Tomato Sausage Risotto in Portobello Caps

Coming off of my last successful risotto experience, I wanted to try another flavorful risotto recipe.  While I love the consistency, I have the same problem with risotto that I do with pizza - too much starch, not enough diversity of flavor.  So rather than making one of the essential risottos - mushroom, or cheese, or lemon - I went with a slightly different take - a tomato-based risotto, promising a somewhat unconventional experience.

Your average risotto is made by slowly cooking the rice in hot broth as it is stirred, unfolding the starchy web on the outer layer of the rice so that it can dissolve into the cooking liquid.  Chicken broth is very commonly used for this.  But I was intrigued by the idea of using canned tomatoes instead of broth, just for the variety.  It turns out that this is an amazing twist on your average risotto, transforming a meaty, savoury dish into a lighter, more aromatic dish.  The meat still finds its way in by way of some Italian sausage, but it's a different backbone that was eye-opening and delicious.

Tomato and Sausage Risotto
Modified from Martha Stewart Everyday Food

• 1 can (28 ounces) diced tomatoes in juice
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 3/4 pound sweet or hot Italian sausage, casings removed
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• Coarse salt and ground pepper
• 1 cup Arborio or Carnaroli rice
• 1/2 cup dry white wine, or dry Vermouth
• 10 leaves basil, chiffonaded
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving (optional)
• 2 tablespoons butter

In a small saucepan, combine tomatoes (with their juice) and 3 cups water. Bring just to a simmer; keep warm over low heat.

In a medium saucepan, heat oil over medium. Add sausage and onion; season with salt and pepper. Cook, breaking up sausage with a spoon, until sausage is opaque and onion has softened, 3 to 5 minutes.

Add rice; cook, stirring until well coated, 1 to 2 minutes. Add wine; cook, stirring until absorbed, about 1 minute.

Add about 2 cups hot tomato mixture to rice; simmer over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until absorbed, 4 to 5 minutes. Continue adding tomato mixture, 1 cup at a time, waiting for one cup to be absorbed before adding the next, stirring occasionally, until rice is creamy and just tender, about 25 minutes total (you may not have to use all the liquid).

Here's the process of risotto, armed with a fancy risotto spoon.  Observe how the rice swells and the liquid becomes thicker in these time history photos, taken at the 3 minute mark, the 20 minute mark, and the 26 minute mark.

Remove pan from heat. Stir in basil, Parmesan, and butter; season with salt and pepper. Why the butter?  Because you're "mounting" your sauce.  You heard me.  It's from the French monter au beurre, meaning "build with butter" and pronounced "mount" by the less classy Americans who heard the phrase.  It's the process of adding a cold fat to a hot liquid and getting it to emulsify at temperatures above where it usually breaks down into milk solids, fat, and water.  Restaurants tend to do this to develop a more velvety, bodied sauce, which you have probably simply called "delicious", "rich", or "OMG".  Also, they tend to put in way too much - websites I scanned just called for 1 tbsp butter per 1/2 cup of sauce, so don't get crazy mopping that stuff up with your bread.

These are the finishing ingredients - they only go in at the very end

Now, stand over your dish... and mount it!

Serve immediately, and sprinkle with additional Parmesan, if desired.  For a classy presentation, grill portobello caps and use them as small serving bowls on your plate, as shown above.  A recipe follows.


Grilled Portobello Caps
by me

• 2 medium portobello caps
• 1 tsp coarse dijon mustard
• 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• salt and pepper
• 2 tbsp olive oil

Stir together last four ingredients, and brush onto both sides of mushroom caps.  Cook on a hot grill for 5-6 minutes per side.

Fettuccine with Pesto and Summer Squash

Okay all, here's a quick and easy recipe I think I came up with a while back, trying to find a use for some zucchini.  If you're like me, every summer you end up with too much of the stuff, and you're desperately trying to find a way to use it.  And you can only grill so much of it before you want to gag, so you start looking for new and creative ways to give it different flavors.  This one uses a pesto and ricotta cheese to give it both a sweet creamy texture as well as that pungent herb taste, and it comes together incredibly fast.  If you got really crazy you could make your own pasta or pesto, but for this one I'm using store bought ingredients (although they were both fresh, not dried or canned).  This dish is arguably similar to this one which I posted last year, but with a lot more flavor going on, and a few more ingredients.  It is also distinctly non-vegan, for those of you who live by that code, whereas the other one might have been.

