What's All This About Risotto?

I never got the whole deal about risotto on cooking shows.  Come on.  It's rice.

Then I found a recipe I wanted to try that happened to use it.  It wasn't a bad price, so I figured, "Why not?"  And let me tell you: My life will never be the same.

Arborio rice is the color in land of Oz.  It's the marshmallows in Lucky Charms.  It's the unexpected snow day.  It's the still-wrapped, whole crayon in a box of broken ones.  It's the spiral slide on an ordinarily dull playground.  Put simply, Arborio rice straight-A student of the rice family.

When I was first trying to figure out how to cook the stuff, I looked at a number of recipes for the basics.  One commonality was that almost all of them were seemingly apologetic for the amount of work that went into making risotto.  When it comes down to it though, it's not that much.  Really.  Trust me.  Basically, you just add liquid every few minutes as the rest of the liquid gets sucked up by the rice.  The creamy texture and flexibility of flavoring is worth every carbohydrate (if you care about such things).

Suffice it to say, I get it now.  My culinary world will never be the same.