April 29: Asparagus Risotto

Paul has been working hard at perfecting risotto, and decided to make a new version based on Mario Batali's recipe for Risotto with Mushrooms and Vin Santo. Since yours truly is now living a non-mushroom lifestyle, we decided to make the same basic recipe but add in asparagus instead of mushrooms.

Paul chopped and cooked the onion in olive oil for about 10 minutes. Instead of adding the mushrooms as in the recipe, we just moved forward with cooking the rice.

So now that I'm re-reading the recipe, I think we used yellow onion instead of red onion. These look suspiciously like non-red onions. I will confirm with the source. Editor's Note: Yes, it was a white onion.

Here is the rice about midway through the process. You introduce the warm chicken/vegetable stock one ladle at a time, and continuously stir to incorporate which takes a while. This is where wine comes in to play. 

You only need 1 cup to add to the recipe at the end (we replaced the Vin Santo/sherry with white wine), so there's a little left over for you to enjoy in the meantime.

This looks like it's about...the start of glass two.

We decided in order to keep the asparagus crunchy and not mushy, that we should blanch it. We added the chopped asparagus (we used 1 bunch) to boiling water and cooked it for about 3 minutes. I pulled it out right when it started to turn bright green. You put it right into cold water to stop the cooking process. They retained that nice bright green color, which looked quite tasty.

Making good use of the skimmer.

Finally, the risotto was finished. We didn't end up using all the chicken stock -- Paul tastes the risotto periodically as we get close to the end to see how "done" it is. When it's still a little al dente, we consider it finished. 

At this point, we added the cup of white wine, and cooked it down until you could no longer smell the alcohol (about 2 minutes). We incorporated the asparagus, cheese and butter at the very end. 

Yum! Creamy risotto goodness.

And then of course, topped it with a little more freshly grated Parmesan. 

Served alongside a green salad, it's pretty good. Boys got hungry late-night, so you may either need a larger serving or perhaps the inclusion of some meats.

I really liked this version. While I am truly sad about my mushroom boycott, I think a nice flavorful vegetable like asparagus also works great in this instance. Paul is very excited to try other ingredients, now that he has figured out risotto. I definitely don't mind being the guinea pig.