Broad Bean Risotto

The Olympic Food Challenge has come to an end.  The summer of discovering new recipes and ingredients is over but I am still learning.  My latest revelation is the fact that I do not like following recipes.  That I have come to this conclusion at the end of following so many recipes shouldn't be so surprising.  But if I'm honest, I have never been a fan of slavishly following quantities and timings, preferring to add my own slant on a "borrowed" idea.

My dislike of recipes has been magnified recently with most of the OFC recipes being web-based.  I am not going to bite the hand that feeds me* but there are many food sites and blogs around and, sadly, they do not all pass muster.  The number of times that I found recipes with missing steps, or mystery ingredients that were not used during cooking, drove me potty.

Now that I am free of the shakkles of poorly written recipes I am once more the master of my own destiny.  I can also cook what I want, without hoping that it comes from a country that I have never heard of.  To get the ball rolling I decided to cook risotto.  Possibly my favourite meal and definitely one that I have missed while discovering new dishes.

Tonight's star ingredient in the risotto was broad beans.  We missed the early broad beans this year so tonight's were of the large, starchy variety.  That said, once they had been blanched and podded they were still delicious in the creamy risotto.  I'm looking forward to embracing my recipe freedom now that I have it back.  I'll still read the odd cookery book for inspiration and new ideas, but you won't find me tied to a book any time soon.

*not that I'm getting paid for any of this blogging nonsense.

Spanish Vegetable Stew

My posts on Tonight's Menu this week have been shorter than usual.  I'm sure there are some of you out there who are glad of this.  I am hoping that normal service will be resumed in the not too distant future.  The reason behind my brevity is that fact that I have been working late and Z has been doing all of the cooking.  Sometimes it's hard enough to write about what we have eaten but when I've not been involved in the process it is even harder.

To try to remedy this lack of physical involvement in the cooking process, I spent some time this morning podding broad beans for this evening's meal.  We decided last night that we would have a Spanish inspired vegetable stew.  It could have been a vegetarian stew if we had omitted the chorizo, but we like chorizo and we're not vegetarian.