The Cluttered Pantry

Everyone needs an outlet for the kinds of stress that family and small business and home-running brings.  For me it’s a small garden that, here in Chicago, I get a few months of great pleasure and relaxation from, and cooking.

Cooking works on so many levels.  It feeds (sorry for the pun) my need to keep my family healthy and their tummies full.  Cooking let’s me take, much needed ,deep breaths and clear my mind of all of those to-do lists, plans, and worries, as well as  a bad habit of trying to plan for the future. And literally forces me to stay in the here and now of stirring a pot or chopping a vegetable.

Even shooting photos of some of that food for this blog gives me time to focus (sorry again for the pun) on a style of photography that is so different from the lifestyle, event, and nature images that I generally shoot for corporate clients.

You don’t have to read many of the non cooking posts on our site to figure out that our lives are a bit hectic.  We run our own digital media agency, we have a 115 year old house that is a never ending topsy turvy project, the two dogs and three cats think they are human (or at least prefer to be treated as such), and of course, there are the three children…

A favorite dish when I most need some time in my head is Risotto.  Nothing is more calming than standing over my big Garland stove and stirring a large casserole bubbling with risotto and garlic broth with one hand and sipping a glass of wine with the other.  It’s slow, it’s simple, and at some point it reaches this zen moment where after all that stirring the broth just absorbs into the arborio rice and you feel the thickness resist against your wooden spoon and you just know….dinner is ready.

The “method” I use is, I think, pretty basic.  I vary the broth (Vegetable, Chicken, Garlic Stock) and I generally switch out fresh vegetables based on what looked the best to me at the produce shop, but portabello mushrooms and asparagus are always a good option.

Garlic Stock is my favorite way to go (If you haven’t tried it, seriously it takes almost no time to make and is useful in so many dishes that you’ll wonder why you didn’t always have it in your fridge or freezer. I’ll post the “recipe” in the comments section).

Ingredients:

• 1 medium onion – chop it as finely as you can
• 3 Tbsp. Olive Oil
• 40 – 45 oz og broth or stock (have it warming on the stove)
• 1lb Arborio Rice (I use a brand called Bellino – which seems to be more of a quick cooking grain)
• 3 to 6 oz of grated parmesan cheese
• spices to taste (i use pepper and salt of course but other spices depending on the vegetables)

Method:

I use the large Le Creuset Casserole (it’s the perfect depth- if you use too deep a pot it just doesn’t come out the same). Just heat the oil and sauté the onions until they are brown.  Add the dry rice and stir to coat it with the oil and then add about 1/2 the stock, and start stirring.  Just stir slowly and move the liquid around.  Keep the heat so that it stays at a slow boil and add a bit of the remaining stock a cup or so at a time. Just keep stirring and you’ll see that the broth will fully absorb into the grains.  Once that happens stir in the Parmesan and spices you want to add and then continue to stir until the rice is tender (same sort of Al Dente bite as pasta seems about right to me.)

I usually transfer the rice to a large serving bowl, add a bit more oil to my pan and then sauté the vegetables, or if I am using Asparagas I sauté and then add a bit more stock and then cover the pan so that they steam a bit.  Then I just toss it all back together.

One pan, one serving bowl, one or two glasses of wine while cooking…always leaves me calm and ready to take on a dinner table that right now includes trying to get calories and good food into; one child who refuses a sippy lid on her cup but also can’t keep from knocking her drink over at least twice each meal; another child who is way too busy telling you everything she learned today to actually put any food in her mouth.

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