Mushroom Spinach Risotto (or Arugula If You'd Like)

A lightly tweaked recipe, for when you'd like to eat something special at home...

This month’s newsletter could have easily turned into “20 Things to Do With Cabbage” after a grocery delivery debacle last week involved ordering a single red cabbage for one dish, and receiving six. Luckily for you… that will not be the subject of this newsletter after all, because I was able to distribute the extra cabbage to my building’s super, a friend who gave it to a coworker, and my pal Books on GIF. I do have a partial cabbage left and probably still need to figure out 20 things to do with it, as this is one vegetable that always seems to multiply, but I am very relieved not to have 24 pounds of it sitting in my tiny fridge right now. So… you get a risotto recipe!

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RECIPE: Mushroom Spinach Risotto

Summer cooking laziness is in full swing on my end, but I recently slightly reworked a recipe I previously posted on the blog for a mushroom risotto. The previous incarnation used arugula and some Riesling for flavor. This time, I swapped in spinach, because that’s what we had on hand, and some Sauvignon Blanc. Very minor changes—just as delicious, and yes, though you will end up standing over a stove to cook it, it really isn’t that horribly time consuming. So I’m re-upping the recipe for you, my readers, in hopes that it gives you an opportunity to cook something nice for yourselves at home.

Ingredients

Serves about 2 to 3

1 cup Arborio rice

1.5 tablespoons butter, unsalted

1/2 tablespoon olive oil

1 to 2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 yellow/white onion, diced

3 and 1/4 cup vegetable stock

2 tbsp white wine (optional) — I have used both Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Couple of handfuls of spinach (arugula is also a good option)

3/4 to 1 cup chopped mushrooms (cremini is my preference, but white would work)

Instructions

1. Bring the vegetable stock to a boil, then turn off the heat and keep the stock covered.

2. Add butter and oil to a wide, deep pan on medium heat. Then add the onions, followed by garlic and cook until the onions are translucent. Add rice and mix everything together. Cook the rice until the edge of the grain turns translucent.

3. Add a cup of stock, along with the two tablespoons of wine if using it—let the mixture come to a boil as you stir, then reduce the heat.

4. Allow the mixture to simmer, stirring often. Then add another cup of stock once most of the liquid in the pan is absorbed. Keep stirring. As you stir, keep adding the remaining 1 1/4 cup of stock as the liquid in the pan with the rice gets absorbed.

5. The risotto should be taking on a bit of a soft and creamy texture, but it shouldn't be completely mushy. Add the mushrooms to the mix while there's still some liquid in the pan, in the final minute or two before turning off the heat. Once the liquid is mostly absorbed, turn off the heat, and add the spinach (or arugula) and parmesan. Stir thoroughly and you'll see the greens wilt. Salt and pepper to taste, and serve!

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Food for Thought

I have a couple of varieties of miso in my fridge and we also bought a jar of kimchi on one of our first real grocery store trips in a while some time ago. (Grocery deliveries will remain a regular thing, even with the risk of surplus cabbage, for the near future, but we do make strategic trips to the store from time to time.) So in an attempt to actually use ingredients, I decided to try making Miso Glazed Chicken Wings (via Megan Keno on Simply Recipes) and this Kimchi Fried Rice from Healthy Nibbles, and… oh my god, it was all so delicious and super easy to make. I didn’t really alter much of anything while cooking these things, so I’m merely offering them to you in case you’re seeking inspiration.

When we’re not actually planning out cooked meals, we’ve been eating a lot of cold cuts and cheeses and fruits, picnic style, especially for weekend lunches—but even some weeknight dinners. I suspect we’re not alone, as evidenced by The Art of the Summer Dinner (Helen Rosner, The New Yorker).

I made my first chapatis (or rotis) via instructions from my mom on a WhatsApp video call a few months ago. They turned out very wobbly looking, but were tasty. A second batch I made last month looked a little worse, to be honest, though I still froze them for eating later. And then I came across How to Extract a Mother’s Rogan Josh Recipe Over Zoom (Priyanka Mattoo, also via The New Yorker), and boy… was it relatable. Maybe some of you are having some similar experiences during our pandemic times?

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Bites of Culture

What I’m Watching:

My current thing is binging Jane the Virgin as part of a “get through things on my Netflix queue” kick. I didn’t watch the show when it was first on the air and I blame that on my usual complaint that there’s too much content to stay on top of. But while I paused partway through season one a couple of months ago, I’m on the verge of finishing season two after restarting the show recently, and so far, I’m a big fan of the way relationships between female characters are portrayed and I also really love Rogelio.

Speaking of catching up on old TV, we’re watching a lot of Psych, which is the perfect lighthearted escapism needed this year.

The Marvel rewatch continues… Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is up next.

But we’re still making room for other movies: Always Be My Maybe and John Wick wound up being a perfect inadvertent Keanu-thon last Saturday (the former made me miss San Francisco, the latter was new to me and… kind of beautiful to watch even if the exposition made me laugh a lot?) And then we watched Last Black Man in San Francisco (which also made me miss that city), which is a touch more melancholy.

What I’m Reading:

I am really truly back into the swing of reading after struggling with it for the first couple of months during this pandemic. Out of newer books released this summer, I tackled Megha Majumdar’s A Burning and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. I’m going to be a voice of dissent for a second: A Burning is well-written and brings up some important themes, but I also found it very thin, even though we are told the story through various points of view. Mexican Gothic, on the other hand, was just a creepy good summer read (and extremely weird by the end).

Separately, I finally got to Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which had been sitting on my library wishlist for ages (is it possible to miss the city you live in? That’s what Just Kids did for me). And I read a collection of short stories—Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine—that I thought was very strong.

What I’m Listening to:

Do you remember Doves? I’ve loved them since high school and saw them live on their last tour. They’re coming out with their first album in 11 years in September. The handful of tracks they’ve already released sound great, but the news also made me revisit their prior catalogue: Lost Souls, The Last Broadcast, Some Cities, and Kingdom of Rust. They are so very good.

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Thanks for reading this edition of Rad Dishes! You can follow me on Instagram. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook (though also wondering if I really need all the social media for this). The original Rad Dishes still exists here.

Radhika