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?
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Guest Post: Author Influences and Aha! Moments: The Evolution of Writing by S.G. Browne
Most writers can probably remember the moment when they realized that they wanted to become a writer. Maybe it was a story someone read to them when they were a child. Or a novel they read in junior high. Or the first time they wrote a poem or a short story for an English assignment in elementary school. Maybe they saw a play or a film and felt inspired to write their own script. Or wrote an article for their high school newspaper. Or took a writing class in college.
Everyone has their Aha! moment. An epiphany that sends them down a path of words and characters and plots, that takes them on a journey of creativity and self-doubt and soul-crushing rejection. Not to mention years of emotional therapy.
That moment for me happened in the late fall of 1985, during the first semester of my sophomore year in college. I’d been introduced to The Stand by Stephen King the previous summer and devoured the novel while on a family vacation. I didn’t read much as a kid. I was allergic to libraries and would rather play outside or watch TV. Books were an afterthought or a requirement for high school American and Western Lit classes. Although I did enjoy Vonnegut. And Lord of the Flies remains near the top of my list of Desert Island Books (irony noted). But after reading The Stand, I was hooked.
So I picked up a few more of King’s novels, along with novels by Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, F. Paul Wilson, and John Saul, among others. All horror writers, all the time. I’d fallen in love with reading and I couldn’t imagine my life without books. But there came a moment when I was in the middle of The Talisman by King and Straub that I became so caught up in the adventure unfolding within the pages of the story that the world outside of the novel ceased to exist. It was something I’d never experienced before. Not with The Stand or any other of the books I’d read. And it was such an amazing and exhilarating moment that I thought: I want to make someone feel like this.
So I took some writing classes and I kept reading. When I graduated, I got a job to pay the bills and wrote short stories in my spare time, sending them out to magazines in the hopes of having them published. The stories were all of the supernatural horror variety, of course. And the influence of the books I’d read, especially the novels of King and Straub, loomed large on my writing. They were, after all, the impetus for my wanting to become a writer.
Over the next decade, I wrote dozens of short stories along with three novels. While I managed to get a dozen of the stories published, the pay didn’t amount to much. And although I received positive feedback on my novels, none of them found an agent or a home. Writing soon became a grind, the joy replaced by discouragement, and I started to question whether or not continuing along this path was something that I wanted to do. Cue the self-doubt.
Soon after, in October 2002, I was browsing the books at my local bookstore in preparation for another trip and came across the novel Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. I’d seen the movie Fight Club and loved it, and Lullaby was a supernatural horror-satire with a premise that sounded fun. So I bought a copy and put it in my backpack for the flight.
Have you ever read the first few pages of a novel or a short story and had to go back and reread them immediately because they spoke to you in a way that no story has ever spoken to you before? Suddenly an idea forms in your head. Except it’s more than just an idea. It’s an awareness. A realization that you have this story inside of you but you never knew it was waiting to be told until that moment.
That’s what happened to me in the first five minutes of that airplane flight, reading the opening pages of Lullaby. I’d written previous supernatural horror stories with elements of dark comedy and social satire but had never considered expanding any of them into a novel-length form. The idea had never occurred to me. But the dark comedy and social satire in Lullaby spoke to me in a way that straight supernatural horror no longer did.
So I read more Palahniuk. Around that same time, I discovered the comedic fantasy books of Christopher Moore (Lamb and Bloodsucking Fiends). Together, the influence of their books had an enormous impact on my writing. Where King and Straub had made me realize that I wanted to become a writer, Palahniuk and Moore made me realize what I wanted to do as a writer.
When I finally sat down to flesh out my darkly comedic short story “A Zombie’s Lament” that I’d written a year earlier, I discovered the joy of writing again. More than that, I discovered my voice. And that voice helped me to write Breathers, my fourth novel and first published novel, which came out in 2009.
I wrote four more novels after that, all of them dark comedy and social satire with a supernatural, speculative, or fantastic element. In addition to Palahniuk and Moore, I continued to read King and Straub but added other writers to my diet, including Gaiman, Pratchett, and Hiaasen, who all helped my writing to evolve. But Palahniuk and Moore were the catalyst for the writer I had become.
Then around 2014-2015, I discovered the short story collections of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, specifically St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Get in Trouble. This discovery created a third shift in my writing and I found myself exploring ideas and stories and characters that I never would have considered writing about before. Not only did the stories of Russell and Link inspire me to write a number of my own short stories, but they also helped me to bring more balance to my writing.
