The Risotto

We tried new things today.

First of all, there was the ridiculously easy mushroom risotto.

Boyfriend wasn't very excited about this one. It's a dish that has 'mushroom' in it, and mushrooms are his mortal enemies. But I know the secret to sneaking them past his defences, since he told me a while back.

We used the tupperware chopper for all the chopping necessary, which made an easy recipe even easier. First, the onions with the butter. We avoided the garlic crushing/chopping by using garlic grains, which means we didn't have to buy a whole bulb only to use two cloves of it and have the rest go mouldy. Dried thyme is hard to do cheaper, so we bought the cheapest we could find. It turns out, buying it loose in a bag rather than in a pot halves the price. We were too lazy to search for risotto rice, and amazon promised it would be costly, but we had pudding rice, which the internet said we could use and which is a lot cheaper and thus less painful when we screw up. We didn't have chicken stock cubes, so we used beef stock. We're no drinkers, so we used more stock instead of wine. We just chucked in about a litre of stock with the unboiled rice mixture and shoved it in the oven. Ikea pots are oven-friendly that way.

Next, the mushrooms to be added. No portobello mushrooms exist in the land of affordable foodstuffs which we call our local supermarket, so we went with fresh button mushrooms. There were frozen ones available, which were cheaper, but... Well... We were sort of too hungry to wait for them to defrost.We cleaned the fresh ones and then threw them in the chopper with a glug of cream, as instructed. We were meant to chop them to a paste, but Boyfriend is the resident chopper and he was gleefully turning and turning and turning and... Well, there were no chunks to speak of in the resulting sauce.

We took the baked pot from the oven, added the sauce and let the remaining heat cook the mushroom mix. Ten minutes later, we were eating. Both me and Boyfriend loved it, even though neither of us have any idea what risotto is supposed to taste like. It looked like the picture did and tasted 'mushroomy', which was the main description of the video recipe.

We paid about 15 euros for the ingredients, and it makes at least four generous servings, though the spices will take us a while further and we didn't use the full half-pound of butter. We basically have to buy more mushrooms and onions if we want more risotto.