Oven-baked Butternut Squash and Rosemary Risotto

This risotto is a rustic, weeknight supper kind of a dish, not for an elegant dinner or to impress somebody with your culinary skills. But it isn’t quite as unsophisticated as it looks; alongside the butternut squash and sprigs of rosemary it has a few hidden secrets, more of which later.

As a baked risotto this is definitely not an authentic recipe, but it is the only sort that you can bung in the oven and ignore while you sit on the sofa finishing off those last bits of Easter egg. Personally I think I have reached the stage of being pretty much done with chocolate for the six weeks or so. First there were those chocolate kiwiberries, then a bit of neat chocolate (a sample of all three colour varieties) and last night we rounded it all off by making Bill Granger’s Molten Chocolate Puddings. If you too are so over all that chocolate then this is the perfect antidote; simple, wholesome and very savoury.

Anyway, back to those hidden secrets. Nearly invisible from the photo but very strong on flavour are a few dried porcini mushrooms and hint of truffle oil. And if you look really closely, you might just be able to see that this is a risotto made with brown rice. What on earth was I thinking I hear you ask? Well two things really. First, brown rice has that great nutty flavour which is fabulous with those strong flavours like the rosemary and the porcini mushrooms. Second, brown rice is a wholegrain, and white rice isn’t.

It is a bit confusing this wholegrain business but in the most basic sense wholegrains are foods made from the whole grain. For example, whole grain cereal flakes are made by taking entire grains (starchy endosperm, germ and bran and all – see wikipedia for a picture) and squashing them very hard to make big flat flakes. In the case of rice, brown rice is the whole grain version and white rice has been milled or ‘polished’, removing some of the nutritious outer coating. Not polishing the rice keeps the bran on the outside, making the rice much higher in fibre, and keeps the part of the grain that has all of those lovely B vitamins in it (you need those for lots of different things but largely to release energy from the food you eat so that your body can use it). Oh and it leaves the rice with much more flavour, did I mention that?

This recipe is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this time by Anh of Food Lover’s Journey. If a risotto doesn’t float your boat to recover from some of those seasonal chocolate excess then I’m sure there will be plenty of other ideas in the round-up, or if not I point you towards the chocolate offsetting calculator, as thoughtfully recommended to me by Nick over at The Tracing Paper.