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
Add the vegetable stock cube to the boiling water and stir in thoroughly.
Heat up a large frying pan over a medium heat, add 25g of the butter.
Once the butter has melted, add the onion and celery. Cook for 10 minutes until softened.
Stir in the rice, until the grains start to turn translucent at the edges.
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.
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.
Stir in the pumpkin puree and take off the heat. Place a lid on top and leave to rest for 5 minutes.
As the risotto rests, melt the other 25g of butter in a separate frying pan add the walnuts to toast.
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.
This was a guest blog post. Interested in blogging here?
Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?
Alas, I cannot pay, but if that does not dissuade you, here’s the guidelines.
Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.
Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.
I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:
Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
F&SF volunteer efforts you work with
Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.
When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)
Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. ???? Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"The Wayward Wormhole, a new evolution of writing workshops has arrived. And I’m here for it! Geared more towards intermediate speculative fiction writers, the application process doesn’t ask about demographics like some other workshops and focuses entirely on your writing. The television free Spanish castle made for an idyllic and intimate setting while the whole experience leaned more in the direction of bootcamp slumber party. Our heavy and constant workload was offset by the family style meals together with our marvelous instructors. The Wayward Wormhole is not for the faint of heart but if you’re serious about supercharging your writing, then this is the place to do it."
~Em Dupre
You may also like...
Guest Post: Score One for Music by B. Morris Allen, "¨Editor, Metaphorosis Books and Metaphorosis Magazine
What if prose were written like music? What if, instead, of a common world, stories in an anthology were steps on a share emotional path? Those are the questions the upcoming anthology Score is attempting to answer.
Emotions are a key part of our experience of art. The books that stick with you are often the ones that made you feel something. Even when we don’t recall the details of a plot (or painting, or movie), we’ll often recall how it made us feel. Even if you don’t recall the details of Watership Down, for example -“” the names of the rabbits, the original warren, etc. “” you probably remember how you felt about the rabbits and what happened to them. You remember how you felt when you closed the book. Even if you mislay every detail of a book, you’ll remember whether it made you laugh or cry or feel wistful.
Score is an attempt to tackle the emotional side of writing head on. A group of almost 20 authors set out not to write about robots or aliens or magic “” though we have all of those “” but to write from emotion.
What does that mean, and how does it work? It means, simply, that each of the authors worked from a coherent emotional score, knowing the emotions in the piece before and after theirs, what emotions they were to emphasize, and … nothing else. They had complete freedom of genre, topic, tone, approach, etc. “” so long as they worked with the emotions they were assigned. The result is a fascinating collection of stories with a distinct emotional progression.
Putting together the score was challenging. As the editor and ‘composer’, I defined fairly early on the emotions we would work with. I knew the direction I wanted to score to take – an overall path of ascending hope that I thought a good fit to the times “” but choosing emotional terminology that would work consistently across many different writers took some work.
In the end, we worked from a palette of six emotional ranges – six emotions with four variants each, two positive, two negative. For example, Hope ranges from Hope at the positive end to Despair at the negative end. These aren’t quite the emotional pairs used by social scientists, and we could have ended up with a wide range of others, but these six emotional ranges allowed ample scope for ups and downs. The emotions are loosely grouped into two sets – the Hope set (Hope, Curiosity, Awe) and the Joy set (Joy, Love, Lust).
Each writer was assigned a specific major and minor emotion, and the score has distinct movements. Using musical terms very approximately, there’s an Overture, a Hope triad, a Joy triad, a Bridge, a Joy triad inversion, a Hope triad inversion, and a Coda. There are high points and low points, but … spoiler alert… it all ends with Hope and Joy.
It’s been a lot of fun putting this together. While I personally often write from an emotional basis, putting together an entire score was an intriguing and challenging exercise. Each writer interpreted the task in their own way, putting their own distinct stamp on it, as artists will. The result is intriguing, and I hope will be as much of an adventure for readers as it was for all of us.
Guest Post: Jeffrey A. Carver on How I Ventured into Audiobooks and Lost My Shirt"”or Maybe Found It
Audiobooks are the current gold rush in publishing””or so they say, and you know “they” always know what they’re talking about. If you don’t get on the audiobook wagon, you are sure to lose out.
That might or might not be true. But one thing that is true, without a doubt, is that listening to a book narrated aloud is an experience unlike that of silently reading text. An audiobook can make or break a book for the listener. In the hands of a poor narrator, any book can be crushed. But in the hands of a skilled narrator, even humdrum text can take flight, and sparkling text can soar. The latter is an experience you might want to serve up to your readers. But if your publisher isn’t doing it, or you’re an indie writer and are your own publisher (I’ve been in both positions), how do you make it happen?
I’ve spent much of the last year getting some of my best work into audiobook, and I won’t kid you””it’s not easy. But you can do it. The landscape of audio publishing has changed quite a bit in the dozen or so years since my agent placed nine of my books with Audible, the 400-pound gorilla in the business. For that process, I didn’t have much to do beyond providing the text, except offer pronunciation guidance to the (Audible-chosen) narrators who asked. What I got from the deal was a mixed bag: some recordings I could be truly proud of, and others that made me wince.
As it happened, my best-known books were not part of that deal, because of the audiobook rights being held by my print publisher (who was not exercising them). It took years to get those rights reverted, and when the reversion came, it was just in time to miss a window of opportunity to get the books into Audible. Curses! Rotten luck!
