Mum and I have been clearing out our freezer lately. It really was time; it was getting a bit feral in there. We've all sorts of random stuff - endless bags of egg-whites, tubs of stock, chicken carcasses, bags of bacon, fruits, meat and so on.

For dinner the other night, I decided to contribute to the ritual clearing-of-the-freezer by making a risotto. It had chicken stock (freezer), a few slices of pumpkin (bottom of the fridge), blue cheese (fridge), and bacon (2 rashers, neatly bagged up in the freezer, as Nigella instructs you to in How to Eat), and a bit of Prosecco (half a bottle still left from Christmas - it's just a little flat, it's still good, it's still good).

Does everyone know how to make a risotto? I couldn't, until last year, before which all my attempted risotti either took hours to make, never cooked properly (mmm, crunchy!), or tasted gluggy and munting. Most books seem to have a different-yet-similar method, but I've found Giorgio Locatelli's tips to be most successful. Quantities depend, obviously, on how many are eating and how hungry y'all are.

Giorgio

1. On a medium to low heat, sautée finely chopped onion in oil and a little butter with a pinch of salt until soft and translucent.


2. Add your rice, and turn the heat up to toast the rice. Stir it until all the rice is slickly coated with the oil.


3. Add a splash of wine, which should hiss in the heat of the pan. Stir to cook until the alcohol is evaporated.


4. Turn the heat back down, and start adding ladlefuls of hot stock (Giorgio says homemade stock is the only way; I'm not nearly as energetic and often use powdered). Stir until the stock is absorbed, before adding another ladleful of stock. Continue in this way until all the stock is absorbed and the rice is cooked. You may need to use more or less stock - it changes each time, depending on the rice, I think.

So that's your basic guide to making risotto. Jamie Oliver also has a step-by-step guide in most of his books, if you can't get your hands on Giorgio.

Back to my particular risotto. As I was stirring the rice, I had my pieces of pumpkin roasting in the oven at 200C for about 30minutes. When the rice was cooked, I added the pumpkin and some crumbled up blue cheese, and the bacon, which I'd fried to a crisp. Stirred it all through, and it became lovely and creamy. And bright orange!

Et voilà.

I was quite pleased with the way it turned out. Off-the-cuff suppers can be quite hit or miss, but this one tasted good. And the family loved it. Always important.

Here are some of the dishes I've been making this week...

Bill Granger's spaghetti with garlic and spinach (Every Day with Bill Granger)















This one is super simple and light, as you'd expect from Monsieur Granger. You fry some garlic in olive oil with chilli, add some white wine, and toss the lot through cooked spaghetti and baby spinach leaves. Delicious and fast! (This one's for you, Fembotanist!)


Nigel Slater's baked couscous with chicken and spices (Real Cooking)















From Nigel Slater's recipes, I expect nothing but the best. And I have yet to be disappointed. For this recipe, you marinate chicken pieces in a mixture of dried chilli, cinnamon, curry powder, garlic and oil, and then bake them in the oven. For the couscous, you soak it in an equal amount of water for 15 minutes, mix through some sultanas, dot with butter, cover with foil and bake it in a separate dish while the chicken's cooking. Once both are cooked, you mix them together and sprinkle over some mint.


Jamie Oliver's pumpkin, pancetta and chestnut soup

I'm not quite sure where this recipe was published; I think it was a magazine. My friend DG has made it before and raved about it. She didn't have the exact recipe on her, but I winged it from her description. I think in the original recipe Jamie instructs you to roast cubes of pumpkin with chilli and coriander seeds, but I started with the pumpkin puree already in my fridge. (I had quite a bit of pumpkin leftover from my disastorous pumpkin rice of 2 days ago.)

Sautée a chopped onion in oil with some pancetta, crumbled vacuum-packed chestnuts, and sage...















... then add the cooked pumpkin and some stock (I used chicken), and simmer for half an hour.















Then blend it in a blender, and it's ready to eat.





















Absolutely fabulous. Much easier than it looks, and very hearty and satisfying with a complex flavour. The weather is way too hot to be eating this type of soup at the moment, but really, don't let that stop you. Some things are too good to wait for the seasons to change.

In Jamie's book, Happy Days with the Naked Chef, he gives a recipe for butternut squash filled with rice. The squash is hollowed out, the flesh mixed with rice and other spices before being packed back into the squash. Then it needs to be baked for an hour and a half, until the squash and the rice is all cooked. The method sounded really interesting, and I had a big round pumpkin knocking about in the fridge, so I thought I'd give it a go. It was supposed to be my lunch yesterday.

While it was cooking, I prepared a salad to go with - Nigella's cucumber and pomegranate salad from Feast. It always looks beautiful, and is light and refreshing against a spicy or substantial meal. You toss small dices of cucumber with pomegranate seeds, finely chopped mint leaves, olive oil and lime juice.
















Now, after the allotted time in the oven, the pumpkin flesh was well cooked, but the rice was still hard! Grr. I covered it back up and put it in for another half hour, by which time the rice was still hard, and the pumpkin was becoming disconcertingly mushy. I was starving by this stage, so I gave up on the pumpkin and reheated some leftovers. *Sigh*. It was probably too ambitious of me to try the recipe without a butternut squash. I assume that the recipe will work with a long, thin butternut squash instead of a big old round pumpkin, and it did smell nice... so I'd probably still give it a go in future.

