Two Cheese Risotto (aka Super Simple Risotto)

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OK, don’t be scared. I know, I know. You hear risotto and you think of risottos that take a lot of time and effort (like the Acorn Squash one I made a few months back), and you just instinctively shake your head no. But wait! There is an easier way, I PROMISE.

This one started out with the standard Sunday night issue: what’s going on the dinner plates tonight? We had already chosen our meat (grilled scallops) but we didn’t have any sides. Veggies are easy to come by in our house, since we stock the freezer as our default when we don’t want to fuss with fresh; so, that wasn’t an issue either. DH suggested cheesy rice, and I thought that would hit the spot. So, off to the pantry I went to find a box of Rice-a-Roni. (Don’t judge – some of us have embraced boxed items as fallback positions.)

No dice. Or, more specifically, no (cheesy) rice. Drat.

Off to the cookbooks I went, to see if there were any options involving white or brown rice, and none of them quickly pointed to something I liked. BUT, one suggested a risotto, and the pantry did have a large bag of arborio rice. Score!

What I ended up doing was basically preparing a risotto in what I consider to be a less time-consuming fashion. Yes, there’s still effort involved, but it’s miniscule by comparison to some AND it gets you a cheesy rice AND it’s got a limited set of ingredients AND it’s far better for you than the boxed option because it’s not a complete salt lick.

Two Cheese Risotto

My new favorite replacement for a box...

Prep Time: 5 mins

Cooking Time: 30-35 mins

Serves: 4

Ingredients

1-1/2 Tb olive oil

1 small yellow onion or large shallot

2-1/2 cups low-sodium chicken broth

1/2 cup white cooking wine

1 cup arborio rice, uncooked

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

2 oz finely/”fancy” shredded Cheddar cheese

Make it Happen

1. Peel and mince the onion/shallot.

2. In a large, deep skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat.

3. Add the onion (or shallot), tossing it in the olive oil to coat. Cook for 2 minutes, stirring occasionally.

4. Add the broth and white wine to the pan. Stir well to combine. Cover and cook for 4-6 mins, until the mixture begins to boil.

5. Add the arborio rice to the pan and stir well to combine. Cover and reduce heat to low for 10 minutes, stirring at the 5 min and 10 min marks.

6. Raise the heat to medium-low and cook for another 10 minutes, again stirring at the 5 min and 10 min marks.

7. When the majority of the liquid is gone, reduce heat to low, then add both cheese and stir well to combine. Once the cheese has melted, turn off the heat and serve immediately.

Why don’t schools support working parents better?

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This isn’t the post I’d originally planned to post.

My first draft of this, written two days ago – the evening after I registered dd for Kindergarten – was far more cranky. Now, I’m not sure how I feel. Numb? Frustrated? Resigned to it all?

The long and the short of it is that I’m dealing with the emotional aftermath of realizing how much about our lives will change once dd starts Kindergarten. Of course, there’s a financial toll, but we’ve been paying such enormous sums of money to our day care center for so long that I’m just not as sensitive to that anymore. You could say that I’ve been broken down by it all.

What I’m trying to get past now is the fact that so many things need to be cobbled together in order to ensure that dh and I can continue to work.

Let me say that again: so that dh and I can continue to work.

Why should putting our dd in Kindergarten, in a public school – no less – have any kind of impact on whether or not we have jobs? After all, public schools are free and that should be an enormous help, right?

Well…not quite.

We live in a town with excellent schools, so private schools aren’t a consideration. I’m perfectly at peace with that; the quality of the school district was part of our decision to move here, and we’re both the product of public schools. Of course, our property taxes are through the roof, but that’s a function of the high quality schools and a NIMBY streak a whole town wide.

So, it kinda hurt when we found out that we have to pay for full-time Kindergarten. The half-day is free, because that’s a requirement set by the state, but full-time Kindergarten comes at a cost of nearly $4K before you get to any before and after care.

Why on earth would you need before and after care, you ask? Well, school only runs from about 9am-3pm. With both of us working full-time and still having commutes to contend with, that schedule is impossible to match. We typically leave the house around 7am to get both of us to work on time (with a day care drop-off by *somebody*), and I’m the first one to the kids at 5:15pm, if I’m running on-time. So, that leaves us in the unenviable position of needing both “before-care” and “after-care”. If we’re okay with paying for the before and after care offered at school, we can pay more than $5K on top of the Kindergarten tuition. As it is, we’re only on the hook for an additional $4K because of a before-care arrangement I struck up with a friend who lives up the street.

Now, that’ll cover us from the start of school (around Labor Day) to end of the school year (late June), not including various holidays, Christmas vacation, and two school vacation weeks in the spring term. There’s still a gap of however many weeks (9-12) during the summer where we need to have a better plan than leaving dd in the house with a window cracked. She’s pretty nearly outgrown her daycare, so next summer (and maybe even this summer) we need a camp. That’s another $4K-ish, with hours running from about 9am-3pm/4pm. BUT, you can pay for before- and after-care! Sigh.

