Risotto, Continued

Let’s put it all together. In yesterday’s entry I put “diced peas.” Although dicing the peas won’t ruin this, necessarily, I don’t recommend it.

**Risotto with Ham and Peas**
Serves 2-3, increases exponentially without a problem

3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons peanut oil
1 small onion, chopped
1 cup short-grain rice, arborio or carnaroli are traditional

1-1/2 cups dry white wine
3 cups (or more) stock, water or other flavorful liquid (dried mushroom soaking liquid, cheese rinds (not wax ones) simmered in water for a half hour, half-strength bouillon from Knorr brand cubes, water from cooking vegetables, almost anything)

3/4 cup diced ham
3/4 cup peas, thawed if frozen (this happens readily if a ladle of hot stock is poured over them at the beginning of the process. The stock can be dumped back into the pot later.)
1/2 cup grated pecorino romano cheese

In a saucepan, add half the wine to the stock and bring to a boil. Cook for one minute. Lower heat and keep mixture very hot but just balrely under the simmer. (This is to get rid of unwanted alcohol in the rice.) Keep this pan adjacent to your risotto pan, you will be ladling from one pot to another almost continuously.

Melt the butter and oil over medium heat in a heavy, nonreactive pot, like copper lined with tin or stainless steel or enameled cast iron. Aluminum may darken the risotto. Add the onion and sweat, stirring frequently. Sweating means to cook without browning, so keep your eye on it, you want to cook the onions until they are just softened. Add the rice and stir well. When the liquid from the onions has evaporated, the rice will begin to brown, stir frequently and listen for the rice to begin to whistle. No, I’m not kidding. When the natural moisture in the endosperm of the rice breaks out it will make a little whistling noise. This means the rice grains are getting in the mood.

After the rice has been whistling for a minute or so, add the remaining 3/4 cup wine all at once. When wine is mostly cooked, add one cup of stock and adjust heat so that the mixture bubbles excitedly but not vigorously while you stir it. From this point on, the risotto must be stirred regularly. Stir, and stir with a purpose, scraping the bottom and corners to avoid the risotto scorching. When there is just barely enough stock in the pan to keep all the rice submerged, add another half cup of stock and continue stirring, adding stock every few minutes as needed.

In about twelve minutes, start tasting a grain or two of rice to determine its consistency. Much like pasta, the rice should be neither crunchy nor mushy, and that last little white pearl of starch should remain inside the rice. This is not fluffy white rice with a stir fry, don’t expect it to be. This will take from 15-20 minutes, depending on heat, rice and humidity. When the rice is almost there, add ham and peas to heat through. When you believe it to be thrirty seconds from being done, add the cheese and stir thoroughly. Add stock to adjust the consistency to your liking and serve immediately. It’s not as urgent as it is with pasta, but don’t wait around. Get everybody sitting down before you add the cheese.

What to drink, what to drink. Well, I made this with [Devonian White](http://www.anthonyroadwine.com/wine.html) from Anthony Road Winery in New York, but I drank Cotes du Rhone with it, since we have a lot of it lying around right now. Crisp whites would be good, like sauvignon blanc from California or the Loire Valley, or you could go Italian with a light tocai friulano or even a nice falanghina, especially the recent release from Feudi di San Gregorio. I could see this with a number of reds, especially a chilled Sancerre or Bourgeil or a lightweight pinot noir from California, like the bargain basement Ramsay Lot #16 Pinot from the Carneros Valley.

Riesling could fit in, too, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

Listening: Green Day. Wow. The iTunes is on random.

Leftovers, ho! Risotto with Peas and Ham

You have been spared a long and boring post about frozen peas and the *Lusitania*. Why? I accidentally closed the window I was writing it in, and due to evolving laziness, I rarely use a word processor for posts anymore.

So let’s cut to the non-sandwich leftover chase. Derrick from [Obsession with Food](http://www.obsessionwithfood.com/) posted a [risotto primer](http://www.sfist.com/archives/2006/11/28/sfist_in_the_kitchen_risotto.php) on SFist recently. When I came across it yesterday, I got the hankering. Of course, I get the hankering for italiannate carbs every 24 hours or so, but today it was risotto. Risotto, like pasta, only more so, is one of those dishes where you look in the refrigerator and find out what’s for dinner. For me, it’s tied for first place with frittata for effective use of leftover vegetables and the hands down winner for best use of a single leftover pork chop, sausage link or tidbit of seafood.

When I look in the refrigerator these days, I see ham, a lot of ham. I saw a lot of baked ziti until the Agent’s brother and I polished it off, but the ham is still there. Fortnately, ham is both flavorful and versatile, and, being smoked, it plays well as a background flavor.

The beauty of risotto, of course, is that even plain risotto is really good: stock, onions, wine, rice and cheese- staples at our house- so anything you add to it makes it that much better. Take a cue from stir frying and add ingredients in reverse order of how long they take to cook. So, small cubes of raw squash could go in at the very beginning, eight minutes later some diced wax beans, then some goat cheese and sage leaves when the rice is really close. The whole process takes about 20 minutes.

**Risotto with Peas and Ham**

If you’re squeamish about not measuring things, risotto is the recipe for you to spread your eyeballing wings. Here’s a guestimate of what made dinner for two with bread and a salad.

