Wild Mushroom Risotto
- By Katie Roche
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- 26 Jun, 2019
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I've been looking forward to this recipe for WEEKS because I love mushrooms, and have fond memories of my dad cooking us up shaggy manes in butter by the skillet-full. Dan, however, hates mushrooms - "it's a texture issue", he says - and wanted nothing to do with this. If you enjoy being absolutely horrified, ask Dan to share with you his textural simile for mushrooms. You will enjoy the simile less than he enjoys the actual food. Anyway! My friend Hannah was in town, so after I finished up at work, she joined me on an ItemQuest for dried morels, which should have taken me to Amazon.com several days ago, but for lack of forethought, took me to Whole Foods. I knew they'd be my only hope around here of locating an expensive, dried mushroom. I only wish I lived somewhere weirder like Missoula, where some of our close friends live, where there is this indoor farmer's market at a senior center with lots of old crunchy people selling things like varieties of dried mushrooms, or soap made out of their goat's milk or whatever. But Columbia doesn't really have the Type of Person who would do things like this - i.e., ladies in their seventies who wear knitted miniskirts/old men in corduroy who recreationally play the cello and enjoy some pot every now and then. No, the old people around here are all golf, Lilly Pulitzer, and disdain. I've really become quite sidetracked.
Ok, so I hunted the Whole Foods and was directed to a wall of packaged dried mushrooms at exorbitant prices for miniscule amounts. "For the blog!", we say, and grit our teeth and go for it. That is all I purchased for this recipe at Whole Foods; I did the remainder of the ItemQuesting and The People's Grocery, the Almighty Kroger, for obvious cost reasons. While there, I picked up pancetta, some more Arborio rice which is specifically used for risotto-making and which costs twice as much as regular rice (*of course*), shallots, and chicken stock. I already had Parmesan cheese and saffron, as well as the white wine which I recently purchased as a four-pack of mini-bottles. This has come in quite handy because I do not particularly care for white wine for drinking, and now I don't have to get a giant bottle of it every time I need it for a recipe, leaving it mostly full in the fridge after I've used 1/2 a cup. Items assembled, ready to begin!
Ok, so I hunted the Whole Foods and was directed to a wall of packaged dried mushrooms at exorbitant prices for miniscule amounts. "For the blog!", we say, and grit our teeth and go for it. That is all I purchased for this recipe at Whole Foods; I did the remainder of the ItemQuesting and The People's Grocery, the Almighty Kroger, for obvious cost reasons. While there, I picked up pancetta, some more Arborio rice which is specifically used for risotto-making and which costs twice as much as regular rice (*of course*), shallots, and chicken stock. I already had Parmesan cheese and saffron, as well as the white wine which I recently purchased as a four-pack of mini-bottles. This has come in quite handy because I do not particularly care for white wine for drinking, and now I don't have to get a giant bottle of it every time I need it for a recipe, leaving it mostly full in the fridge after I've used 1/2 a cup. Items assembled, ready to begin!
The first step was rehydrating the morels for about 30 minutes in hot water. Kinda like making French press, but with mushrooms. This isn't super relevant, but I've actually never been a big fan of the French press method of coffee-making, mostly because it leaves a thin layer of coffee silt at the bottom of your cup every time. I don't often want to get into this, because people will tell me all proud of themselves that they like to make French press, and I don't want to one-up their pretentiousness but talking about how much I don't like it and prefer pour over. So consider this my shout into the universe, hoping that whoever reads it will know that I don't find French press impressive or refined, just a hopeless attempt to SEEM like those things without actually knowing that some coffees shouldn't be French pressed. Like, most of them. (Emily, since I know you're reading this, you make better French press than 99% of people, it was totally drinkable and not gross and that is An Accomplishment.)
Here you see me essentially making pour over with the mushroom liquid. She says to pour it through a coffee filter and discard solid bits, and I had the perfect way to accomplish this! I would like to submit that this mushroom broth had a PUNGENT smell that would have been off-putting were it not for the fact that I know I like mushrooms and had faith that it would turn into something great. So if you decide to make this, start soaking the mushrooms, and think to yourself, "How can something so expensive give off such an offensive odor?", don't worry. Sometimes expensive things just end up not smelling that nice. Like one ounce of dried mushrooms soaked in water. And hockey gear soaked in sweat.
This looks so much like actual coffee that it would make a great prank, if it weren't so outrageously expensive. I guess you could probably choose cheaper dried mushrooms to rehydrate. I'm filing this away for future use; I'm always on a quest to figure out how to passive aggressively communicate displeasure. It's a workplace skill in the south and I have definitely not mastered it.
While I was waiting on my mushroom soaking, I cleaned these off with a damp paper towel (you're not supposed to rinse mushrooms!) and sliced them up. For me: what dreams are made of. So many mushrooms. For Dan: Ew ew ew ew ew.
