Vegetable Stock & Risotto for Daring Cooks

It's that time of the month.  Daring Cooks time.  This month, the challenge was homemade stock and risotto.  I really enjoyed making both parts.  It was leisurely and delicious!  I've made risotto on multiple occasions, but this was my first time making stock and that was a real treat!

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.

Simple as ever, and a great product.  But I had a dilemma.  All of those perfectly good vegetables being used to flavour the stock weren't going anywhere.  I know some people save their vegetable scraps and keep those for making stock (which I think is so absolutely awesome!!), but I hadn't done that.  After they had boiled away for 4 hours, drained and squished of their juices, I decided that I wasn't going to waste all of those veggies.  I was going to make a vegetable risotto.  And I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

Honestly, it was very good.  The stock, of which I made my own vegetable version of, came out just right.

Vegetable Stock
An original recipe by Lauren of Celiac Teen
Ingredients
1 onion, peeled
3 tomatoes
1 small head of broccoli
3 carrots
1 small butternut squash, peeled
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp peppercorns
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp dried parsley
8 cups water

Steps
Clean vegetables.  Remove ends and seeds of all vegetables.  Chop vegetables into fairly large chunks.

Place all ingredients in a large stock pot.  Cover and bring to a boil, then decrease the heat to low and simmer for 4 hours.

Remove bay leaves and strain through fine sieve.  Make sure to force out any stock that may be trapped within the vegetables.

---

For my risotto, I used the challenge recipe, but added in probably 1/2 cup, maybe 3/4 cup of the vegetable puree to it and I halfed the recipe.  400g is about 2 cups of rice, and Aborio multiplies a lot in size.  I didn't absolutely love this method, but the risotto did come out absolutely brilliantly!

It tasted like chicken noodle soup.  Without the chicken.  Or the soup.  Or the noodle.  Like a vegan, non-soup non-noodle chicken noodle soup.  That pretty much sums it up.

Veggies!  Yes.  I love that without even trying, they are one of the most beautiful things you can see.  The colours.  The free-flowing shapes.  The individuality.  What we aspire to be.

Vegetables and sunlight.  Two of the best things for you, and prettiest things around.

I love my broccoli.

And my carrots.

And I should stop now because I love WAY too many to count.

Sorry.  I had to.  I'm in love with all of this sun.  

The sun, along with birds chirping has made it spring for me.

My glorious mish-mash of vegetables.  Add water, boil, forget about them.

Then, after you've squished all the liquid you can out of them, they are pretty like this.

I guess it's like baby food.  The best darn baby food I've ever tasted.

And then, it gets reunited with the stock and tangled with the rice.

Yes, the tiny flecks are broccoli.  

Just make sure you remove the peppercorns before the vegetable puree joins the rice.  I caught those just in time.  You probably don't want to chomp down on one of those suckers.

---

I'm pretty sure I'll be making this (all parts of it) again.  It was one of the less labour-intensive Daring challenges, and that was absolutely perfect!  A fantastic meal for any day.  One that has more room for creativity than a lot of the others.

Thank you to our hosts, Eleanor and Jess.  It was a great challenge!

xoxo

Lauren

Twitter, Facebook, Foodbuzz and Flickr.