Always on the lookout for good uses of squash - this one hit the mark

Fettuccine with Pesto and Summer Squash

• 1 pint (2 cups) fresh zucchini or other summer squash
• 2 tomatoes
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 pound fettuccine, dried, one 1/2 pound container of fresh fettuccine from the refrigerated section, or equivalent volume homemade pasta
• 4 ounces pesto
• 1/4 cup ricotta cheese
• salt and pepper to taste

Peel your tomatoes by blanching in a large pot of hot water (check here for detailed instructions).  Reserve the hot water for boiling your pasta - you can use that water again, making this more time efficient.  After shocking in ice water, coarsely chop tomatoes and set aside.  Chop the zucchini into bite-sized pieces, no larger than 3/4" to a side.  If using dried pasta, begin to boil now and follow package instructions to cook until just shy of al dente - maybe 30 seconds short of done.  If using fresh, read on.

Prep your ingredients - I used local mini squash, which have less bitter seeds

Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat.  Add the zucchini and cook until starting to brown, then shake / flip and cook other side.  When you flip the zucchini, add the onion, and stir around to saute lightly.  Saute the garlic for just a few seconds.  If using fresh pasta, add to pot of boiling water now, and cook for the 60-90 seconds recommended by the package, or whatever you feel comfortable with for homemade.  

Back in the skillet, lower heat to medium low, add the tomatoes with any juice that may have accumulated, and cook for 30 seconds.  Add the pesto and stir to combine, and keep warm.  Drain cooked pasta, reserving up to 1/4 cup of the cooking water, and add pasta to the sauce.  Stir to combine, adding water a little at a time as needed to reach the consistency you like.  The starchy water will help partially thicken the dish while creating more of a sauce, as well as help finish the pasta (which you cooked to NOT QUITE al dente, right?) by cooking it in this sauce.

Toss the sauteed vegetables with the pesto and partially cooked tomatoes.  Don't keep the heat on too high at this point or you'll lose some of the subtlety

To serve, plate pasta into 2-3 servings, and garnish each with 2 tbsp of ricotta cheese.  If you want to get crazy, add a chiffonade of basil threads (see Wikipedia for a nice picture of this).  Eat it, love it, feel good about yourself for eating healthy.

Thai Red Curry Chicken (Gaeng Gai)

I've noticed a trend so far on my recipes - either a bunch of meat, or Thai food.  Well, today it's a meaty Thai food recipe.  Don't worry, one day soon we will break out of this trend.  Last night's dinner was my Thai Red Curry Chicken, known in parts that know these things as "Gaeng Gai", where "Gai" means chicken, and "Gaeng" means either 'curry' or 'freaking awesome', depending on which dictionary you use.  It's a very easy recipe if you have about 3 weird ingredients, all of which can be found routinely at asian grocery stores.  If you don't have an asian grocery store nearby, I recommend importfood.com, which seems to have the right assortment of foods, though I can't vouch for their freshness.

With that questionably useful tip, let me jump right into the recipe.  And at last, this one can't be attributed to another author, because I have made it dozens of times, and I've been tweaking both the ingredients and the instructions to get something I'm most pleased with.  It's still not perfect, but it's pretty close for home-cooked Thai food.

First, a word on ingredients.  In this recipe, I use Thai eggplants whenever possible, which are green globes about the size of a golf ball.  Next up, the red curry paste.  There are some standard curry pastes available both in asian grocers and now in most regular grocery stores.  I use Maesri brand red curry paste for this, although I have recently gotten my hands on some excellent imported curry paste I acquired at an asian grocery store, found in their freezer section.  Feel free to ask around, but Maesri does a pretty good job.  Next, the Thai basil.  This looks a little like basil, but with smaller, less rippled leaves.  There is also a plant called holy basil, which has more purple-colored leaves.  I like them both for this dish - they both add a licorice flavor to the basil backbone, with a hint of mint on the Thai basil side.  I happen to grow Thai basil specifically for this recipe, but it's fairly easy to come across one or both of these in the asian grocery store.  Finally, the kaffir lime leaves.  If you can find them fresh, good job!  However, you are much more likely to find these in the freezer section, in small bags.  Try looking in the smaller grocery stores - this is a somewhat hard to find item, and while not essential to the dish, it does add a tart citrus flavor to the sauce.



