Cooking is hard

PSA: You should read instructions on new ingredients that you’ve never used to cook with before. Trust me.

Let me just start by saying that I can’t cook. I know how to make Maggi (it’s an Indian version of Ramen, only better), some kinds of eggs, pasta (you can buy the sauce ready-made so boiling pasta isn’t very hard), and I have successfully made a risotto twice now. I’ve only recently started cooking and I was really excited about my risotto being edible, so obviously I wanted to make it when my mother and brother came back to visit. 

Now the thing you have to know about risotto is that it’s similar to making rice, except instead of boiling the rice in water, you cook the rice by slowly adding cups of broth and waiting until the rice absorbs it all. My mother does not eat chicken because she doesn’t like how it tastes anymore. I have only ever made risotto with chicken broth. I could not make it with chicken broth this time. This is where everything went wrong. 

After scouring the earth for vegetable broth (seriously grocery stores really don’t stock vegetable broth) we found one that was a concentrate. Except I didn’t read that it was a concentrate and that there was a water to broth ratio that I needed to use. So I might have used the entire bottle for 3 cups of the risotto rice… it was almost a liter of broth. So after stirring and stirring and stirring (you have to stir the broth into the rice) I had to try the rice to see if it was properly cooked or needed more broth/water. So I tried the rice and realized that it was really salty… but I hadn’t added any salt to it yet. I didn’t think much of it, added some water, and continued to stir. I only noticed just how salty it was when I had other people try it, and their expressions gave it all away, mostly the scrunching of faces and the little “oh” that followed.

I then started to try to fix this train wreck of a risotto. Apparently, potatoes soak up the extra salt from things, so we cut a potato and put it in the risotto, and then I kept adding water in hopes that it would somehow dilute the saltiness of the risotto. Unfortunately, nothing helped. So we had sandwiches for dinner :)

The point of all this being, you should read instructions and recipes really carefully and when you’re using things you haven’t used before to cook with, you should read its content. It’s safe to say that the next time I make risotto with vegetable broth, I will be reading its salt content and trying the food much more often as I cook it. Or maybe I just won’t cook anything again, we’ll see. 

Until next time, 

Sanj.