The recipe called for four large handfuls of mushrooms and a number of other vegetables I didn’t have in the house, so Brett and I headed over to Berkeley’s Monterey Market for heaps of fresh produce. I was able to choose from a number of fine mushroom specimens, eventually selecting oyster mushrooms, baby shiitakes, chanterelles, and the elusive matsutake (eat your heart out Santa Cruz anthro students!). The day of the event I went down to our local grocery store and picked up “no-chicken” chicken stock and some desserts. Then I embarked on my cooking adventure.

Pre Cooking Kitchen

First I had to clean the kitchen. My apartment has no dishwasher, and I am a lazy, lazy man… so it took a while to work through the dish backlog. But eventually I got to the sparkling kitchen you see above.

Cooking Begins

The recipe is divided into two steps, the initial preparation of the risotto followed by the preparation of the mushrooms and integration of the same with the risotto base. Above is the first stage of the risotto, which I realized was designed to feed eight people!

Not Enough Vermouth

Sarah had told me there was vermouth in the cupboard meant to be used with a risotto but had never been actually used, so I assumed there was a more or less unopened bottle up there. Not so! I was two ounces shy of what was needed, but figured I would be fine with what I had.

So Much Rice

Risotto is made by pouring in small amounts of warm stock which the rice absorbs while it cooks. This is supposed to be a time consuming process full of concern for whether or not the risotto is going to actually absorb all the liquid. In this case, that was never a concern. The rice continued to absorb the stock seconds after I put it into the pot. This probably should have been cause for early concern.

Risotto Step 1 Complete

After step one was complete the recipe instructs you to put the rice in a large pan to let cool while preparing the next step. Here you see all the rice. This turned out to be a pretty dangerous setup, as there isn’t enough counter-top space to put this pan down, so it ended up on one of my kitchen stools where my dinner guests kept running into it while moving about the kitchen! Thankfully it never actually fell off the stool.

Mushroom Specimens

I had originally purchased four mushrooms types, but I think I bought too much of each, so I decided to drop the shiitakes from the mix. That still left three varieties, oyster on the top, chanterelles on the right, and matsutakes on the left. I wasn’t 100% sure of the best way to prepare the matsutakes, so I ended up cutting the stems into smaller bits — which was good as the stems were chewy — and the caps into roughly 8ths. The oyster mushrooms were more or less diced, and the chantrelles were cut into strips. This allowed one to identify which mushroom was which based just just on the size.

Five Cups of Mushrooms

After the mushroom prep, I ended with five cups of mushrooms. That’s a lot of mushrooms!

Mushroom Medley

Into the frying pan with a ton of butter. This started to smell fantastic about five minutes into cooking.

Risotto when Finished

Now, I don’t have any photos of the steps between mushroom prep and the final product, but this is where the wheels fall off the wagon. It turns out my risotto isn’t anywhere done enough. I keep adding stock, it keeps soaking it right up, rice continues to be crunchy. We eventually add WAY more stock than the recipe calls for, throw on the lid and let it cook for an additional 15 minutes untouched. This finally got the risotto rice to soften up in the core, but it also ensured the rice converted to roughly 70% paste. The final product was not “oozy” so much as it was “gooey”.

Fellow Diners

Here we are about to sit down for the meal. I picked up a bottle of white wine from South Africa called “Goats will Roam” that was pretty decent, but not great. I had hoped it would be less fruity, but turned out to be amazingly fruity. The risotto itself was perfectly acceptable. It was quite dense and cheesy, and you couldn’t always taste the different mushrooms, but I still enjoyed it. I can’t say the matsutakes where anything amazing. Perhaps they are meant to be savored in a more delicate dish? We rounded off the meal with a loaf of bread.

The Forgotten Lemon Juice

Later that evening I realized I had failed to add the lemon juice I had squeezed earlier. Everyone agreed that the risotto would have been much better with the juice, as it would have helped to cut the richness and perhaps reduced the gooey factor. Rookie mistake.

Risotto Leftovers

With only three people eating a dish designed to feed eight, I ended up with lots of leftovers. Thankfully it cooks up really nice in a fry pan and I’ve already had one good meal with almost no prep required thanks to my overcooking.

Post Cooking Kitchen

Of course, the kitchen ended up a disaster once again, but such is the cycle of life.