Creamy white rice risotto with shiitake mushrooms

I love brown rice, I really do. It IS possible to make a brown rice risotto, there are recipes in macro cookbooks, and I even have one here on the blog. Nevertheless, there is something about a traditional creamy white rice risotto…..so I gave it a try and here it is, we loved it!!

Since I was making a vegan risotto, I didn´t use a chicken broth, which you can find in many recipes. Instead I prepared a stock using some leftover water from blanching vegetables, in which I soaked 4 shiitake mushrooms, for a couple of hours. The shiitakes give a wonderful earthy rich flavour to the broth as they soak. After taking out the shiitakes, I added one tablespoon of rice miso diluted in a little bit of water and I brought the broth to boil.

After completing this step I sauteed a large sliced onion on olive oil with a pinch of salt. When the onion softened I added one and a half cup of white risotto rice, stirred to coat with the oil and added a splash of mirin (that is instead of white wine which is required in several recipes). After the mirin soaked into the rice, I started adding the warm broth (you can leave the broth gently simmering with a lid off on your lowest flame to keep it warm during cooking). I added always only half a cup of the broth at a time and kept stirring continuously, watching for the liquid to soak in. You should not let the risotto get completely dry and without liquid, but also don´t add more liquid before the previous one is at least mostly absorbed. Risotto requires your constant attention and stirring, so don´t leave it just sitting there 😀 Don´t worry, the result is worth the effort!!

Meanwhile (or before you start making the rice) sautee your soaked and thinly sliced shiitake mushrooms in some olive oil until they become very fragrant and shrink considerably, they can almost start caramelizing. Set them aside, it´s ok if they cool down.

I put six cups of broth into my risotto (different recipes call for different ratios of rice and broth). The point is: the rice should get soft, but not overcooked, it should still have a bite, while being very creamy. This should take about half an hour. At the end I mixed in the sauteed mushrooms, some nutritional yeast for extra cheesy flavour (totally optional) and some extra salt and pepper.

I served the risotto with black olives, fresh chopped parsley and some steamed savoy cabbage.

Anise flavoured vegetable stew with hiziki

Yep, you got it right – I DID mix seaweed and anise! Together with a load of sweet vegetables and miso! 😀 Sounds maybe a bit odd but it´s a lovely comforting stew which is pretty warming in spite of the cooling seaweed featured. Anise definitely adds extra warmth to the long cooked winter vegetables…

I cut up carrot, parsley root, parsnip, turnip, hokkaido pumpkin, red beet, curly cabbage and onion into medium-sized pieces, placed them into a thick-bottom pot and covered the vegetables with water. They don´t have to be fully submerged, you can just add some water accordingly during the cooking time. I mixed in a handful of presoaked and rinsed hiziki seaweed (it needs to soak for about an hour). I also added a generous sprinkle of anise seeds and a pinch of salt.

Cover the pot with a lid, bring to boil and afterwards just simmer on a low flame, keeping the lid on and watching that the vegetables don´t get too dry. At the end you can add a tablespoon of brown rice miso diluted in some warm water and let it gently simmer with a lid off. The stew should not end up being too watery, you can also always thicken it with corn starch, arrowroot or kuzu…

I served it with a rice/barley mixture with gomasio.

Miso risotto with mushrooms and celery root

I love to make creamy risotto-style rice. With brown rice it´s a bit difficult to make a real Italian risotto, which requires stirring in small amounts of liquid at a time, which means a lot of time spent standing above the pot…not such a task with quick cooking white rice, but quite a job when you´re using slow cooking short-grain brown rice! 😀 This is a bit of a compromise, but the flavour is very rich and surprisingly similar to an authentic risotto!

I pressure cooked my regular brown rice with water and rice milk, in a 1:1 ratio. After the pressure came down, I took the lid off, placed the pot again on a low flame and stirred in some rice miso diluted with a little bit of water and let the rice absorb the liquid while stirring with a wooden spoon, for maybe five minutes. The whole point is to get the rice creamy, that´s all…

While pressure cooking, I sauteed some sliced onion with a pinch of salt, on a bit of olive oil, and when it got translucent, I added chopped mushrooms and thin strips of celery root and proceeded to cook until all got soft and caramelized. I seasoned the vegetables with tamari soy sauce and caraway seeds. When the rice got creamy, I stirred in the veggies. The risotto was served with a side of freshly blanched curly (savoy) cabbage.

