Made some risotto a while back. It was a lot easier than I’d expected, and nobody complained too hard.
So here’s the recipe, roughly:
- Vegetable oil (I didn’t have any olive handy, so I used basic vegetable oil)
- Chopped onion
- 2 cups rice (I used medium-grain sushi rice, some people insist upon Arborio; it will work with basic long-grain white rice too)
- 1/2 to 3/4 cup of white wine (I used Monkey Bay Cabernet Sauvignon Blanc; it wasn’t terribly expensive, but it wasn’t garbage either)
- 2 cups chicken stock (you can cheat with two cups of hot water and enough powder to make two cups)
- 1 can cream of mushroom soup
- Pepper
Throw some oil in the bottom of a good saucepan and fry the onion in it. Once it turns brown, add your rice and stir so it gets coated in the oil. Let it cook a little, then add some wine. The 1/2 or 3/4 cup above is a rough estimate; I poured in enough to more or less cover the rice.
Once the rice starts absorbing the wine (this will happen pretty quickly), add your chicken stock and mushroom soup. If you’re using powdered stock, throw the concentrate in with the rice, then add the water. Stir well to break up the soup, turn down the heat, throw a cover on the pot and walk away.
Come back every few minutes to give it a good stir. If you don’t do this, you end up with a brick of weird half-cooked rice covered in a puddle of liquid. Not delicious, and probably crunchy in the middle. So make sure you stir it periodically to spread the liquid around properly. Once everything is absorbed and you like the consistency and doneness of the rice, throw the lid back on and turn off the heat for a few minutes. Add some pepper before serving, and you’re good to go.
This batch was large enough to feed three adults with a bunch left over. I wound up eating it for lunch a few days that week. Unless you have a huge family, you’re probably best off cutting the rice and stock in half, which might just make it a bit creamier at the same time.
You can make this diabeetus-friendly by cutting the portion size. The ingredients above end up making roughly six cups of finished risotto. Eyeballing the ingredients, I figure each cup will weigh in around 45-50g of carbohydrate. If you serve a cup as a side with something like a steak and vegetable, you’re good to go. So you potentially have six meals worth of side dish here. In my family, that means the three of us have some that night and I get three lunches that week.
Total cost was maybe ten bucks, but you’ll probably have at least some of it just hanging around in your cupboards. The most expensive single component was the wine, and even after serving some with the meal we have half the bottle left. Call it $4 for the wine, anywhere from 50 cents to a buck for the rice, a buck for the soup, a few cents for the chicken stock (I use the Orrington Farms powdered stuff, but bullion would work just as well), half or a quarter of an onion, and a bit of pepper. Bear in mind this batch was probably also about twice what you’ll really need.