I love risotto not just for its texture but also for the variety of garden goodies that taste so delicious in it. Every time I teach a risotto workshop, the vegetables I bring vary: peas, asparagus, and rhubarb in a spring workshop; peppers, beans, and zucchini in a summer one; and winter squash, mushrooms, or frozen vegetables at the changing of the year. Summer provides so many homegrown options that it’s hard to choose. But as temperatures climb, it’s also hard to stand by the hot stovetop as the rice slowly absorbs stock.

I was thrilled to learn that restaurant chefs who need to get orders to tables faster than Arborio rice cooks have a technique that, when applied at home, reduces the heat in my kitchen: parcook the rice. One night of food prep that produces two dinners and minimizes my cooking time on night 2 is one of my favorite ways to beat summer’s heat. I explain how it works in this week’s Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon.

Learn more about parcooking rice and get the complete recipe for Two-Meal Garden Risotto in my column.

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Twice as Tasty

Cooking risotto in stages expands the dish’s flexibility. Sometimes I parcook the rice in the evening and go on to create a finished dish to eat straightaway, as I explain in my column. Sometimes I parcook the entire batch late at night or early in the morning, when the house is cool, and refrigerate everything for meals later in the week.

You can apply this meal-prep trick to incorporate seasonal vegetables, shellfish, and many other ingredients into your own “risotto of the day.” Mix and match some of the other risotto recipes on the blog for maximum variety.

• Shrimp and Green Vegetable Risotto
• Sunshine Risotto
• Winter Squash and Mushroom Risotto

You can find more recipes that pair seasonal vegetables and grains in the recipe index. You can also learn more about one prep for two meals in this blog post.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.