Rewriting the risotto.

So the recipe for dinner last night was more of a starting point. It was an oven baked tomato and sausage risotto but I took issue with a number of points. First up, if you're cooking with sausages - especially chorizo - I can't see any good reason to cook it in a separate pan and keep it in quarantine from the rest of the dish. The sausage doesn't want to hurt the dish  - it wants to help. So, I decided to pan-fry it first, set it aside and then fry the onion and arborio rice in the fat from the sausages. Next up  - what's the point of a risotto with no wine involved? Seriously, that's the excuse for opening a bottle of wine so you can have a glass while you cook. So I added a healthy quantity of white wine to the rather prim list of ingredients. At this point I just made a mistake plain and simple. It always happens - I halve a recipe in all but one thing. This time I accidentally added the full quantity of crushed tomatoes. This made it a long wait for the juices to be absorbed before the stock was even an issue. Long but well worth it - it was a magnificently rich risotto that carried mysterious chilli shadows all through it as a result of using the sausage fat instead of oil. The fresh basil leaves and parmesan just made it. Oh, and I ditched the oven bit. (A side note: did the person who chose 'You're Gorgeous' as the song to sell children's nurofen listen to any of the lyrics apart from the chorus?)

Just to get up to date, tonight was a quiet one: eggs oven-baked in a tortilla (it just seemed like a good idea....) and a dish from my mother: train-smash. The photo should explain the name even though this version didn't have pieces of white onion to represent the rails. It looks gruesome but it tastes fresh and sweet: shallots, some left-over bacon, zucchini, capsicum and tomatoes cooked in butter with plenty of salt and pepper over a moderate heat. Mum also insists on adding a dash of sugar when cooking tomatoes  - it works. Trust in the mother.