Or… maybe not. Eventually, my failure to land The Chaos Chronicles at Audible (with a narrator chosen by them), led me to approach a narrator whose work I loved and admired””Stefan Rudnicki, a Grammy and Hugo-winning artist, whose natural voice is somewhere down in the frequency range of James Earl Jones’, and just as captivating.
Stefan liked the book I pitched to him, Neptune Crossing, and he secured a deal to have it recorded by him and published through Blackstone Audio. He did a great job, and Blackstone got it out in great shape, and all was grand. Except… it didn’t sell. Not very well, anyway. It’s a terrific audiobook (in my opinion), but it was the first and only book in the series. Who wants to buy the first book and find that there are no more? Approximately nobody, apparently.
Blackstone, discouraged by the sales, didn’t want to fund the rest of the series. I was on my own if I wanted the books that I considered some of my best work turned into audiobooks. Stefan was eager and willing. Stefan is also a top-tier narrator who works with a top-flight director and top-notch engineers. I could pay Stefan out of my own pocket, and the rights would be mine forever. My books tend to be long. The cost for finished recordings clocked out at around $4000-6000, per book. Eeek. It seemed impossible.
However, fortune seems to favor the foolish, because some unexpected funds came to me that made it possible to pay for books 2-4 in the series. And around the time those were finished, some different unexpected funds came in that enabled me to contract for Books 5-6, my recently published The Reefs of Time and Crucible of Time. I had spent eleven years writing these books, and after a career of working with traditional publishing, found myself without a publisher””and put them out myself, as my first self-published originals. They meant a lot to me. And so I made the choice””not an easy choice, mind you””to take some money that I might have used for other purposes, and invested it in having my books recorded.
That point bears repeating: the money was an investment in the future. An investment for my readers to have new ways to discover my story, and an investment in future earnings, even if the time to recoup my costs is measured in years.
Great, I can hear you thinking. How does this help me? Well, you might not have the particular good fortune of money coming just when you need it. But there are other ways to fund these projects. You might crowd-source the expense. You might find a narrator who’s newer and charges less, or is willing to record for a share of the royalties. The two major audiobook self-publishing platforms both offer ways to do this. There are avenues.
And that brings us to the second big question: Even if you get your audiobook recorded, how do you get it before an audience? You may already know that ACX.com and FindawayVoices.com are the two big players. But which do you want to work with, and why?
How about both?
I started out by leaning toward Findaway, mainly because they distribute to more than 40 stores, including Apple, Audible, Amazon, Google, Kobo, Nook, Overdrive (library sales!), and many more. ACX distributes to just Audible, Amazon, and Apple. Add to that Findaway’s 80% of net royalty rate, versus ACX’s 40% (if you go exclusive), and it seems like a no-brainer.
But maybe not. If you distribute through Findaway to ACX (which is how they distribute to Audible and Amazon), you only get 80% of the reduced nonexclusive royalty of 25% from ACX. For many people, Audible, Amazon, and Apple are where most of the sales come from, so that might not seem like such a good deal.
Personally, I lean strongly toward wider distribution, both for philosophical reasons and practicality. (I don’t want Amazon to control everything, and I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket.)Â So I went with Findaway for maximum distribution.
Uploading to Findaway is a pretty straightforward, if finicky, procedure. You learn right away if a chapter file flunks some fiddling technical specification. So you know when you’ve nailed it, and your book starts showing up pretty quickly, at least in stores like Apple, Nook, and the other big outlets.
But all was not rosy with the Audible/ACX distribution. The “ingesting” process is slowwww. Where things started going wrong was when it turned out that ACX has more exacting standards””not in quality, but in finicky attributes such as the exact amount of silence (room tone) at the beginning of a chapter, or the precise length of a sample. Two or three months can go by before you learn that your book failed acceptance at Audible. That’s a long time when you’re trying to rev up interest in a new book.
I finally came around to this: Submit your book to both places. At ACX, choose nonexclusive distribution. At Findaway, exclude Audible and Amazon from your distribution. It’s more work, but you get the widest possible distribution, you’ll be up at Audible much faster, and the royalty rate is better. You’ll also get a better reading of where your books are selling.
Support at ACX, in my experience, has generally been quite good. At Findaway it has ranged from meh to excellent.
Since last fall, I’ve released three books in audiobook format: Strange Attractors, The Infinite Sea, and Sunborn. Books 5-6, The Reefs of Time and Crucible of Time, are being prepared for fall 2020 release.
Has it brought me riches of sapphire and gold? What do you think? (The correct answer is no.) It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t know when I’ll break even, so in that respect as in many others, this is a labor of love. But it’s also a way to more richly present my stories to the widest possible audience. A way for folks in their cars, or at the gym, or walking their dogs to discover my work. It’s an investment in every conceivable meaning of the word. So, yes””a labor of love. But one that I hope will pay dividends for a long time down the galactic road.
JEFFREY A. CARVER has been writing character-driven hard science fiction/space opera since the 1970s and is still hard at it. His novel Eternity’s End was a finalist for the Nebula Award, and his Star Rigger novels and ongoing series The Chaos Chronicles have gained a wide and appreciative audience. Battlestar Galactica fans will enjoy his official novelization of the 2003 BSG Miniseries. Last year he published an epic two-volume novel, The Reefs of Time and Crucible of Time, which are widely available in ebook and print, and will be out in audiobook in the fall of 2020.
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.
