Eating Dirt

A Fun Thing to Do With Leftover Risotto

"Leftover risotto?" you ask, "why would I ever have that?"

For starters, risotto is an easy last minute dinner, requiring little thought, that is limitlessly flexible. It is the perfect solution to an overabundance of leeks or onions, freezer space that needs to be reclaimed from bags of frozen shrimp or a drawer full of green things preventing the fridge from closing. Many vegetables can be simply tossed into the pot as it cooks: asparagus, chard, spinach, squash. Even meat and especially seafood cook up with the toss-in treatment, when thawed and cut into smallish pieces. On special occasions, I sauté the meat or fish first, but in a pinch I just drop it in. And did I mention, risotto has the smell of fresh butterfly milk? Well, it does.

In addition, preparing a delicious risotto requires no timer, no exact amount of anything, and best of all, no skills whatsoever. All that aside, I now know that in addition to tomorrow's lunch, the extra risotto left after dinner can be fried up, into little balls, with mozzarella in the middle. Just right for a fancy weekend afternoon snack accompanimenied by a small glass of dry white wine, like the Canal House ladies suggest. Or dinner for the kids: even mine like these croquettes enough to eat them with some sausage and a few forced greens on the side.

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Risotto Croquettes or Supplì Al Telefono (adapted from Canal House Cooking v7):
(Click here for printable recipe cards)

Delicious, fun to eat and fun to make, if you have a fry-Daddy husband or wife. Rope him or her in for a special treat! You'll need a frying or candying thermometer.

1 cup cold risotto (leftover, please. See the recipe for easy risotto below)
2 eggs
1/4 cup parmaigian-reggiano
10 or so 1/2 inch cubes of mozzarella
1/3 cup flour
1 cup panko or fine dried bread crumbs
vegetable oil
salt

This recipe doubles easily...make it with one cup of risotto the first time, then adjust as needed in the future. There is nothing sadder than fried goods having to go into the fridge.

Mix together the risotto, 1 egg and parm in a bowl. Wet your hands with cold water, then put about 1 Tablespoon of the risotto mixture in your palm, flatten it and put a mozzarella cube in the middle. Form the rice into a ball around the cheese, and set it on a tray.

Put the flour, remaining egg, and panko in separate bowls. Beat the eggs with a little water. Roll each ball in flour, then in egg, then in panko. Arrange them on the tray again. Now you can refrigerate them until you are ready to fry.

Fill a heavy, large skillet with 2 inches of oil (that's 2 inches deep). Heat over medium-high heat to a temperature of 350˚. Be careful, because as my Mother says, "You might burn the house down!" Fry the supply in the oil, until golden brown all the way around. Let them cool on a wire rack, salt and enjoy!

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Super Easy Last Minute Risotto (adapted from Canal House Cooking v7):
(Click here for printable recipe cards)

2-4 Tablespoons butter
1 small onion, or some leeks, or some shallots, finely chopped
1 cup arborio rice (or double the recipe if you have a family of 4 and want leftovers)
4 or so cups of stock (I like chicken, you can water it down or sub in whatever)
1/2 cup or so parmesan-reggiano
salt and pepper to taste

Bring the stock to a gentle simmer in a small pot on the stove, reduce it to low and keep it hot.

Melt the butter in a second, slightly larger pan. Add the onion and 1/4 teaspoon salt and soften on medium-low heat, for about 8 minutes. Add the rice, stir it until it is well coated with the butter, and then add a ladle full of the hot stock. Stir, then wait until the rice pot is close to dry, and add another ladle full.

Continue like this until the rice is as soft as you like - usually twenty minutes or so. Taste and season with salt and pepper as needed.

Spoon onto a plate, sprinkle with parmesan and top with meat, fish, or whatever your main course is, if there is one. Serve with a salad or sautéed greens on the side.

Polenta and Blood Orange Sorbet

Polenta is a rather intensive affair, when cooked at home from dry crunchy grit. The traditional recipe calls for near continuous stirring, for half an hour to fourty-five minutes. Deborah Madison offers a more modern walk-away version, but it needs to sit in a double boiler for an hour and a half, after two separate pots of water are brought to a boil, one at a time, on top of each other, all before the grit even comes into play. At my house, a cooking time that long and with that many steps could only be accomplished with very well orchestrated planning, which is not my forte.

So I chose the stir a lot method. I figured I'd be standing right by the stove, prepping veggies for the accompanying ragu, so it wouldn't be a big deal. And it wasn't. Except that I failed to notice what else was going on in the kitchen, most notably the scissors in my daughter's hand and the hair on the floor.  

Luckily it wasn't mine. I am too old for a mullet. But on a rather perky soon to be five year old, the look can be somewhat fetching. Jon Bon Jovi did always have a sort of preschooler-esque discipline about him, and when I found her in the living room, sitting on the sofa with the orange sky gathering through the window behind her, I could see the resemblance. 

Perhaps devoting all my attention to cooking dinner under the guise of taking care of my family is a bit misguided, but the polenta was pretty good. Excellent in fact. The ragu was passable. And the blood orange sorbet? Fabulous.

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Traditional Polenta (adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone):

If you're making this with the ragu, you'll want to start the pancetta step of the ragu before the polenta.

2 cups course cornmeal

1 1/2 teaspoons salt or to taste

2 to 6 Tablespoons butter

Bring six cups of water to a boil in a large, heavy saucepan. Add the salt and then the cornmeal in a steady stream, stirring constantly with a whisk to avoid lumps and having the meal seize up within the first few minutes. Lower the heat and cook, stirring more or less constantly for 30 to 45 minutes. If the polenta seizes up into a hard mass, add small increments of boiling water while it cooks, to smooth it out. When done, taste for salt and then stir in butter. Serve immediately or keep it warm over boiling water (in a double boiler) until ready to serve.

