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Fake chicken and red capsicum risotto

Tuesday, 18 February, 2003

It's not in every job that you can walk in on a Monday, ask for the Tuesday and the Wednesday off and have your manager grant it to you. But that's exactly what's happened to me! So I am going down to a place near Bendalong today, tonight and tomorrow with the girls on staff at ECU.

They have asked me and Miriam to prepare lunch so I've made chicken and red capsicum risotto. Ben doesn't reckon it's “real” risotto (???) so I guess I should call it “Fake chicken and red capsicum risotto”. I amended it from a recipe I found in a Maggi cookbook. I thought I'd share it with you with my instructions. Ben and I usually aren't very good at cooking without really specific directions so if you're like us, I think you'll appreciate this:

Servings: 4-6
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes

• oil
• 500g chicken cubed
• 1 onion finely chopped
• 1 1/2 cups long grain rice or Arborio rice
• 1 pkt Maggi Chicken Noodle Soup Mix (but Continental Chicken Noodle Soup mix does the job just as well. In fact, usually I don't use ANY Maggi products to make this dish)
• 3 cups water
• 1 red capsicum cut little pieces (the recipe book says to skin and roast it but I never bother)
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 cup grated cheese (preferably parmesan but I use Coon Tasty)
• freshly ground black pepper
• 2 tbsp chopped parsley

Wash and drain arborio/long grain rice about three times or until there is not as much white gluggy stuff coming off the rice. If you have a rice cooker, put the rice in the rice cooker with the 3 cups of water and the chicken noodle soup mix. Set to cook. If you don't have a saucepan, combine the rice, water and chicken noodle soup mix in a saucepan and get a friend to watch and stir it so it doesn't stick to the bottom and burn. Then go out and buy a rice cooker because it's much easier than standing up for twenty minutes while your rice is completely ruined.

Cover the bottom of your frying pan with oil and fry onions on high. I've discovered that frying them on a high heat (about 6 on our electric frypan) makes them go nice and translucent and soft (I hate crunchy onions in my food). Once the onions have become like that, turn down the heat a little (to 4 or 5 on our electric frypan) and add the chicken. Keep pushing it around the pan until it's cooked or almost cooked. (Ben once worked with a lady who reckons that Australians always overcook their chicken. She liked plump and juicy more than dry and stringy.) Once the chicken is cooked, add the capsicum and fry until that's cooked.

If you're still waiting for the rice to finish cooking, turn the heat down to low. (You can grate cheese in the meantime. I also go out and cut some parsley off my temperamental parsley plant.) Once the rice is done, add it to the pan and mix everything up. Then sprinkle cheese, black pepper, chopped parsley and the lemon juice all over it and mix it all up so that everything is evenly distributed all through the risotto.

(This approach is heaps better than the cookbook's which tells you to do stupid things like remove the chicken from the pan once you've cooked it and simmer the arborio/longrain rice with the onion, soup mix and water before returning the chicken and capsicum to the pan. I tried it that way once and the rice took FOREVER to cook and turned out crunchy.)

Hope the ECU girls like it! Will be back to blog in two days.

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