White Asparagus Risotto

I'm a believer in complete, full meals on the weekends.  While we haven't quite converted to actually eating at the dinner table, weekend meals for us, are usually complete, carefully prepared, and sometimes are a joint venture between my husband and I. This recipe is one I picked up living in Italy, but I actually cooked it in the oven.  As our apartment here doesn't have a proper oven, I've actually taken to making this back on the stove, as traditionally is done in the Italian way. We ate this for our Sunday meal and it was a nice treat.  Traditionally prepared risotto takes time... you must be patient with the rice and you must continuously stir the mixture, coaxing the rice to absorb the liquid, slowly but surely.  White asparagus are a Holland treat, these are a bit out of season as asparagus are a spring vegetable, but since the season is a bit late and it's still cool-ish here, they seemed appropriate to buy at the market.  This recipe can also be prepared and is much brighter with green asparagus or spring peas.

Ingredients: 

1L vegetable or chicken broth

20-30 white asparagus stalks, cut into bit sized pieces (green asparagus works for this recipe too)

2 cups of uncooked risotto rice

1 small shallot minced

1-2 tablespoons of butter

2/3 cup (up to 1 cup) of white wine (that you would drink)

1 cup of freshly grated Parmesan

salt and black pepper to taste

1. Prepare the vegetable or chicken broth, after it comes to a boil, keep it warm on your lowest setting on the stove. 
2. Melt the butter in a large saute pan.  Once the butter begins to sizzle, add the shallots and salt (be careful here depending upon how much salt is in the broth) and freshly ground pepper.  Saute until the shallots are translucent or beginning to brown, but not burned (3-5 minutes). 
3. Add the chopped asparagus and saute until fork tender (I like mine with a little crunch still there, so this didn't take more than 5-7 minutes).  
4. Once asparagus are cooked to your liking, remove from the pan and set aside. 
5. Add the risotto into the same pan and allow the 'raw' rice to cook for 1-2 minutes (no extra butter/oil is needed here) on medium-low heat. 
6. Add one ladle full of broth and allow the risotto to soak up the broth slowly (keep cooking on medium-low heat).  Once the broth is mostly absorbed by the risotto (when you push the risotto in the pan, liquid should slowly cover the spot where you pushed the rice away from, there should be very little to no liquid that the rice is swimming in). 
7. Add the wine and cook in the same manner as described in step 6. 
8. Once the wine has mostly cooked away (similar to as described in Step 6), repeat with the remaining broth, 1 ladle full at a time until the risotto rice is cooked al dente. 
9. Add the cooked asparagus and Parmesan and stir together with the risotto rice.  Serve immediately with extra Parmesan and black pepper for garnish. 

This is one of my favorite weekend meals, it's comforting and it's a great way to use fresh spring vegetables (yes, even in end June! ...).  If you give it a try, let me know what you think! 

Savory and Sweet Crepes for dinner!

Tonight we had savory and sweet crepes for dinner and they were fabulous, definitely one of my favorite meals!  Crepes have been on my mind since last weekend... we've been trying the strawberries from the fresh market and they don't seem to last very long.  In that situation I generally cook them down and make a jam out of them (although I don't preserve the jam since I almost never cook enough to have much in the way of leftovers).  Well last weekend, we ate of the strawberries, so this weekend I decided I would buy a big bucket of Holland strawberries and make a jam.  I plan to use the extras for a yogurt topping during the week... yum! Since it was pretty late and the batter for the crepes needed to sit for 2 hours (gah!), we decided to have savory and sweet crepes for dinner instead of breakfast. Here are some photos.

(Note, crepe recipe used was from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, all prepared and cooked by my husband, can take no credit there!)

For the savory crepes I steamed some asparagus and then sauteed them in butter, salt and pepper and melted gruyere cheese over half of them.

White and Green Asparagus

Savory crepes

 For the sweet crepes, obviously we did the strawberry jam!  Yum!

Strawberry Jam

Sweet crepes

Here are some lovely peonies I purchased at the fresh market to brighten your day!