It seemed like a waste to chuck out the pumpkin, so after lunch I scooped the rice out and put it in a pot, added a bit of water and cooked it for 5 minutes until it was all soft and edible. We had it for dinner that night, and it was actually quite tasty!















As for the pumpkin flesh, I put that in a separate bowl to be refrigerated and used the next day...

I love gooseberries. They taste so good! Mini kiwi-fruits without the hairy exterior. A burst of delicious flavour in every bite. It just sucks that they're hardly in season here, and when they are, they're incredibly expensive! I needed 3 punnets for this ice-cream, at $5 each. Gasp! I actually made it a few weeks ago, during the short gooseberry season, and have had it in the freezer just waiting for a day like today.

I ate a bowl of it today in the afternoon, to try and get a respite from the oppressive heat and humidty that seems to have gripped Melbourne. It was very light, tart, and refreshing. A little too tart; I had to sprinkle castor sugar over the top to make it more palatable. It did, however, have a fabulous texture. I've found that fruited ice-creams tend to be a bit icier and harder than the creamy ice-creams, but this one had a good scooping texture. (I also managed to let it sit out on the bench for a good half hour before digging in, which helped).

The recipe is Nigella's, from Forever Summer. It is made of 3 parts. The first is a purée of gooseberries, elderflower cordial and water, which you cook on a low heat until the berries collapse; the second part is a custard made with single cream, caster sugar and egg yolks; and the third part is a tub of double cream. You just fold all the parts together (making sure they're nice and cold first), and then churn it in an ice-cream maker, before putting in the freezer to freeze completely. Just a little hint: the mixture tastes absolutely heavenly (even better than the finished product, in fact), so save yourself a decent amount for scraping out of the bowl, the saucepan, the spoon, the churn...

The recipe makes a generous litre.

Two of my cousins from Queensland have been staying with us for the past week, and last night we had a big dinner at my house for all the family who live in Melbourne. There were 10 of us in total, and I wanted a meal that was simple to make, fresh, light, healthy and delicious. Finished with a massive crème brûlée, naturally.


Menu
Pasta al forno con pomodori e mozzarella (Jamie Oliver, Jamie's Italy)
Roast pumpkin and red onion with honey dressing (Bill Granger, Every Day)
Rocket, parmesan and pomegranate sald with balsamic (Tessa Kiros, Falling Cloudberries)
Crème brûlée (Nigella Lawson, Nigella Bites)

These dishes, I thought, would be suitable for a large family dinner. They're all large and easy to share, look very welcoming lined up on the table, are not-too-challenging for the eater or cook, and are fine if left to stand around for a short time after being cooked. This gives you all the time you need for your aunts and uncles to exclaim how much you've grown! As for the dessert, my cousins had never had crème brûlée before, and wanted to try it. More importantly, though, I have a brand new blowtorch which really needed to get broken in! Can you see it in the top picture? My dad bought it for me half-price blowtorch in the Boxing Day sales. Woo-hoo! Filling the thing with WARNING: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE butane gas is a bit of a scary experience, but my mum and I managed between ourselves. (Well, I say "between ourselves", I really mean she did it while I cowered behind the island bench).

I started off my afternoon of cooking by making the crème brûlée. Nigella's recipe is a little different from most other ones that I've seen. Rather than cooking a custard on the stove, and then in a waterbath in the oven, she simply instructs you to make a very thick and rich custard on the stove, then chill it in the fridge until firm.

Whilst it was chilling, I got on with the roast vegetables. The roast vegetable dish consists of wedges of unpeeled pumpkin and onion, tossed through chilli flakes and olive oil, which you then roast in a hot oven for 45 minutes. At the end, you boil honey and red wine vinegar, and pour it over, finished with a good sprinkling of mint.

I have made the baked pasta once before. It's fantastic! You just make a simmered tomato sauce (onions, garlic, tinned tomatoes, red wine vinegar & basil - easy peasy)...












There's nothing like a big pot of tomato sauce to make you feel like a hot Italian Mamma.

...boil the pasta (I used penne instead of the orechiette specified because it was vastly cheaper in such gigantic quantities), mix the pasta with half the sauce, and layer it in a dish with parmesan and mozzarella. I ended up filling 2 large dishes, with more pasta leftover. I do love cooking in industrial quantities! Then you just shunt it in the oven for 15 minutes until it is all hot and golden and bubbling and making your house smell just like a home should.
















Here it all is...











































Rocket, pomegranate seeds and juice, parmesan shavings, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Toss together in whatever quantities please you, and there it is.

I had doubled the quantities for the pasta, but not for the vegies or the salad. You can't make friends with salad, and I've generally found that people don't really go in for side dishes when you're cooking for a crowd. This time, however, I was wrong. The salad and the vegies got absolutely demolished! I guess I forgot... I wasn't cooking for a "crowd", I was cooking for a Malaysian family! I needed double of EVERYTHING. (Triple quantities probably wouldn't have hurt).

After dinner, I retrieved the custard from the fridge. It wasn't exactly firm enough to hold its shape out of the dish, but it looked and smelled good anyway. I suppose if you're not going the waterbath route, then you need to cook the custard until super thick, and it'd need a good long time to firm up in the fridge.















It was easy enough to sprinkle demerara sugar over the top, and use the blowturch to transform the custard into crème brûlée...
















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