Make a risotto with wild flavours of boar and mushroom and homegrown salad garnish.
Wild boars are pretty terrifying creatures. But the meat they produce is so incredibly rich, wild and flavoursome that you’d be a fool not to try some. The smoky meat works perfectly with rich, earthy mushrooms, cream and wonderful punchy cheese.
I bought my wild boar salami from Local Roots in Wycombe, who stock meat from the Real Boar Co.
Ingredients
Serves six
250g wild boar salami
6 large white onions
4 cloves garlic
4 large open-cap mushrooms
700g mixed mushrooms (the more unusual and flavoursome, the better)
20g dried porcini mushrooms
1 cup chicken stock (fresh if possible: it’s so much tastier)
600ml milk
100ml white wine
500g arborio rice
300ml double cream
50g Parmesan cheese
Parsley
1 tbsp sugar
Knob of butter
Olive oil
1 tbsp pesto
Fresh basil
Peashoots or other leafy green salad
1. Cut the onions chunkily and fry in a flameproof casserole dish in butter with the sugar and crushed garlic until brown and caramelised.
2. At the same time, cut the large mushrooms into quarters, and slice the smaller mushrooms. Heat some olive oil in a saucepan and fry all the mushrooms bar the porcini with a liberal sprinkling of parsley until they are browned. This brings out their flavours.
3. Throw all the mushrooms (except the porcini) in to the casserole dish with the onions along with the arborio rice and a little more parsley. Stir until mixed well, then add the milk, white wine and chicken stock. Bring to the boil before putting in the oven at 180 degrees for half an hour. Check every so often to ensure the rice has enough liquid.
4. Meanwhile, rehydrate the porcini mushrooms in a bowl of water for half an hour. Cut the salami into chunks and fry very quickly in the same pan that cooked the mushrooms.
5. Once the rice has expanded fully, bring the dish on to the heat on the hob and add the cream, the salami and the porcini mushrooms.
6. Serve the risotto, sprinkling the grated Parmesan over the top, garnishing with basil shoots and a few drops of pesto. A light salad of peashoots works perfectly with this dish.
Salad challenge week 24
I’ve got peashoots coming out of my ears currently, and so this dish gave me the perfect opportunity to gobble a few more of them up. I’m also pinching the tops out of peas that have reached the peak of their supports on the balcony, which gives me even more soft, lush, juicy foliage to eat. What a shame.
This week I sowed
Komatsuna, peashoots
Find out more about the 52-week salad challenge here. Don’t forget to follow others taking part in the salad challenge on twitter using the hashtag #saladchat. And if you don’t have your own blog but want to write a post about your own experience of the challenge, then use our Your Blogs section
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