Next: chocolate peanut butter munchies
Back to main
pumpkin leek risotto with chili and cilantro
You can tell it’s autumn now at the farmer’s market. Rows of pumpkins and winter squash, apples and cider (and cider donuts!). Seeing the pumpkins and leeks at one of the booths, made me yearn to make pumpkin risotto. I think it’s a shame that pumpkins disappear completely after Halloween, so I have to stock up now. Fortunately, once diced, pumpkin freezes well so I can make this dish again and again so long as I remember to store some away.
This dish is from a fun little cookbook, Mediterranean Hot: Spicy Recipes from Southern Italy, Greece, Turkey & North Africa that I picked up several years ago in Texas. Whenever I cook from this book I think of my friends Matt and Sarah who got married while she was still in college and right after he’d graduated. They were quite poor and neither knew how to cook. They found this book at Half Price Books and in their first year of marriage they worked their way through all of the recipes.
One night soon after making this discovery, they invited me over for dinner. They rolled out dish after scrumptious dish. And we ate and ate and ate until I was quite stuffed. Sarah told me that this book was fast becoming their primary form of entertainment (they had no television). They’d spend an entire evening cooking; making one dish, eating it, then preparing another and eating that. So a meal could stretch out and fill up the evening. I was lucky enough to have been invited to several of these marathon meals and always left feeling very full and happy.
Eventually I had to go out and buy the cookbook for myself. And when I moved away, my sister later acquired her own copy as well. My book is well stained and opens quite naturally to the page with this delicious, spicy risotto, always the sign of a well-loved recipe.
Cooking and eating together has always been a strong glue that joins me with my friends. And this book is full of dishes from the Mediterranean world, where hospitality is such a emphasized virtue, that beg to be shared with large groups of people.
Serve this risotto with a large green salad and it’s a whole meal, perfect for a cool autumn night.
Ingredients:
- 3 leeks, white part and 1 inch of green part, very thinly sliced and well washed
1/3 cup olive oil
3-5 teaspoons Aleppo pepper, or 2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
2 large cloves of garlic, minced (optional, I leave out garlic from recipes because it’s a migraine trigger for me)
1-1/2 pounds pumpkin or winter squash, peeled and seeded and cut into 1/3 inch cubes
1/2 cup dry, white wine
3 cups defatted chicken stock or more as needed
1-1/2 cups arborio rice
2/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup chopped cilantro
Directions:
In a large skillet or saute pan, saute the leeks in olive oil for 6 to 8 minutes until translucent. Add pepper, garlic and pumpkin. Saute 5 to 10 minutes, until any liquid has evaporated. Add wine and stir. Add 1/2 cup water and reduce heat. Let simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, until pumpkin is tender. (You can prepare the vegetables up to this point several hours in advance.)
Twenty minutes before serving, bring stock to gentle boil in medium saucepan. Keep warm. Heat the pumpkin mixture and, as it starts to boil, add the rice, stirring a few times with a wooden spoon to coat rice with oil.
Add about 1/2 cup of boiling stock and simmer, stirring constantly, adding more stock as liquid is absorbed by rice.
After about 15 minutes, taste the rice. It should be cooked but al dente. Season with salt and black pepper. Remove from heat and stir in the cheese.
Sprinkle with cilantro and serve.
(Serves 4-6. Even though the book says to eat immediately and reheated risotto is something of a culinary faux pas, I like eating this risotto as leftovers the next day so having extra doesn’t bother me.)
COMMENTS
-->Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Comments are being moderated. After you submit your comment it could take up to a couple hours, but usually only a few minutes, before it will appear. Thank you for your patience. If you have any questions, you may contact Domenico Bettinelli.