Guest Post: Brian McNett Serves Up Colorful Purple Wheat Noodles

Raised by an Italian mother (don’t let my embarrassingly anglicized name fool you), the kitchen formed the hub of all activity in our home growing up. Not just for cooking meals, but also entertaining, welcoming guests, and even eating.

If anything happened in our home, it happened in the kitchen.

Few recipes stir up the memories and emotions I associate with then as risotto does. My mother had her own go-to risotto recipe that had evolved over the years she had learned it from her own mother, and it became a monthly tradition for her to cook up a batch of risotto rice, leek and chicken, which would keep us going for days.

I’m a big fan of meals that can be cooked in a pot. Not just because they can often be a bit more “˜hands off’ than other types of recipe (I’m infuriatingly lazy), but also because I find there’s more room to improvise and tweak it in line with your own personal preferences.

This risotto recipe is a bit braver than more traditional takes on the Northern Italian dish. It matches traditional risotto elements, like white wine, onion and garlic, with a much more outlandish pumpkin and walnuts. If I’m honest, I don’t think my Italian grandparents would approve (in fact, I know they wouldn’t – they never forgave me for my lazy tiramisu recipe) but if I didn’t deliberately undermine them at every given opportunity, then what kind of grandson would I be?

The truth is though, despite my tweaking on it, the recipe does still remind me of learning to cook in our home kitchen in the middle of the Berkshire countryside. And if a recipe can stir up intense memories like that, then it’s served its purpose.

One of the greatest cooking fallacies is that making a good risotto takes a lot of time and skill. Well, you’ll be glad to hear it only requires a good amount of time, and simply no skill. Fortunately this means that even someone as clueless as me can make it.

All this recipe needs is a lot of patience, and definitely a lot of stirring. Your arm might take a little while to forgive you, but the dish you get at the end more than makes up for it

If you’re making this in autumn or fall then you might already be drowning in pumpkin-inspired dishes (pumpkin lattes, pumpkin cookies, even pumpkin peanut butter), but this is too good not to try. Furthermore, it’s a great dish to break out for Thanksgiving as a vegetarian alternative to the more traditional meat-heavy meals on offer.

That said, I still love to break it out year-round, and enjoy it just as much in the summer.

Pumpkin & Walnut Risotto
Prep Time
10 mins
Cook Time
45 mins
Total Time
55 mins

Servings: 2 people
Ingredients
1 cube Vegetable Stock
500 ml Water boiled
50 g Butter
1 White Onion. Finely Diced
1 Stick of Celery. Finely Diced
1 Garlic Clove. Finely Diced
150 g Arborio Risotto Rice
125 ml White Wine
150 g Pumpkin Puree
25 g Butter
50 g Roquefort Cheese crumbled
50 g Walnuts chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Add the vegetable stock cube to the boiling water and stir in thoroughly.
2. Heat up a large frying pan over a medium heat, add 25g of the butter.
3. Once the butter has melted, add the onion and celery. Cook for 10 minutes until softened.
4. Stir in the rice, until the grains start to turn translucent at the edges.
5. Turn up the heat a notch to medium-high, adding in the white wine. Stir until all the wine has disappeared. Add the dried sage.
6. Slowly stir in the vegetable stock by adding in one full ladle at a time, stirring continuously until fully incorporated and the rice is cooked. Do this over the course of about half an hour.
7. Stir in the pumpkin puree and take off the heat. Place a lid on top and leave to rest for 5 minutes.
8. As the risotto rests, melt the other 25g of butter in a separate frying pan add the walnuts to toast.
9. Serve the risotto. Top with the crumbled roquefort cheese and buttered toasted walnuts.

About the author:
Ben is a former semi-pro cyclist and big eater. Now he is just a big eater. He writes about food and drink for lazy cooks at The Eat Down.