Brown rice risotto

This risotto is my slightly adapted version of the Brown rice risotto in Christina Pirello´s cookbook Cooking the Whole Foods Way. It´s one of the best brown rice dishes I´ve EVER tasted and that´s quite something! So rich and creamy that nobody will miss the white rice usually associated with Italian risotto.

First soak one and a half cups of brown rice (the recipe calls for medium-grain but I used short-grain) for 6-8 hours. Drain and rinse well. In a stainless steel pot with a heavy bottom, heat one teaspoon of olive oil, add rice and stir to coat all the rice with oil. Add a pinch of salt, 1/4 cup of mirin and 3/4 cup of water. Cover pot with a lid and cook on a medium flame until liquid absorbs, stirring at times. As soon as the liquid disappears, stir in minced garlic (2 to 3 cloves) and one small minced onion.

Meanwhile prepare your vegetable stock (5 cups), in case you don´t already have some saved. You can either make a stock from sliced vegetables which you strain after some time of cooking or you can use a vegetable bouillon cube/powder. I used a powder made of various dried and crushed root vegetables. I also mixed in two teaspoons of diluted barley miso, for 5 cups of liquid, and let it simmer for about five minutes. Christina doesn´t use miso in her recipe but I found it being very flavourful.

Once the onion and garlic are mixed through your rice, add half a cup of stock, cover again and cook, stirring frequently, until liquid is absorbed. Continue cooking this way, adding always half a cup of stock at a time. And keep stirring…It will take 45 to 60 minutes depending on various factors, mostly probably on the type of rice you choose (short-grain cooks longest). The rice should get very creamy and tender.

Towards the end, sautee some sliced leek and carrot on a teaspoon of olive oil with a pinch of salt. When your rice is ready, stir them in. I topped the risotto with minced fresh basil leaves.

9.10.

For dinner after coming from the Art of Cooking workshop I made myself some pretty cleansing, discharging dishes, to further continue what I started at the workshop 🙂

I now eat miso soup twice a day – this time it was with dried daikon (for deep discharge of old accumulation), carrot, wakame and chopped leek as a garnish on top.

I cooked brown calasparra rice together with sweet brown rice and some hato mugi. Calasparra is a wonderful rice coming from Spain. Sweet brown rice is a protein rich strengthening variety of rice of the sticky sort. Hato mugi, also called “pearl barley” or “Job´s tears” is a cleansing grain and I must say I fell in love with it, very nice mixed in with your rice!!

With the grains I made a nishime of daikon, carrot and kombu, seasoned with tamari. A nishime is a very nourishing sweet dish. You prepare it by placing a poststamp of dried kombu on the bottom of the pot (preferrably a thick-bottom pot with a heavy lid), then you place big wedges of daikon and carrot (or other hard vegetables), add only about half a cm of water, cover with a lid, bring to boil, and cook on low flame for about 20 minutes (more or less – depending on how quickly your veggies get soft). I love how it brings out the sweetness in the veggies! At the end I added a splash of tamari, but you can also just use a bit of salt.

I also had sauerkraut for a pickle and some raw rapini and mizuna that Nardo got at the organic market – rapini (or broccoli rabe, turnip tops etc.) and mizuna (Japanese mustard, Japanese greens etc.) are both relatives of the turnip, and they remind me a little bit of rucola.

23.9.

I love the “macrobiotic plate” with islands of different types of food. It is a bit like creating a symphony 😀 Some time ago I finally got my order of 5 kg (!!) of teff in the mail, so I cooked it for dinner. Teff is a super-nutritious grain from Ethiopia, actually the smallest grain in the world. It reminds polenta a bit when cooked. It has a very fine delicate texture and I really like the taste and aroma…and it´s done in 15-20 minutes! Together with the teff I steamed broccoli and daikon (steaming is a hit in our household lately) and served them with a quick sauce made by diluting rice brown miso with some warm water. I also did a stir-fry in a wok – leek, green beans, carrot, chinese cabbage and celery stalk, with added sesame seeds and a dash of tamari and water. Simple yet satisfying dinner 🙂