Cookin' up some grub: Monday Risotto

My favourite thing to cook, ever, is risotto. It's so yummy and easy and it's one of those meals - in my opinion - that you can chuck all your leftover veg, etc, in and it'll still be amazing. I call this a Monday risotto because all the prep to make it yummy is done the day before when you do your Sunday Roast.

Ingredients:

-250g Risotto Rice

-Glug of good white wine

- Glug of extra virgin olive oil

- I large onion

-1ltr Stock *

-3-4 roasted garlic cloves *

-Big handful chopped chicken thighs *

-A few rashers of bacon*

-Your favourite veg - in this case I used peppers and courgettes because that's what I had lying around.

- A good grating of fresh parmesan/good quality mature cheddar

Serves 2 on it's own, or four with bread and salad.

*All these items are the left overs from your Sunday roast. When you cook your chicken, cut slits in the breast skin and pop a fat garlic clove in each one. Then chuck a few more cloves in the pan. Sit the chicken on top of a quartered onion. Bung some olive oil all over the poor little pollo, rub in some pepper and mixed herbs and cover it with bacon until the last half an hour of cooking to stop the skin burning. This is all going to give you fucking bitching stock - especially if you carve the chicken in the roasting pan and you'll get little meaty flakes in your stock. Use half the juices for your gravy for the roast and save the rest for your risotto the next day - add a veggie stock cube and some hot water and you're set.

Chuck the roasted cloves from the chicken breasts in your mash for your roast (I did celeriac and potato mash - nom!) and save the ones from the pan for the risotto/

We normally just have a chicken between 2 people, which means there is lots of meat left over the next day, so we used breast meat for this, but thigh meat - which normally gets left - is actually tastier and takes to re-heating much better. If you're in the same boat as us, we'll take the chicken legs, potatoes, carrots and onions we had left from the roast and make a soup on the Tuesday. Or we'll chuck it in a curry.

1. Dice your onion and roasted garlic and cook until the onion starts to go soft in a large non-stick saucepan.

2. Add your risotto rice and fry with the onion for about a minute.

3. Add a good glug of wine, enough to cover the rice. Drink some of the wine - this is very important. When the rice has absorbed all the wine, slowly start adding your stock, about a ladleful at a time.

Yeah. Check out that bad boy.

4. While your rice is ricing, fry up your bacon. If you don't like salty food... well, either skip the bacon or cook something else because your stock is really salty as well! Depending on what veg you're using and how crunchy you want it to be, fry up your veg as well. I like my peppers quite crunchy, so I fried them off just to heat them through.

Pictured: Pan of awesome.

5. Keep adding your stock. The key to a creamy risotto is to keep on giving it a bloody good stir - this supposedly knocks the starch out of the rice and makes it nice and gooey.

6. When you've used about 2/3 of your stock, throw in your veg that you want to be nice and soft. Keep on adding your awesome stock.

7. Your rice is done when it's al dente and it looks creamy. If you need to use more stock than what you've got prepared, you can make up some more with just a stock cube.

8. Throw in your meat and any pre-cooked veg

9. Divide it up into bowls, and grate your cheese over the top. I know it's sacreligious to put cheddar in a risotto, but I really don't care, it's yummy. Just make sure it's the good quality, crumbly kind.

10. Eat the crap out of that mofo!

I ate the crap out of this mofo.

If it's just the two of you, you're going to be full. If there's four, get in some lovely ciabatta bread and serve with a nice juicy salad. My other favourite flavours are  prawn, pea and chorizo risotto, or mushrooms with red pesto (sub the white wine for red).

Do you plan your cooking so you can get more than one meal out of your ingredients? Do you mind a random cooking post now and then? How the hell do you take pictures of food while you're cooking without the lens steaming up?!