The Fuzzy Chef & Friends

For my second trick, I taught how to make a more complicated, "company" risotto for entertaining or special evenings. This one involves a lot more work, primarily because of the requirement to separately prepare a lot of the ingredients and the "stir continuously" rice cooking method.   In the picture above, it's the yellow one.  Click through for recipe.

This is the first of the two risottos we made for the class, to demonstrate the easy, low-attention way of making risotto, for weeknights when both you and your sweetie are tired and you can't deal with a high-attention dish.  It's the dark-colored of the two risottos above.  Pictures of the cooking steps supplied by Matt Sonic!  Click through for recipe.

Christmas Eve was very different from Thanksgiving as far as cooking was concerned this year.  Thanksgiving dinner I had planned out 2 weeks in advance.  Christmas, I was still thinking about things on Monday.  So it didn't throw me much when dinner had to be revised and revised.  Also, we had a surprisingly "white Christmas" for Oregon; it snowed nonstop for several days, which is a rarity for Medford.  So what did all of this snow make me think of?  Why, sunny Brazil and Spain, of course!