Episode 208: Risotto, Smitten Kitchen Everyday, and Our JoC Potluck

A few of the delicious treats listeners brought to the potuck

Bad news for conscientious home cooking. Hey, Whole Foods shoppers: That free range chicken may be anything but. Ugh, we have bought so much of this chicken. Perhaps it’s time to buy more of our birds from Primal Supply.

In our What’s for Dinner segment, we sing the praises of homemade risottos. This is Marisa’s favorite recipe. Joy loves Cook’s Illustrated’s butternut squash risotto recipe but it’s behind the paywall. Also recommended: The risotto method/recipe described in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

We’re totally smitten with a new cookbook: Deb Pearlman’s Smitten Kitchen Everyday. It has us running to the kitchen. Joy has already cooked this recipe twice with plans to make it a third time this week. It’s true that there are hundreds of terrific recipes on the Smitten Kitchen blog, but we are just fools for beautiful cookbooks and this one is pleasure to read for entertainment and info as well as to just plain cook straight out of.

So, we held our second Joy of Cooking potluck and guess what? It was even more fun than our first. A group of you listeners joined us to dig into so many delicious recipes from the book we probably wouldn’t have found on our on. Dishes included chicken cacciatore, savory leek pie, lentils with sausage, roasted cauliflower with golden raisins, curried rice with fruit and nuts, hacked tempeh, and kale with roasted delicata and pomegranate seeds.

We’re doing it again in January, and if you want in, tell us in the comments below to get on the invite list.

This week, we sing a love song to the soda stream. This one tool makes a big difference when it comes to have delicious nonalcoholic drinks at your finger tips.

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