Kohlrabi and Pea Risotto with Dill

I haven't done a food post in a long time! It's not just that for the past few months I've been cooking less, but I've also had less energy for photographing food and making blog posts. My return to food blogging isn't going to be too spectacular, but I am glad I'm getting back to it all the same. I feel ready...now that the wedding is over, and my time in Austria is coming to an end, and Georg is finally putting the finishing touches on his dissertation; I feel much more calm and capable.

I really like making risottos. I feel like if you just stir it enough, it'll always turn out right, and, once you know the recipe and basic technique, it's really fun to experiment with different ingredients. Since making risotto is a pretty old technique that no one really has a copyright on, I'll post the recipe here. For basic risotto for four, you need:

1 cup risotto (arborio) rice
a few tablespoons of olive oil
1 large shallot and a few cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 cup white wine
4 cups chicken stock, kept at a simmer
a couple tablespoons of butter
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

All you do is coat the bottom of a large skillet with olive oil, put it over medium heat, add the garlic and shallot, and saute until they're tender. Then, you add the rice, stirring it around in the oil so it gets coated with oil and shiny. After a minute or so, you add the white wine and stir semi-constantly until it's absorbed. Next, you ladle chicken stock, a cup at a time, into the rice and stir after each addition until the liquid is mostly absorbed. Once you've added the last cup of stock and it's about halfway absorbed, you can add whatever flavorings you like, like vegetables or herbs. Once the liquid is almost entirely absorbed, you add the butter and Parmesan. The rice should look really shiny and pretty and ready to eat, whatever that means.

Today I was lazy and flavored my risotto with frozen vegetables. I added to my risotto about a half box of frozen cream of kohlrabi and peas with dill. Since the vegetables were creamed, I omitted the butter at the end. Other successful risottos I have made include lemon risotto (flavored with lemon zest and lemon juice) and fresh corn risotto with thyme (see my July 2007 blog post about this). I have also seen risottos made with red wine, squash risottos, blue cheese and mushroom risottos, nut risottos...you can even make dessert risottos! The options really are limitless.