Green Risotto

Wednesday November 28

Despite its being the end of November, we still have an amazing range of greens in our garden, presumably due to global warming (thanks, George W. Bush!). So we are using them as much as we can, as long as we can. Again, the Herbfarm Cookbook provided an interesting and unusual recipe, a risotto using exactly what we had most of: sorrel, arugula, parsley and chives.

Here's the recipe. It also offers lots of ideas on other herbs to substitute.

Holt is the risotto master around here, and though he follows almost none of the rules (has used non-Arborio rice, added cold or even frozen broth, and finds risotto to take far longer than they ever say it does), his results are always great. In this case, he calculated that adding the herbs at the very last minute, as the recipe states, would give you more of a risotto salad than a true risotto, especially since we were also using some tiny but tougher turnip greens, and had no basil (though we could have thrown in a cube or two of our own pesto). We left it out instead, and did it Holt's way, adding the chopped turnip greens just after the sautéed green onion, and the other herbs later but still while adding the broth (in this case, our own duck broth, which is what we had in the freezer). The result was lovably tender, and probably no less tasty than the original.