3 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons peanut oil
1 small onion, chopped
1 cup short-grain rice, arborio or carnaroli are traditional

1-1/2 cups white wine
3 cups (or more) stock, water or other flavorful liquid (dried mushroom soaking liquid, cheese rinds (not wax ones) simmered in water for a half hour, half-strength bouillon from Knorr brand cubes, water from cooking vegetables, almost anything)

3/4 cup diced ham
3/4 cup diced peas
1/2 cup grated pecorino romano cheese

If you must make risotto now, follow the link above. If not, I’ll post the rest tomorrow. The Agent just got home, so the theory will come later.

Creativity, Leftovers and Mamma’s Gravy

Now comes the challenge: What to do with all these leftovers before they go bad? I have half a pound of maytag blue cheese leftover; maybe some gnocchi are in my future. Ham sandwhiches for the rest of the year, certainly, and there’s enough beer left in there to keep a frat house busy for an hour. I feel some cheddar quesadillas coming on, for sure.

And cookies? Forget it.

One thing still blows me away: We ran out of gravy. No, not ham gravy, tomato gravy. What most of the world calls tomato sauce, in Philadelphia (and New Orleans) we call gravy. I make a lot of different tomato sauces, some traditional, some not, but they’re tomato sauce. But when I make the gravy like Mamma makes, I’m *makin’ gravy*.

**Mamma Cangelosi’s Gravy**
Ok, this isn’t really Mamma Cangelosi’s gravy. It’s Mamma’s how I make it, but honestly they are very similar. My mother’s is a little more acid and, visually, stays redder than mine. (Mine goes slightly mahogany.) Mine also comes out slightly sweeter, which I find a little annoying. Attempts to use less sugar have taught me a lot about using sugar with tomatoes, but haven’t produced the desired result. Maybe a higher temperature (which I believe mom uses) would caramelize the sugar more, ending in a richer and less sweet sugar flavor. I stray from her on this because she often scorches her gravy, not usually affecting the taste (though sometimes) but affecting the bottom of the pot, big time.

Sometimes I think it’s the garlic. Garlic has a lot of natural sweetness, and since I don’t saute it first (whole cloves go into the liquid) maybe they’re introducing more sweetness than I realize. Mom uses garlic powder, so it’s a non-issue in hers. Mom also doesn’t always use basil. For her, it’s optional depending on availability. Remember, Italian or Italian-style tomatoes are almost always packed with basil, so, as they say, it’s in there.

Thinking back to gravy-making experiences with other families, the garlic gets sauteed, but that’s because most of those versions include other vegetables, especially onions. I feel a new experiment in my future.

**The Recipe**

This is the ancestral sauce. It has few ingredients, the most important of which is time. The character of tomatoes, like most foods, changes with a long, slow cooking process. The sugars cook and intensify, the water goes away, the garlic melts into the occasional white fleck. Tasting (with bread) throughout the cooking process does a number of things: it’s enjoyable, you can be sure you’re not scorching it, you learn how the tomatoes change over time and, most importantly, it irritates the hell out of my mother.

I use a 7 quart enameled cast iron pot for this, mom has a big, old stainless steel and copper guy. This size pan will hold a double recipe with no meats, or a single recipe with meats, which will sauce 2lbs of pasta amply (with leftovers) and all of that will serve about 8 normal people, or five if two of them are my brother and me.

2-4 pounds meats, such as meatballs, hot and sweet sausages (pricked all over with a fork), *bracioles*, thick, bone-on pork chops or meaty bones *or* 3 tbsn extra virgin olive oil

Peanut or canola oil as needed, if using meats

1 28-oz can tomato puree or equivalent amount of canned or home-pakced tomatoes milled through the finest blade of a food mill. (1 qt jar of home-packed is fine)

3 6-oz cans tomato paste (Mom uses the flavored ones)

Salt and black pepper to taste (about 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon respectively)

1-3 tablespoons of sugar, depending on acidity of tomatoes

3-4 whole, peeled garlic cloves (Mom uses 1-2 tbsn garlic powder- NOT garlic salt)

3-4 bay leaves

1/2 cup loosely packed basil leaves, optional

Brown meats either in the gravy pot with oil (if their own fat is not enough) or under the broiler (good for meatballs) until thoroughly browned but not cooked though. Set aside.
Dump out all fat from the gravy pot and add tomato products. Turn heat to high. I use a whisk here to get out all the lumps of tomato paste. Mom does all of this right on the meat and doesn’t worry about it. I can’t say she’s wrong.

Take your cans of tomatoes and rinse them thoroughly to get all of the bits of tomato out of the can, and to get water into the sauce: about 2/3 of a can for the tomatoes, and 3 cans of water per can of paste. (It will take about three canfuls to get all of the tomato paste out of the can, anyway.)

Add all remaining ingredients except meats or olive oil, and bring to a boil. Cook the gravy, uncovered, stirring often, for about ten minutes. Turn heat down so that it will boil vigorously when partially covered and cook for another thirty minutes, partially covered. You cannot leave the gravy alone, especially now. You cannot stir it too often, scraping the bottom and sides thoroughly.

After thirty minutes, the gravy should be a slightly darker color and noticeably thicker. Add the meats or oil and reduce heat so that it bubbles and perks excitedly, but doesn’t boil. You may need to use a flame-tamer (the lids of the tomato cans work well for this- be sure to take the price tags off). Cook, stirring regularly for about 2-1/2 hours, until the desired depth of flavor and consistency is reached. The meats may be taken out after an hour or so, or left in for the duration, which will cause them to fall apart slightly. They can be reheated in the gravy before serving.