Although all of my novels and many of my previous short stories included female characters who featured prominently in the plot, none of the women played the role of the main protagonist. Half of the 14 stories in my new collection, Lost Creatures, are told from a female POV””including a ten-year-old Japanese girl, a college zombie, and a time-jumping alcoholic. And they are some of my favorite stories I’ve ever written.
Over the course of my creative career, dozens of writers have had an impact on my writing, influencing and inspiring me. And while my writing wouldn’t be the same without the existence of every single one of those writers, the books and words written by these six authors found me at the right time and had the most significant impact on the formation and the evolution of my writing.
BIO: S.G. Browne is the author of the novels Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard, Big Egos, and Less Than Hero, as well as the short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel and the heartwarming holiday novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus. He’s also the author of The Maiden Poodle, a self-published fairy tale about anthropomorphic cats and dogs suitable for children and adults of all ages. His new short story collection, Lost Creatures, is a blend of fantasy, science fiction, dark comedy, and magical realism. He’s an ice cream connoisseur, Guinness aficionado, and a cat enthusiast. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, check out his website at www.sgbrowne.com, or learn more about his new collection Lost Creatures.
Guest Post: M. H. Thaung Discusses How and Why Do People Make Bad Decisions?
When I read or write fiction, I like seeing characters make bad decisions and then deal with the consequences. However, if they make those decisions for implausible reasons, they can appear silly or inconsistent rather than attracting sympathy. If they’re forced into decisions because of overwhelming external factors, they may come across as lacking agency. In both cases, the decision seems made purely to further the plot rather than arising naturally. For me, the sweet spot is when readers can appreciate straight off (or shortly afterwards) that a character has made a misstep with likely repercussions, but it’s understandable why they ended up in that situation.
In my day job in a pathology lab, mistakes can have serious, even fatal, consequences. We try our hardest to minimise them as well as spotting and correcting them as early as possible. When (not if””we’re human, after all) a mistake happens, we investigate the reasons and see what we can do to prevent a repeat. Additionally, at corporate level, we are expected to attend courses on how to make systems safer. Such training can be a chore, but for me it has one significant plus: it’s fertile ground for ideas about where characters may go wrong.
I’d like to share here how I set up my characters’ unforced errors, allowing them to make plot-influencing mistakes in a realistic manner. The concepts aren’t new, but using risk management ideas helps me to flesh out details. This isn’t an academic treatise, so I have cherry-picked knowledge from workshops on error, mandatory training and general wider reading. Also, the definition of “wrong” in this context might be fluid, but I’d view it as something suboptimal for the character’s intentions (and interesting for the reader).
First, I think about the character’s environment and what real-life factors might lead the character in the wrong direction. What kinds of flawed reasoning might the character(s) use, and why? And what organisational/social factors might create an environment where it’s easy to make mistakes?
Human errors
The Health and Safety Executive (http://www.hse.gov.uk) categorises human failures as errors (unintended actions or decisions) or violations (intentional deviation from a rule or procedure). The latter is a common trope in stories, with the protagonist deliberately acting against authority in order to achieve a greater good, often with an awareness that such behaviour will incur a cost. I’ll concentrate on the former.
One type of error is the slip or lapse, where a habitual or familiar task is for some reason not completed as planned. Such tasks need little concentration to perform correctly: for example, driving home, cooking dinner, tying up the fiftieth captive in a row. It’s difficult to predict when a slip or lapse might occur. Factors such as time pressure or distractions increase the risk. In fiction writing, we could imagine a situation where a character’s routine is derailed slightly by a distraction or being in a hurry. Such a lapse (e.g. leaving keys on the table by the cell) could have knock-on consequences.
The other type of error is the mistake. This involves a wrong judgement or decision made with conscious thought (in the “attentional control mode”), and it leads to a wrong action. Such errors often occur in situations that are unfamiliar. Whether or not we appreciate the newness of the situation, we might try to apply known rules. For example, a character might eat (or feed another character) a poisonous herb because it looks like a beneficial one.
Added to the above, our decision-making is often influenced by different types of bias (i.e. a subjective preference for or against something without firm evidence).
Flavours of bias include:
Anchoring bias. When there are several options available, anchoring bias is the tendency to lock on to a specific option, and to fail to reconsider when subsequently given evidence against it. Often the favoured option is first (or early) in the list, and items in the middle of the list receive less attention. Thus, the order in which options are presented may influence the decision. An example of this in fiction might be a murder mystery when the detective identifies a likely suspect early on. Further clues point more strongly towards other people, but the detective brushes those aside until faced with an unpleasant shock (such as a second murder when the favoured suspect is in custody).
Cognitive overload bias. If someone is presented with more information than they can reasonably process, they are forced to ignore some of it. This means that they may make a decision without considering all the relevant information (because they were focussed on other factors).
