The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of MelbournefoodGeek and Jess of Jessthebaker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.
A full photoset of my adventure is here.
Unfortunately although this is late I don’t have the time to really do the challenge justice. My mom is visiting and she’s recovering from what appears to be a stroke. Long long long story. Anyway the point of the challenge was to make stock which I do make fairly often. Then you were supposed to make risotto with that stock.
So I made stock. I used my standard method of what do I have that is left over or about to go off. I buy whole or rotisserie chickens every so often and freeze the carcasses for stock. I throw in some parsley and garlic and peppercorns along with a bay leaf or two for flavor. The whole point is to extract goodness i.e gelatin from the bones. Just after Christmas I extracted so much from one batch that it set up like a tasty meat jello in the fridge. I usually let it go for a couple of hours though I did let one cook for about a day when I was doing turkey. I’ve found that less time is fine depending on how much I want to concentrate the flavors.
Anyway so I made stock. I had chosen to do a mushroom risotto since it went well
with the chicken I was planning on serving with it. When I make it again I want to
save some of the mushrooms and roast them for additional flavor.
I’m surprised you even got any of the challenge (with you mum’s stroke) bravo bravo bravo on your efforts and results. Well done on this challenge. Cheers from Auadx in Sydney Australia.