A common science fiction trope is that aliens would think differently from humans. Larry Niven’s carnivorous Kzinti are curious only about things that interest them, C. J. Cherryh’s T’ca are multi-brained aliens that speak in matrices readable in any direction, and Steven Spielberg’s aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind communicate with music and gesture.

But, even just on the Earth, every human being thinks differently! This tremendous variation is called neurodiversity, and each individual’s distinctive cognitive style is their neurodivergence. Many kinds of neurodivergence are common, including autism, anxiety, synesthesia, and more – sometimes presenting challenges to individuals if society demands a different thinking style.

But could these different thinking styles actually help us understand aliens? Many autistic folks experience hyperfocus on special interests: could they better empathize with Kzinti? Could someone with dissociative personality disorder better understand the multiple-brained T’ca? And could a person with difficulty verbalizing better harmonize with Spielberg’s aliens?

My co-editor Liza Olmsted and I decided to explore whether neurodiversity would help us understand aliens in The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters, a hopeful, empowering science fiction anthology from Thinking Ink Press exploring neurodivergent folks encountering aliens. Over forty contributors shared with us stories, poems and art exploring this theme.

For example, in “The Space Between Stitches” by Minerva Cerridwen, an autistic person’s hyperfocus helps her effortlessly repair an alien’s broken teleporter. In “Where Monolithic Minds Can’t Travel,” Akis Linardos explores whether aliens with multiple minds would resonate with dissociative disorder, unlocking travel to the stars. And in “Music, Not Words” by Ada Hoffmann, aliens that speak in music find harmony with a young woman who has trouble with words.

Many stories in The Neurodiversiverse are told from an authentic #ownvoices perspective, in which authors write stories about characters who share their own distinctive experiences. For example, I struggle with social anxiety disorder, and in my own “Shadows of Titanium Rain,” give those experiences to the character Djina as she struggles to understand solitary aliens.

Liza and I feel #ownvoices are particularly important because they improve the representation of marginalized voices in stories, which is part of the mission of Thinking Ink Press. Sometimes, it can be hard to imagine achieving something if you’ve never seen someone like yourself doing it – and it can be hard to solve a problem if you have no words to describe it.

We’re bringing The Neurodiversiverse to life no matter what, but because we’re a small press, we’re running a Kickstarter to help defray the costs of producing and promoting the book. In particular, we want to pay our authors the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association (SFWA) “professional rate” of 8 cents a word, and the Kickstarter will help us do that.

Creating The Neurodiversiverse has been a voyage of discovery for us. Recently Thinking Ink Press embraced its identity as a publisher focused on marginalized voices – something we had always done, but not precisely noticed that we were doing; but once we noticed that it was our focus, we decided to lean in on that and do it well.

Exploring the topic of neurodiversity inspired me to propose “The Neurodiversiverse Anthology,” which I shared with our team to ensure we handled it sensitively. Liza was enthusiastic, joining as my coeditor and helping craft the anthology’s explicit focus on hopeful, empowering and #ownvoices stories. And work on the book awakened my understanding of my own struggles with neurodivergence, particularly social anxiety disorder and autism.

The Neurodiversiverse has opened doors for us as not just editors but as people with our own struggles with neurodivergence, and we hope it has a similar impact on everyone who reads it. So please back our Kickstarter (accessible during the campaign via neurodiversiverse.com) where you can not only help us pay our authors, you can get a copy of the book and find out the answer to the question, “Would neurodiversity help in an encounter with aliens?”

You can find the Kickstarter here.

About the author: By day, Anthony Francis teaches robots to learn; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. His “Dakota Frost, Skindancer” urban fantasy series begins in the award-winning FROST MOON and continues in BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE. His latest novel is JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. He co-edited the anthology DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME and is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology THE NEURODIVERSIVERSE: ALIEN ENCOUNTERS; for more information check out neurodiversiverse.com . You can read more about Anthony’s words, art and science on his blog “The Library of Dresan” at dresan.com.

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