Thai eggplants.  Try to find them at an asian grocer, but substitute regular eggplant if you really have to



Red curry paste.  This brand is good, and easy to find.  Look for the little old lady on the side - that's always a good sign



Kaffir lime leaves.  From importfood.com - they have all of the Thai ingredients listed, if you can't find any at the store

 

 

Think about this recipe as a stew - that's all it is.  Saute your meat, throw in the liquid and vegetables, and simmer for a while.  It's very easy, and tastes just like what you'd get at a restaurant.  Very impressive results.

 

Thai Red Curry Chicken (Gaeng Gai)

Serves 2-3

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 10-15 minutes

• 1-2 tbsp cooking oil (I use canola)
• 2 tbsp red curry paste, more if you prefer more spicy
• 2 cups coconut milk (go for the full fat version, it does make a difference)
• 4 Kaffir lime leaves, shredded (optional, but I like the taste)
• 1½ tbsp brown sugar (use palm sugar if you would like something more authentic)
• 1½ tbsp Thai fish sauce
• 1 pound sliced chicken breast (or lean pork, or shrimp, or tofu...)
• 4-5 pea eggplants, quartered (substitute regular eggplant in 1" cubes if you can't find)
• 1 bell (less preferred) or poblano (more preferred) pepper, sliced into thin strips
• 1 small red chili, sliced (optional)
• 1 can Bamboo shoots
• 2 tbsp fresh Thai, holy, or standard basil leaves
  
  
  

Heat the oil in a wok. Add the curry paste and stir-fry for about one minute, but before it starts sticking to the wok.   WARNING: THIS MAY FILL YOUR KITCHEN WITH PUNGENT CHILE FUMES, SO TURN ON YOUR HOOD FAN AND OPEN WINDOWS!!!  If you start coughing, all is lost - you just get more worked up, and then cough even more.  You might consider drinking water... or giving up and ordering in.  No?  Good, you are a truly dedicated cook.  Throw in the chicken and quickly stir-fry to cook the surfaces of the meat and turn them white, but not necessarily all the way through.  This will infuse the chicken with the curry flavor while still allowing for them to finish cooking in the sauce, and prevent excess boiling of the coconut milk (most recipes have you just simmer the raw meat in the milk / sauce), which breaks it down too much and loses some of its fresh taste.

 



The setup.  Not a ton of things to prep this time

  

Stir-frying the chicken in the red curry paste.  Don't overcook, or else it will wring out the moisture and end up tough and dry

Now add the coconut milk, kaffir lime leaves, fish sauce and sugar.  Bring the coconut milk just to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Add eggplants and whatever peppers you're using.  Simmer for about 10-15 minutes, until eggplants are tender.  Add bamboo shoots towards end of the cooking time - they just need to be warmed up, and won't add anything to the overall flavor.  Kill the heat, then add the basil leaves, tossing to coat.  Serve with steamed rice. 



The full mix after it's been simmering for a few minutes.  Keep things moving so you get all of the eggplant cooked.  A lid would have helped.




The final product, served over rice.  Tastes like restaurant food, but made by you on the cheap



Ramble alert!!  I will add a caveat - I'm still not sold on when to put in the eggplant to make sure it cooks through without damaging the coconut milk.  The step for stir-frying the meat with the curry paste came from a coworker's Thai girlfriend, who told me not to overcook (or even boil) the coconut milk.  To avoid this, I once tried blanching the cut up eggplant by boiling it for 2 minutes and then dunking it in ice water, to cook it mostly through and avoid having to boil the whole stew for too long, damaging the coconut milk flavors.  However, this didn't work so well - the eggplant had very little taste when boiled in water.  Another recipe I saw called for boiling the eggplant in coconut milk, then adding it to the stew for the last few minutes.  This also seems like a decent plan, except it's the same damaging effect on the coconut milk.  So in the end, I would just recommend the original recipe posted above, and be careful not to bring the liquid to a rolling boil.  Just keep it at a simmer, or else you will both damage the sauce and make the meat tough.