Skip to main content

Sweet Potato Risotto

While I was visiting No. 1 in Berkeley, we decided we didn't want to eat out every night and would enjoy a few evenings relaxing at home. We bought yarn (or in No. 1's case, fiber) at different yarn shops, and we wanted to be able to kick off our shoes, watch a movie and knit, and having dinner at home provided that opportunity. Cooking is one of the things I do—I like it, and I like planning, shopping and executing, and I especially like having an appreciative eater to enjoy the results. So, having dinner at home did not inflict damage on my second spring break.

No. 1 is a vegetarian, so I had to choose recipes we would both like with that limitation. I suppose plenty of people would not consider a vegetarian diet a limitation, but if you're used to cooking with beef filets or salmon or chicken, having to exclude those things really is limiting, at first. One evening, I poked around the produce drawer of the fridge and found a sweet potato, and that gave me an idea. I did some more poking around at Epicurious.com and found a surprisingly wonderful sweet potato risotto recipe. It was attached to a recipe for cornish game hens, but I ignored that part and turned the side dish into the main dish.

As I was cooking this stuff, I yelled from the kitchen to warn No. 1 that this was not going to be an attractive meal. It's sort of like a big pot of goop, so I suggested we serve it in bowls so it would be goop in a containing bowl instead of goop all spread out on a plate. Not to exaggerate the appearance of the risotto, but seriously, not pretty. It's seriously great, though, and we loved every bite.

Here is the recipe. Give it a try. Serve it in pretty bowls with a glass of Riesling. And notice that you don't miss meat one bit.

Sweet Potato Risotto

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
1 pound sweet potatoes, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 onion, chopped
1/4 teaspoon minced peeled fresh ginger
2/3 cup arborio rice
1/4 cup dry Riesling wine
2/3 cup mascarpone cheese*
1/4 cup walnuts, toasted, chopped (I left this out only because the other eater doesn't like nuts)
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

Melt butter in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add sweet potatoes, onion and ginger; sauté until potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes. Remove from heat. Cook rice in small saucepan of boiling salted water until just tender but still firm to bite, stirring frequently, about 15 minutes. Drain rice. Add rice to potato mixture in skillet. Add Riesling and stir over low heat to blend. Add mascarpone and stir to melt. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with parsley.

Comments

dive said…
Mmmm … One of my favourites.
I must confess I've never come across a risotto recipe that calls for cooking the rice separately in salty water. Weird. For me the whole point of risotto is letting the rice sloooowly absorb the flavour of the stock (home made veggie stock is so simple to make), little by little.
Robyn Martins said…
Dive, I know. I was surprised by the directions to boil the rice instead of the slow simmer, but it was still great.

Popular posts from this blog

Cindy Loo Who In October

What is it with people and Cindy Loo Who? Of my last one hundred blog hits, forty have been direct visits from regular readers, and fifteen have been as a result of people searching for "Cindy Loo Who," the little pixie from Seuss's How The Grinch Stole Christmas . A couple of years ago, I posted an image of the original Seuss illustration as compared to the TV cartoon image, and for some reason, that post is bringing in the crowds, relatively. Maybe it's the weather. It isn't even November yet, and already we've had frost and have had to dust off our winter coats. When it gets cold like this, I start to think about Christmasy things like listening to Nat King Cole and decorating the tree. It's ironic because I am offended when retailers start pushing holiday stuff early, but I don't mind my own private celebrations. When my sister and I were much younger and still living with our parents, we would pick a day in July, close the curtains to darken the ...

The Ultimate Storyteller—in Life AND in Death

I wrote about The Autobiography of Mark Twain in yesterday's edition of Small Town Newspaper. You can read it here , if you want. This is the photograph I had in mind while I read Clemens' dictations. He really was a masterful storyteller, even when rambling on about the poorly designed door knobs in Florence or in describing the Countess Massiglia, who he described as a "pestiferous character." About her, he said, “She is excitable, malicious, malignant, vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar, profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a coward.” And I laughed out loud.