I’ve started to price out camps, and the timeframes they offer span anywhere from 6 weeks to 12 weeks, in costs ranging from around $200/week to nearly $500/week. It’s all mind-boggling.

I feel like I have to pull together this patchwork quilt of solutions so that dd will be in an educational and engaging environment year-around, since quitting a job simply isn’t an option. The cost of living in the eastern portion of Massachusetts rivals that of New York City or San Francisco – I know only a handful of families with stay at home parents. I don’t feel like I can take out this frustration on any of the nice people at the school; they are all awfully nice and they could easily tell that most of us were deer in headlights: unsure of what questions to ask because we’re not even sure what all we’re getting ourselves into.

I suppose that, as long as I’m willing to open my checkbook and do far more homework than dd will have to do anytime soon, I can get all of these resources lined up. It’s just more than a bit overwhelming and I only hope that I don’t let anything slip through the cracks. The room for error, when you can’t just spend days at home to cover gaps that you didn’t plan appropriately for, is just miniscule.

 

Sweet Sockeye Salmon

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This is one of those weeks where I just didn’t feel like buying meat. Thing is, we stockpile over the course of the year – a buy-one-get-one-free deal (BOGO) here, a trip to BJ’s there, and there’s just MEAT in the freezer. And, when dh started to explain how we’re just overspending on our grocery bill, I couldn’t stomach the thought of putting out money for fresh meat when I knew we had stuff in the freezer that was just in need of a thaw. And that’s where the salmon comes in. Being that we’re on a sustainable seafood kick that we are trying to make a lifestyle choice, we’d purchased a pair of frozen sockeye salmon packages on a BOGO a few months ago. (The price was decent as a BOGO. Under normal circumstances, it would be overpaying – something like $11.99 for 12oz, which works out to $15.99/lb). We’d grilled the first package not long after getting it, and we found it…dry. Something about it just didn’t work and we attributed this to the fact that it was frozen. DH was highly skeptical that we could make it work, so he’d been leery about my trying something else with the frozen salmon, but I promised that I would do something on the stove that I thought might add some more moisture.

Now, layer into this the fact that the kids don’t really get into meat much, unless it’s a fish stick/square (ds) or a chicken nugget (dd). Neither one really is big into salmon, so I had an uphill battle to climb. I’ll give away the ending: they still didn’t like it. BUT, I was able to get out of dd that the issue wasn’t the preparation but the fact that it was salmon. She just isn’t into salmon in any form. DH and I, on the other hand, liked how this turned out. And, he liked it enough that it convinced him I should go back later this week and pick up more (it’s on a BOGO again), not only so we have it for this recipe but also so that he can make this lovely Salmon Stroganoff that’s in the On Rice cookbook we have. (We’ve made it before with fresh salmon, and this preparation showed him that the frozen would work, too.)

We served this salmon on soba noodles, for a change of pace, and I roasted some golden beets to have on the side. That’s the thing about the CSA – before I started that, I don’t think you’d ever hear me exclaim “OMG! These golden beets are *GORGEOUS*!”, and yet I did that very thing this afternoon. Score one for locally produced veggies and an adult willingness to open one’s mind (and palate) to things that, as a kid, seemed oogy from any distance.

Note: the only mod suggested by dh was that the next time we should include shallots, to add even more sweetness. If you want to add shallots, I’d recommend 1 large shallot, peeled and minced, going in the pan at the same time as the salmon (or even just before).

 

Sweet Sockeye Salmon

Sweet Sockeye Salmon on Soba...this dish is brought to you by the letter S

 

Prep Time: 5 mins (assuming thawed salmon)

Cooking Time: 25 mins

Serves: 2

 

Ingredients

12 oz sockeye salmon fillets

1/2 cup white cooking wine (divided)

1-2 Tb olive oil

2 tsp crystallized ginger

1 Tb honey (preferably wildflower)

 

Make it Happen

1. Remove the skin from the salmon and cut the salmon into pieces no more than 1″ x 1-1/2″.

2. Heat a non-stick skillet over medium heat; add the olive oil to the pan.

3. Add the salmon to the pan and turn to ensure even cooking after about 2 mins.

4. Add about 1/4-1/3 cup of the white wine to the pan, to start the poaching process. Let this cook until the liquid is reduced by at least half.

5. Sprinkle the ginger around the salmon and let it cook for another couple of minutes, until the liquid is mostly gone.

6. Add the remainder of the white wine to the pan. Let this go until the liquid is nearly gone.

7. Drizzle the honey over the salmon pieces and toss/turn to coat them evenly. Let this go until the liquid is down to no more than maybe 1 tsp and serve with rice, noodles (pairs nicely with soba!) or the starch of your choice.