terms of bad spores developing) and I'm going to risk it.  If I never blog again, you know it didn't go well, and that @darrengdwn was right when he told me that this was absolutely verboten.

Anyway, I can see risotto becoming a bit of a staple in my diet.  I figure that it's an excellent way of getting stealth vegetables into me (one-third of what I eat has to be vegetables/fruit), so it would be really helpful if you felt like commenting below to give me ideas of what to put in them.  I need variety or I will fall off this diet.  FACT.  And I don't want to do that.

F x