Mushroom Farro Risotto

We got a new stove! Pretty sweet. A big, ol' six-burner, KitchenAid professional range with a convection oven and some serious BTUs. Bruce is so excited, he can hardly contain himself.

He had to give it a test-drive last night, so he made an old favorite around here: pressure-cooker risotto.

Do you use a pressure cooker? Have you recently? I'd love to hear your comments--or fears. It's one of the best tools you can own. I can talk more about them, if you'd like. I'm almost as big an evangelist for pressure cookers as I am for goat!

Last night, he made our risotto, not with Arborio rice, but with farro, a whole-grain wheat, popular in Italy. There are varietals and even controversies among foodies about farro (see here). For this recipe, you want a short or medium grain--although the length of the grain is not of supreme importance to the success of this dish. However, note this: farro comes in "perlato" (pearled) varieties which is the whole-grain wheat equivalent to pearled barley as well as a "semi-perlato" (semi-pearled) variety, with the bran scored and more of those essential, whole-grain nutrients intact. Natch, we always choose the semi-perlato version. Perlato farro becomes too gummy in this technique.

There's not much more to this simple recipe. So let's fire up that stove.

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Escarole and Preserved Lemon Risotto

That banana layer cake and its seven-minute frosting were only the conclusion of our blow-out dinner party on Saturday night. We started out with a risotto I made following the technique in our new book, COOKING KNOW-HOW.

I often make the first courses, partly because I tend to go for foofier stuff than Bruce. He does sturdy dishes; I go for flights of fancy. Like this risotto.

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