Thus Bakes Zarathustra

It arrived in the post today from Texas and I love it so much, I want to put up posters all around the neighbourhood. I first heard about Dansk Kobenstyle through The Kitchn, a site so well executed and so poorly named that, like Ralph Wiggum, it makes me happy and angry. Either way, I fell hard for the bright enamel colours, the cross lid, and the endearingly stumpy wooden handles, so I immediately went trawling on eBay. Next I want one of those wee lidded saucepans with the handle on the side and the little pouring lip, in red, and a casserole in yellow to intimidate the red Le Creuset my mum gave me for Christmas, and one of those lithe ewers, in turquoise, and soon I will have a house full of nothing but Dansk Kobenstyle and cats.

I decided to christen this beautiful motherfucking pan with a good old fashioned risotto, something I hadn’t has the chance to make in a long time. I’m unoriginal when it comes to risotto; pumpkin risotto is my thing, typically with sage, and typically in large quantities. When I went away to a small coastal camp with a friend’s band to take their picture while they recorded some music onto an album, it was my standard pumpkin and sage risotto I cooked from memory. For a long time whenever friends came around it was pumpkin and sage risotto I made, and no one complained because pumpkin and rice and sage and a variety of cheeses and slow cooking do something very good together.

Either way, I get the feeling many people agree with me. There’s a pumpkin risotto in the Jill Dupleix book I bought the other day, and another, similar pumpkin risotto in one of Valli Little’s books that I found on our shelf. I went with Valli Little’s version to try something new. She specified thyme in the original recipe, but we all know she meant sage.

I even bought a cleanskin to cook with, my first time cooking with wine ever, and I totally had some with dinner even though it turned out to be tooth-achingly sweet. I am one classy bitch.

Sage, pumpkin and goats cheese risotto in an awesome pan
Adapted from Valli Little. Serves four. I froze the leftovers.

• 500g butternut pumpkin, peeled cautiously and cut into 1cm-ish chunks (see photo below)
• An onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, smashed and chopped
• A bunch of thin asparagus, woody ends snapped, roughly chopped into big pieces
• A bunch of sage, leaves torn from the stalks, chopped
• 20g butter
• A slug of olive oil
• 250g arborio rice
• A palmful of grated parmesan, if you feel like it
• 110g goat cheese
• 1 litre vegetable stock
• 100ml white wine

Melt the butter in the pan over a low heat. Add the onions and cook until soft, around 2-3 minutes. Add pumpkin, sage and garlic and stir to coat, then stir in the wine. Cover and cook over a low heat for 10 minutes, until the pumpkin is very nearly cooked.

Meanwhile, bring the stock to a boil in a small saucepan, then reduce the heat to a low burbling simmer. Get out your ladle. Threaten someone with it. It’s fun.

Return to your pumpkin. I found all the butter had been soaked up by the pumpkin and onion and whatnot at this stage, so I added a slug of olive oil to give the rice its all-important fat coating. That’s what makes risotto good. That and electrolytes. Stir in the rice and make sure every little grain gets its coat of fat and flavour. Add the stock 1 ladleful at a time, allowing each to be absorbed by the rice before adding the next. Be sure to stir continuously. Right before you add the last ladleful of stock throw in the asparagus pieces. Keep stirring until the rice is cooked but still firm to bite. Take off the heat and stir in most of the goat cheese, keeping a little aside to sprinkle on the finished bowls. I also stirred in a handful of good measure.

Serve sprinkled with goat’s cheese and, if you like, a glass of truly nasty cleanskin wine.