My dad brought by some rhubarb from his garden the other day. They are the biggest and longest rhubarb stalks I have ever seen. As well as standard sweet rhubarb dishes, I wanted to use some to make something savoury, and so decided to try a risotto. It was cool and rainy and so a perfect risotto day, too. While assembling it, the rhubarb component was quite tart, but it balanced out with lots of ginger, carrots and some honey, I wanted the risotto itself to be quite creamy so I cooked it mostly with milk. Grabbing something from the fridge though, I noticed a lonely log of goat's cheese on the shelf and thought that would pair quite well, so it went in too.
Ingredients:
1-2 red onions, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 head of garlic, sliced
2 carrots, diced
2 long sticks of rhubarb, diced
3 inches of ginger, diced
2 tsp honey
2-3 tsp sage
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 - 2 c arborio rice
2-3 c milk
1-2 c water
Lots of pepper
1/4 c goat's cheese
Toasted walnuts to top
1) In a deep sauté pan, heat the olive oil. Add onions , garlic and ginger and cook until fragrant. Add other ingredients and cook on medium heat until carrot and rhubarb are tender.
2) In a saucepan, heat the olive oil. Add rice and cook until rice becomes translucent but do NOT brown. Add 1 c water and cook, stirring almost constantly, until mostly absorbed. Add about half the milk and cook, stirring still, until almost absorbed. Add the rest of the milk and cook further (20-25 minutes in total, roughly). If when this has been absorbed the rice is still a little under done, add the last of the water. Add pepper and goat's cheese and stir until melted.
3) Serve rice topped with rhubarb mix and toasted walnut halves.
This was super tasty! The veg was a little softer than I would have liked because poor planning meant I didn't have all the ingredients at the start and so ended up cooking it for a little longer than intended. Other than that though, I would not change anything. We did discover though that Little Bit doesn't eat goat's cheese. Oh well. He had the veg and some frozen blueberries instead.