Orzo Risotto

For my first cooking experience I choose to try to make orzo risotto (p. 142 softcover) .  I have always really liked risotto and I think it makes a great side dish with pretty much anything.   When I saw the recipe in the book I knew it was something I wanted to try and make.  The recipe also doesn’t call for a ton of ingredients and the estimated cooking time was about 20 minutes so I figured it would be a good place to start.  I made a few small modifications to the recipe including leaving out the parsley leaves and I used olive oil instead of butter.

            

There were three things that I found difficult while making the Risotto.  Number one being that when I went to the grocery store I could not find any “small” onions and so I was not quite sure how much of my large onion to put in.  I also needed to mince the onion and it would have been helpful to have gone to lab before I tried to cut the onion because I didn’t quite know what I was doing.  But I ended up just putting a small amount of onion in. 

The next issue I had was that I ended up cooking the onions too long and they turned brown.  I’m not sure how much of an issue this really is but it wasn’t very appealing looking.  The last thing was that I didn’t quite keep track of how long the orzo was cooking in the chicken stock and it took longer then I expected for it to soak up the broth like the recipe says so the orzo seemed over cooked.

Overall the risotto did not taste like I had expected.  It was fairly bland and tasted like mushy noodles with cheese.  I think it needed some more flavor such as garlic or more pepper.  It was not bad though and it did go pretty well with my broccoli that night.