Mushroom Risotto Recipe

Audra Lowe: Well, grandmothers are right. Sometimes, the home cooked meal is all it takes to make you feel better, right. That’s the philosophy behind a new cook book mixing family recipes with some humorous personal stories. Lesley’s in the kitchen with the author in today’s Better Bites.

Lesley Nagy: Thanks Audra. Greg Gallerano joins us in the kitchen today. He’s the author of “It’s Never Just the Food”. Welcome to Better! Now, Greg, why is it never just the food for you?

Greg Gallerano: You know what it's actually a phrase that my grandmother always said to me and what she meant was that it’s never just about what you make or eat. It’s about the great times and memories that go along with it.

Lesley Nagy: And, we’re going to be making one of your favorite family recipes today. What are we working on?

Greg Gallerano: We are going to make a mushroom risotto.

Lesley Nagy: Oh, sounds great!

Greg Gallerano: Excellent! Okay, what I've done is I've started with a little butter and olive oil and what we’ll do is we add some onions.

Lesley Nagy: I love the smell of that.

Greg Gallerano: Isn’t that great? And, we sauté that for about two or three minutes so we just want to actually begin to caramelize that. Then, we add our mushrooms and then we add the rice and you sauté this for about two or three minutes.

Lesley Nagy: Not very long.

Greg Gallerano: No, not at all. Now, this is the great part. What to do is you're going to add chicken broth to the mixture and what you do is you just put enough of the soup to cover the rice. And now, here’s the trick to a great risotto. It’s all in the stirring.

Lesley Nagy: Well, then I'm glad you’re doing it.

Greg Gallerano: But actually, you try. It’s easy. You just stir it and then as the rice absorbs, you just keep adding a little more chicken broth and what actually the chicken broth is actually cooking the rice in after about 20 minutes to 25 minutes, we will have -- may I just grab this for a second. You will have a finished risotto.

Lesley Nagy: Oh, it looks so creamy.

Greg Gallerano: Thank you. And then what you’ll do is you just to finish it off, you add a little saffron. We add some grated cheese and we add parsley. Give that a quick stir.

Lesley Nagy: Now, you did mention your mom and your grandma a lot in your book.

Greg Gallerano: Yeah, they have been great influences in my life. They taught me what family means and what friends mean and you know what? That’s everything to me and that’s why I love to cook and have my family and friends over just to enjoy it. And, here you have the finished risotto.

Lesley Nagy: That's wonderful!

Greg Gallerano: Do you like to take it and let’s taste.

Lesley Nagy: I would love to take a taste of it.

Greg Gallerano: Now, you can actually do this as a main course or you can accompany it with a chicken rollatini and a stuffed mushroom and these are both in the book, too.

Lesley Nagy: Love to try it. Hmm, that’s great!

Greg Gallerano: Good, I'm glad you liked it.

Lesley Nagy: I did like it and you also have a low fat version in the book.

Greg Gallerano: Yeah, a lot of the recipes are done either low fat or vegetarian. You know what? People have weight problems and people want to eat healthy. You know what? The great is you can do this with the brown rice and you can do instead of chicken broth, you can use vegetable broth which will make the whole thing to be vegetarian so I like to do it the different ways the people have options. So, I do it for a lot of dinner parties. It’s great dish!

Lesley Nagy: It is great dish! Thank you so much for joining us.

Audra Lowe: Thanks a lot, Leslie and now to get that risotto recipe, just head to our website. Click on the tab. We also have a lot of other yummy recipes that’ll go great with it like rosemary fillet mignon or chicken brochette.