A recipe for pantry and freezer risotto

With kale, mushrooms and sausage, oh my

My sister, she of The Big Bowl Salad™, goes through food phases. Last winter, risotto was one of them, and who can blame her? We had so much risotto—read, not too much—that I think because of that I’d assumed I’d made, or she’d made for me, the risotto in Fave Recipes before. I was, after checking the archives, apparently wrong; her love of BA’s Best had been what I’d been consuming.

Part of the non-recipes listed in the front of the cookbook, I decided to make this basic risotto recipe because we had arrived at an empty, cold house with very little food in it, magically had all the ingredients already, and a few of them were homemade, most notably, the chicken broth. (Was the frozen kale possibly intended to be used in stock? Maybe… but we ate it.) That broth was apparently key, given the head note on this one:

I’d been planning to just microwave the chicken stock enough to release it from its container and dump it, still mostly frozen, in with the rice, like the lazy person I am, but apparently that is very much not the way to do things. Given how obsessive people are about making risotto right, I decided to actually follow the instructions and bring the broth to a simmer first, while getting the onions and rice going. This recipe also suggests the same slow addition of liquids technique that Bon Appétit uses. Did I add the stock kind of heavily each time? Perhaps. But the generally methodical technique really works (you heard it here first).

Meanwhile, I cut up the frozen kale, curious what would happen there, as well as my mushrooms, and sausage. I read recently that you don’t need to carefully wipe each mushroom and you can just rinse them off and guess what? I’m happy to switch my technique over to something easier, and having done it this time, I’m feeling dumb I spent so long carefully cleaning when I could have been more willy-nilly. Next, I seared the sausage, and then added the mushrooms to the cast iron with a little more oil and eventually salt and pepper. Once that had all gotten color, I added the frozen kale—which obviously let out tonnnns of water, so proceed with care (stuff got smokey). That meant I continued adding oil back to it, and lots of salt. My aforementioned sister recently started decanting our olive oil into a smaller squeeze bottle, and even though that’s a kind of annoying step, I have to say, it’s highly preferable to just messily glugging out of the massive bottle of the stuff we buy.

I may have slightly over-browned the meat and mushrooms, but the whole thing was easy, despite my annoyance about the broth adding. I’d always had this idea that risotto took forever, but the broth really does absorb quickly. Was it BA’s Best? No but it was mine.

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