Hello! Have you missed me? I’ve missed you! Unfortunately, I’ve been rather overwhelmed with work and other commitments of late, which is not conducive to creative cooking (though I do make a mean pasta bake in these circumstances. Repeatedly.).
Anyway, I’m not out of the woods yet, but I did make a rather good risotto in my pressure cooker today, and since I am still excited by my pressure cooker, I decided it was about time I wrote down a recipe I made using one. Especially as the recipe was originally designed for a slow cooker, because I’m a bit perverse that way.
I wanted to call this recipe Weird Experimental Mushroom Risotto, because it uses oyster mushrooms, which I hadn’t cooked with before, and also a pressure cooker, which is a bit counter-intuitive, but Andrew seemed to think that if I called it Experimental Mushroom Risotto, people might get the wrong idea about just what sort of mushrooms were in there. So let me state up-front that this risotto is not at all psychedelic, a notion which had not, in fact, previously occurred to me, but which I now find mildly disappointing. Just on principle. Though probably psychedelic mushrooms wouldn’t taste that great in a risotto anyway. Or would they just make the whole risotto taste of purple and trombone music?
We will never know. At least, not by means of anything in my kitchen. This risotto tastes, to me, of brown. I am not a particularly synesthetic person, but there is something about porcini mushrooms that tastes beautifully, richly brown to me. I honestly can’t think of any other description of them that captures their flavour so well. If you can’t get porcini mushrooms (and if you are in Melbourne, let me recommend the Mediterranean Wholesaler in Sydney Rd, who sell them quite cheaply), any dried wild mushrooms will work here, too.
This risotto is as vegan or vegetarian as you choose to make it. I happen to have a freezer full of chicken and lamb stock right now (all this slow cooking invariably results in me making stock with the bones and the juices), so I used chicken stock. The slow-cooking book that this recipe is vaguely based on suggests having this as an accompaniment for steak, which I could sort of see working, but honestly, it’s pretty wonderful winter food all on its own.
And really, ridiculously fast in a pressure cooker (though I’m giving you methods for slow cooker and stovetop risotto, too).
Also, you get absolutely heaps of risotto from this recipe. Six servings would be my guess, and more if it is an accompaniment rather than a main dish.
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10 dried porcini or wild mushrooms 3/4 cup hot water 400 g of mixed mushrooms – I used 2 parts portobellos to 1 part oyster mushrooms, but choose whatever your favourites are 2 brown onions 2 tbsp butter 1 tbsp olive oil 2 cups arborio rice 1/2 cup red wine 3 cups of whatever good stock you have on hand, but please make it good stock. You may want to have another 1/2 cup on hand, in case the risotto is too dry later. 1/2 cup parmesan cheese
