If you haven’t figured it out by now, there’s a bit of a lag between when I make these recipes and when I actually post about them. It helps me to reread the recipe to figure out what I’m doing in a lot of these photos. While rereading the recipe for 12-28: Tri-Color Risotto, I realized I didn’t even make it right.
That’s my first explanation for what happened here. My second is that I don’t like cooking rice in a pan–I’m spoiled by rice cookers.
My third is that this isn’t risotto–it’s pilaf.
Read directions carefully. I didn’t.
Ingredients. Subbed LF sour cream for whipping cream. It’ll mess with the consistency some, but this wasn’t ever going to be real risotto anyway, so we’ll go with it.
Veggies chopped for this recipe and 8-25: Stir-Fried Beef. I often try to do a few of these recipes at a time to burn them off faster–sometimes I can pull it off, and sometimes I can’t.
Blanching the cut peppers. Get ready–things are about to go wrong.
Reread the recipe above–does it tell you to mix the peppers in with the onions in the pan?
Spoiler alert: it does not.
Making the “beef” broth.
This should not have the peppers in it. I mean, you CAN do that. But you shouldn’t. Why not?
1. They didn’t tell you to.
2. If you really want to mix your peppers into your risotto, sauté them first, hold them to the side, and then add them back in at the end. Don’t try to cook the rice with the peppers in there–your rice won’t absorb the liquid properly.
Steaming my rice. I put the towel over it (learned it from a former colleague in another career/city/life) to help it steam better. Don’t pull the lid until it’s finished!
(the trick is knowing when it’s finished…which is a trick I’m still learning.)
It’s tri-color…but not the way it was supposed to be. The rice was undercooked due to my improper addition of the peppers, and the saffron was totally lost under the intense pepper flavor. Which is unfortunate, because saffron isn’t cheap.
This isn’t proper risotto method either–Simply Delicious tries to give you easier ways to do it (check out 12-16: Risotto with Pastrami or 12-18: Mushroom Risotto for other examples), but if you want good risotto, do it right.
Portioned out for #mealprepsunday. Hey, it’s expensive/fattening to eat out for lunch every day. Even if the “risotto” is janky, we’ll still eat it.
Plated with 8-25: Stir-Fried Beef, which was the second component to those meal-preps I showed above. It wasn’t going to be great even if I had executed it as intended (this ISN’T true risotto), but it might have been slightly better.
Grade: C
