Kale Risotto with Goat Cheese or Daiya

There are two things, kitchen wise, which are causing a bit of a dilemma lately. One, we stocked up on lots of hard to find stuff (well at least hard to find here up in Kapuskasing) like shaohsing wine, gochujang, short grained rice in bulk, and a slew of gluten free flours. Two, we're moving back to Moncton in July which means that all of this stock either has to be consumed or trudged halfway across Canada. Since I don't like stuff lying around unused anyways, I opt for consumption rather than transportation. So at least as far as the rice is concerned there are quite a few tasty options including, but not limited to, sushi and risotto.

I can't say I've been a huge fan of risotto. It's not the first thing I'd cook if given a choice but lately we've discovered that my wife has serious intolerances to alot of food. She's had to cut out gluten, dairy, eggs, most fruit, and all protein except seafood and chicken. This makes cooking difficult but also kind of fun. It's much more fun finding and cooking a good, gluten-free recipe for pancakes which is not only edible but just as delicious as the gluten variety. By the way, gluten does absolutely nothing for us nutritionally. So in case there are others reading this who are in the same boat as us, one good blog and book is Spunky Monkey (Google it).

Anyways, for the recipe, it comes from my now aging Cook with Jamie book. In this book there is a basic risotto recipe which is used as the base for whatever risotto you want to make and also keeps in the fridge for up to a week which means that making risotto takes only a few minutes on a busy weekday.

The recipe I made was a spinach and goat cheese risotto which I modified to use kale instead. I love kale for it's intense green, almost nutty taste. Just wilt along with some garlic, blitz in a food processor, fold into the hot risotto and mix with parmesan and goat cheese. For my wife, I put daiya instead of cheese; if you're intolerant to dairy, daiya is awesome. We used it on pizza the other day and it was, incredibly, just as good as the brick cheese I had. I mean, most cheese is so processed now that something which contains no dairy at all can easily stand up to it. So kudos to Daiya and shame, again, on the industrialization of food.

Ranting aside, we now have enough leftover risotto to make all sorts of stuff. I want to have a crack at risotto croquettes which are balls of leftover risotto rolled in breadcrumbs and fried.

All of this means 4 cups of rice used. Now we just have to find something to do with the approximately 50 cups which are left.