Of course, decision-making doesn’t occur in isolation. In fiction (as in real life), individuals will have multiple concerns, personal agendas, interpersonal conflicts and other problems that can add deliciously to their challenges.
Organisational factors
People don’t function or make decisions in isolation. There are aspects of their environment that may hamper them””or, alternatively, that they could manipulate in order to get their way.
One point to stress about the organisation (tribe, crew, social system etc) that a character functions in is that the organisation’s prime purpose is generally not to make the character’s life difficult. That said, there are real-life organisations where the environment doesn’t facilitate good decision-making: not because of maliciousness, but because the setup is poor. Several examples are discussed in The Blunders of Our Governments by King and Crewe. I’ve picked a few concepts from the book which can complicate life for fictional characters.
Group-think. In a group of people tasked with an objective, maintaining the group’s cohesion by avoiding disagreement may become more important than raising concerns. Nobody wants to be “that person”, and so everyone remains silent about an obvious problem that could be easily anticipated. Our hapless character may be on the receiving end of a bad decision by such a group. Alternatively, he or she might have been part of such a group, witness the fallout of the bad decision and feel obliged to deal with the consequences. As an example, in my first book A Quiet Rebellion: Guilt, my main character (Jonathan) tentatively suggests to the Chief Scientist that some of her reasoning has been wrong. She’s built her career on her research, and she’s not going to hear him out””and her colleagues don’t seem inclined to contradict her.
[Chief Scientist Lady Nelson says] “… She must have ventured outside the city walls on some escapade. Don’t you agree?”
“Ah, I don’t think so, ma’am.” Jonathan squared his shoulders. She wasn’t going to like this. “I believe there are historical accounts””””
“Pah, historians!” Lady Nelson scowled and shook her head. “All they do is dig through old stories without paying any attention to real world data. History is all very well for looking at how society developed, but not for finding out how the world really works. We do not deal in fairytales, Captain Shelley.”
Cultural disconnect. “Everyone projects on to others his or her lifestyles, preferences and attitudes.” (From King and Crewe). Cultural disconnect arises when a group (usually in power) assumes that others can and will think and react similarly to them, including holding the same values. It’s easy to imagine a fictional character being the one imposed upon, or trying to find some way to translate superiors’ orders into a language that’s meaningful on the shop floor. Sticking with Jonathan, he’s now reporting back to the Council in the capital about how his tour of the rural settlements went. Chief Councillor Hastings asks how the new regulations were received. Jonathan has an internal grumble that the documents are written in bureaucratese, but replies:
“The settlements remain vigilant and are familiar with current official advice.”
[Hastings nods] “Good. Nice to know they pay attention to those notices we send out.”
Hastings isn’t trying to make things difficult, but his casual comment (compounded by Jonathan’s unwillingness to complain) suggests he doesn’t expect there to be a problem. His concern is that the rurals remain willing to cooperate, not whether they can understand him.
Operational disconnect. This is a gap between those who devise plans or policies, and those whose job it is to implement them. In fiction, this might risk becoming a simplistic plot device where those in charge make unreasonable demands of a character, purely to force a plot-convenient challenge and conflict. However, if there is clarity over why the plans were thought to be reasonable (not necessarily fully played out on page), the challenge feels less artificial. In the Council meeting above, Jonathan reports how a rural mayor made a mistake (based on wrong implementation of one of the regulations), but he glosses over things in the telling. After all, he already yelled at the mayor at the time, and there’s no point in escalating things. Unfortunately, Jonathan’s reprimand leads the mayor to overcompensate in the other direction. When news of the second incident reaches Jonathan, he partly blames himself, but he was caught between the instructions of the Council and the practicalities of the settlements.
Round up
I believe that that characters’ poor decisions feel more compelling if there are on-page or behind-the-scenes reasons leaving them vulnerable to making mistakes. The concepts discussed above aren’t new, and writers are no doubt using them already. I offer them here as an additional set of tools. I use them to brainstorm how to bridge the gap between what a character would rationally do and what I (as the character’s creator) need to happen.
Author bio for M. H. Thaung M.H. Thaung was born in Scotland and has moved progressively southwards throughout her career in pathology, ending up in a biomedical research institute in London, England. (As a staff member, not a specimen!) She loves her job and academic writing, with dozens of scientific publications over the last couple of decades. More recently, she has ventured into speculative fiction to discover what might happen if the world worked a little differently.
She’s currently working on A Quiet Rebellion: Posterity, the final novel in her Numoeath mannerpunk trilogy. A Quiet Rebellion: Guilt and A Quiet Rebellion: Restitution were released last year.
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.
