My love affair with risotto goes way back in 90s. It was my favourite dish I would order at an Italian restaurant, growing up. I love its creamy texture, which I found many years later when I started cooking it myself that the creamy texture actually came from the starch of the rice, not cream, and I got to enjoy it even more, guilt free, kind of , one of my favourite is creamy seafood risotto though.;-)

Whereas pasta is well-known and enjoyed by people all around the world, risotto, another traditional Italian dish, seems to be lost on the restaurant menu. The best risotto award from me still goes to the ones at a risotto cafe in Newtown in Sydney. You can try this specialist risotto place if you are interested in any imaginable risotto varieties possible. It is called, I think, Risotto Cafe, opposite to Enmore Theatre. I used to have pumpkin and fetta cheese risotto there and it was absolutely delicious. Another thing I liked was…I can’t remember it exactly, but it was something like a mix of Italian and Indian flavour.

I think risotto is a super-comforting and food for winter. It can be quite complicated and tiring to cook if you are going to follow the traditional technique of stirring the rice for an hour or so by adding a ladle of broth at a time. But you can get away with adding the whole broth at once. We live busy lives, don’t we? And I don’t think the risotto in restaurants is cooked in the conventional method, otherwise diners would starve waiting for their food.

You can make it with any choice of your favourite ingredients and the good thing about risotto is that it’s so easy to come up with great vegetarian ideas and it never disappoints you. I often make mushroom risotto, not with white mushrooms but with swiss brown or crimini mushrooms with white wine sauce and kalamata olives. It’s so good.

The other recipes I made recently are these:

<Risotto with sun-dried tomato and mushroom>

<Risotto with mussel and capers>

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