Risotto! Ie. There Was a Dinner Party

I threw a dinner party!

Well, it was really just some friends over for dinner but I actually cooked something nice. In fact, something I’d never done before. And it was nice!

Now I’ve got a rubbish selection of photos again, really should learn to use my camera and also, TAKE MORE PICTURES. It’s just, I don’t like using flash which leads unfocused photos. Hmmm.

Anyway, for starters we had a selection of things, antipasti, if you like. There were olives from The Fresh Olive Company (they have a stall at Borough Market, well worth a visit if you’re around there), little coctail stick things I made with baby plum tomatoes, fresh basil and buffalo mozzarella (from Morrisons ‘The Best’ range, and it was really quite decent, I thought), and tomato and olive focaccia I made using the recipe blogged here before, just adding halved baby plum tomatoes on top to compliment the olives. The focaccia needed more salt, I think. Something about it wasn’t quite right, but oh well.

For the main we had a Butternut Squash and Chorizo Risotto using a recipe I found on the Morrisons website. I’m not even quite sure how I ended up looking at recipes on the Morrisons website, but I did and I’m glad I did. I’d never used butternut squash in anything before and that was quite exciting. The one I got wasn’t quite ripe, I think, but since it was roasted anyway it didn’t really matter. I’m not big on following recipes literally and in this case I used chicken stock as opposed to the vegetable stock in the recipe, I also used it almost a litre but I may have used a bit more rice too (I don’t have scales). I also added some salt and black pepper to the butternut squash before roasting.

The thing I’ll do differently next time is the garlic. In the recipe here it tells you to roast garlic with the squash, but I’d recommend throwing it in the pan with the onions and chorizo. Oh that’s another thing, do fry the onions for a bit before adding the chorizo. And use oil a bit more liberally too. Anyway it was lovely. The taste of garlic on the squash was a tad too strong for my liking though. That’s why I wouldn’t roast it again. The good thing about the chorizo is that you really don’t need any extra flavourings in the risotto. The stock, chorizo and a bit of salt and pepper on the squash are just right. Make sure you get a strong parmesan though, I wouldn’t use a bog standard supermarket parmesan since the other flavours are quite strong and I like to taste the cheese in my risotto too.

In other news, I’m still on the look out for a job so you know, if you know of any good opportunities, let me know. Anything office based. In London. Ta.