Here is the pancetta and shallots cooking in butter as the foundation. Kroger only sells pancetta in 4 oz packages, and the recipe calls for 2 oz, so what was one to do other than use all the pancetta anyway? Twice as much fancy bacon = twice as nice, obviously.
The rice gets added, stirred to coat with the butter, and then, It Begins. And by "it", I mean the 30 minutes of liquid-adding and stirring while the rice absorbs. For this, Ina has you use the mushroom liquid mixed with some chicken broth, that you keep set at a simmer on the stove next to the risotto pot.
Hannah captured me doing this in all of my post-gym glory. We had just completed the world's most agonizing cardio workout, involving entirely too many burpees and too many variations of them. That was Hannah's first introduction to my gym. She is, actually, the first friend of mine who ever got me to exercise with any consistency - we used to do Jillian Michaels workout videos in an empty dorm room in the basement of Alpha Hall at Grace College. We did the video where Jillian has you do circuits of 3 minutes of strength moves, 2 minutes of cardio, and 1 minute of abs and at the time, I GENUINELY believed that 2 straight minutes of cardio would kill me. In light of a workout with a burpee count in the HUNDREDS, let's all pause for a quick LOL.
The last thing that got added to this was a lil pinch of saffron. It kinda looks like the brittle hair of a villainous doll. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what saffron does for flavor; I read an article on it just now that said saffron "straddles sweet and savory effortlessly" but like, that doesn't really mean anything to me. It def imparts a *color* to dishes. I just use it when I'm supposed to, kind of like how I use bay leaves when I'm supposed to, though if I were guessing, saffron does more for a dish than bay leaves do. What IS the point of a bay leaf? I know the internet could give me this info; whether or not I take it to heart is another matter entirely.
All liquid absorbed and dish finished, here she is. It was really hard to take a good photo because it was steaming up everything.
You get the idea. Creamy rice dish. Lots of mushrooms. Having both recently returned from England, Hannah and I have become fond of the gin and tonic, which you see pictured here with the risotto. A strange pairing? Maybe. But I've never been *enthusiastic* about a cocktail before I met the g&t. I try to keep my consumption to one or two a week, but I infinitely prefer them to any other alcoholic beverages and find that there aren't really any situations when I wouldn't choose one over, say, wine even though wine would probably pair better with this dish. You know what else would pair better with this dish? Temperatures not in the 90s. That would be great.
Thoughts on this: This is DELICIOUS, and I cannot stress this enough, WORTH EVERY DOLLHAIR of expensive mushrooms for a nice meal. I'm not thinking it'd go in your weeknight rotation. I'm guessing that at least 25% of people who regularly read this blog share Dan's aversion to mushrooms and, given the choice, would take the Totino's pizza I bought him for $1.29 at Kroger over this beautiful dish that I lovingly stirred for 30 minutes straight. I do, however, have a small group of loyal taste-testers at my work, and each of them proclaimed the majesty of this as strongly as I did. It. Is. Fantastic. It is not, however, BASIC. This is a common thread running through this blog, but it bears repeating: any dish with a single ingredient costing more than $10 is not BASIC. Anyway, I've got to recommend that you make this. Do it. Do it for someone you're in love with who's not so sure about you. Do it for someone who IS sure about you, and make them more sure. They'll never know that Ina called it "basic", they'll just love you forever. For all the people who get more enjoyment out of me not liking the recipe, the anti-French-press rant was for you. I can't summon up any hate for this; it's everything we expect of Ina, except it's MORE than that now that, 2/3 of the way through this cookbook, my expectations of Ina have lowered somewhat. No entire bottles of wine on meat products, no excessive amounts of work, just one excessively expensive ingredient. How fabulous is that?
Thoughts on this: This is DELICIOUS, and I cannot stress this enough, WORTH EVERY DOLLHAIR of expensive mushrooms for a nice meal. I'm not thinking it'd go in your weeknight rotation. I'm guessing that at least 25% of people who regularly read this blog share Dan's aversion to mushrooms and, given the choice, would take the Totino's pizza I bought him for $1.29 at Kroger over this beautiful dish that I lovingly stirred for 30 minutes straight. I do, however, have a small group of loyal taste-testers at my work, and each of them proclaimed the majesty of this as strongly as I did. It. Is. Fantastic. It is not, however, BASIC. This is a common thread running through this blog, but it bears repeating: any dish with a single ingredient costing more than $10 is not BASIC. Anyway, I've got to recommend that you make this. Do it. Do it for someone you're in love with who's not so sure about you. Do it for someone who IS sure about you, and make them more sure. They'll never know that Ina called it "basic", they'll just love you forever. For all the people who get more enjoyment out of me not liking the recipe, the anti-French-press rant was for you. I can't summon up any hate for this; it's everything we expect of Ina, except it's MORE than that now that, 2/3 of the way through this cookbook, my expectations of Ina have lowered somewhat. No entire bottles of wine on meat products, no excessive amounts of work, just one excessively expensive ingredient. How fabulous is that?
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!