Update (Apr 2023): Posts like these have moved to my new food-focused newsletter at
Hello again ~ Long time no write from the Meal Memoirs corner of this newsletter. I’ve eaten a lot of good stuff since the last installment in August, but haven’t felt compelled to document anything until a particularly satisfying series of meals earlier this month…
The journey begins with an Outdoor Chef Life video that Jason found and kept rewatching, one that involves using forest-foraged mushrooms to make a two-part meal of mushroom risotto and arancini. I’ve never had arancini before, but since they’re basically deep-fried rice balls, I needed no convincing.
On a Sunday night, we set out to do part one — a simple (aka the first recipe that showed up on Google) mushroom risotto…
…which turned out great. It’s probably our most successful risotto yet, because we used more chicken broth than ever before (at least 6 cups) — and were able to cook the rice longer.
Then it was Arancini Night. Deep-frying is an intimidating thought for a Monday night, but thankfully the process was relatively straightforward (we just followed what Taku/Outdoor Chef Life did here, which is to make a risotto ball, press in a tiny mozzarella ball, coat it in flour, egg wash, and panko, and then deep-fry for five minutes).
The arancini was then served with some store-bought marinara sauce and lemon wedges. I loved it. Besides, anything fried feels restaurant-y, so there’s that.
In my mind, this is where the “project” ends, just like in the Youtube video. But we had some arancini left over — just two balls though, so not enough for a full two-person meal.
At lunch the next day, it became clear that the path of least resistance for incorporating the arancini in a somewhat sensible way would be to have it with spaghetti and meatballs.
It worked pretty well. We turn to spaghetti a lot for easy meals and the arancini added an indulgent new dimension that lets me have both rice and noodles in one meal ;)
At this point, we don’t have any more risotto or arancini left but there was still a decent amount of mozzarella balls and tomato sauce to use up. So Jason went and Got Creative With Ingredients.
For the next three weekday lunches, he made surprisingly gourmet fridge-cleaning “pizza toasts,” topping his own bread with the tomato sauce, mozz, chives, and Canadian bacon from Costco. So good!
After more than 90 weeks of working from home, finding surprise and delight in home-cooked meals gets challenging. That’s why I was especially pleased when the weekend risotto effort managed to spark some much-needed newness during the week as well. It all felt like a fun word association game except with ingredients.
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Thanks for reading and happy new year ~