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Provencal Vegetable Ragout (adapted from Cooking Fresh from the Bay Area):

1/2 pound pancetta, cut into one inch pieces

1 leek, sliced thinly into rings

1-3 sprigs thyme

1 cup chicken stock

1 quart water

8 to 10 baby carrots, scrubbed (sliced into baby sized pieces if you use larger carrots)

3 spring onions, sliced (spring onions are pretty small, about the size of a leek)

1/2 cup chanterelles or other forest mushroom (rehydrated dry ones work fine)

2 cups freshly hulled peas or shelled and peeled fava beans I'm sure frozen would be OK)

1 bunch asparagus, rinsed and trimmed

2 Tablespoons butter

Heat a small saucepan over medium heat. Add the pancetta and brown, for about 5 minutes. Add the leek and thyme and cook until the leek starts to soften. Add the chicken stock and water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer uncovered for an hour or so.

When the pancetta is tender and there is about one cup of liquid remaining (after about an hour), remove the thyme and transfer the mixture to a saucepan large enough to hold all the vegetables. 

Bring the heat up to medium, add the carrots, onions and mushrooms to the pancetta-leek mixture. Cover and cook for about four minutes (longer if you used older carrots). Add the peas, cover again and cook for two minutes. Add the asparagus and butter and cook for four more minutes, or until the asparagus and carrots are tender. Be careful not to let the liquid evaporate completely, you may need to add a little bit of water. When the ragout is finished, there should be only a small amount of liquid coating the vegetables.

Taste and salt, if necessary. Serve over polenta.

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Blood Orange Sorbet (adapted from Chez Panisse Cooking):

This is one of my favorite recipes. Ever. I've been making it yearly since my husband and I were given a fancy juicer by one of our wedding guests. Maybe since even before that, using a hand juicer, after my parents gave us an ice cream maker. Its a little late in the season this year for blood oranges, but if you, like me, buy them and then spend weeks agonizing over the right time to make sorbet, they will keep fine in a plastic bag in the fridge. 

12 to 16 blood oranges, to yield 1 quart juice

grated peel of two of the oranges

1 cup sugar

Grate the peel of two of the oranges and set it aside. Juice the oranges and strain through a fine-mesh sieve (this is a great job for little kids, have them rub a spatula along the bottom of the sieve to help the juice drain through). Place the juice in a pan or bowl and add the sugar and the peel. Stir the mixture until the sugar is entirely dissolved (another good preschooler job). Chill the mixture in the refrigerator, then freeze in an ice cream maker. Serve the day it is made.

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Slimy Leek, Pea and Chicken Pasta

 

Sometimes we turn to last minute alternatives.

The kids and I spent the morning visiting the doctor,  investigating my son's complaints of tummy aches and other intestinal issues that have been carrying on for the last few weeks.  I figured his GI problems were due to the fourteen days of antibiotic he'd ingested to treat an ear infection back at the beginning of the month, in addition to the seven days of antibiotic he'd taken for a staph infection about a month before the ear thing. But when his eyes got goopy and he started barking like a seal I figured I should take him in.  

"Hrm..." the doctor said "his tummy feels fine, but he has a really big ear infection".

Well imagine my surprise that he'd been able to foster a new, nasty infection so quickly in the same ear. But, it turns out, its the same old infection, just bigger and badder, and now identified as antibiotic resistant.  So he gets another fourteen days of a new antibiotic.  And when the doctor confirmed my suspicions that the stomach problems were probably a result of the antibiotics, she asked me about my son's diet.

"Gus is kind of like a bat.  He eats mostly fruit." I told her.  And she thought that was fine, but recommended that he (which of course means we) start eating lots of "white, starchy things".  "Don't feed him any whole grains", she said.  And with that she was gone, leaving me with a blindingly white prescription flapping in my hand and two insane children groveling at my feet, shredding the exam table paper and rubbing themselves all over the clinic floor.  

Yikes.  No whole grains?  Thats like, all we eat.  Aside from fruit and vegetables. Perhaps that should clue me in to why my son has such active bowels.  But I took it in stride and realized we had a wonderful opportunity to have white, processed grain pasta with our scheduled dinner. 

Except that my kids wouldn't eat it.  In fact, I wouldn't even eat it.  When the recipe asked me to simmer the leeks in chicken broth I got a little nervous, and in hindsight I wish I'd gone with my gut and sauteed them instead.  Even my husband, who actually ate the pasta, was surprised that I hadn't.  He thinks that will fix any problems, but I'm not planning to test his theory.  This one won't make it into my three star and above archive - which, by the way, I'm planning to put up sometime soon, in printable 4x6 notecard format - get your recipe boxes ready.

So instead, we had a cheese plate and toast.  Havarti and Cheddar from Say Cheese, where we'd stopped after the doctor, luckily. Thanks guys, for saving the day!

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Creamy Leek, Pea, and Chicken Pasta (adapted from Sunset Magazine, April 2010):

8 oz spaghetti or other pasta

1 cup shelled peas

1 bunch leeks, sliced (about a cup)

1 green garlic, sliced

1 cup chicken broth

1 cup coarsely shredded chicken

1 cup cottage cheese

salt & pepper (about a teaspoon of each)

Cook the pasta in salted water, following package directions and adding the peas to the pot for the last few minutes. Drain and put it in a large serving bowl. Meanwhile, bring the chicken broth to a boil and cook the leeks and garlic in it.  When the leeks are soft, add the chicken and pour over the pasta.  Stir in the cottage cheese and salt and pepper.

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