It made the risotto more interesting -- the most interesting part, to be honest. I've had better pumpkin/squash risotto recipes; this one tried to be very fancy by pre-cooking half the squash in water to form a puree and frying the other half to caramelise it, then just adding it a few minutes before the rice was cooked. It works much better when you actually cook the squash in with the rice (I even used the drained-off cooking water in with the rabbit stock, but it didn't have the same effect).
Toasted walnuts are nice, though. Apparently the Americans sugar-glaze them ('candied walnuts') before adding them to risotto, but then Americans seem to use bizarrely large quantities of sugar in everything.
Facebook has been showing me American dessert recipes, and when you convert the quantities from the relatively small-sounding 'cups', because sugar is so heavy relative to its volume you realise you're being asked to make a pie filling with something like eight ounces of sugar in it... "Chocolate cobbler" sounded appealing, until I looked at the quantities and realised it wasn't just 5oz sugar in the main mixture, but another 7oz sugar in the topping -- a couple of weeks' worth of sugar in a single dessert! And even "Water pie", supposedly a super-economical recipe from the Great Depression, involves 5 tablespoons of butter and 7oz sugar in addition to all the ingredients required for a large pie-crust -- a very big change from the English economy recipes I've been baking that rely on beetroot to save on sugar and potatoes to save on fat and flour. The chocolate pudding from a few days ago had one ounce of fat and one and a half ounces of sugar to eight ounces of grated vegetables and six ounces of flour... and was still very moist and tasty after being steamed for a couple of hours. I'm pretty sure I've got a 'self-saucing' pudding in the National Trust cookbook that is similar to the 'cobbler', because I remember accidentally putting twice too much water in it and still getting successful results -- and I'm pretty sure the proportions are nothing like the US ones!
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Toasted walnuts are nice, though. Apparently the Americans sugar-glaze them ('candied walnuts') before adding them to risotto, but then Americans seem to use bizarrely large quantities of sugar in everything.
Facebook has been showing me American dessert recipes, and when you convert the quantities from the relatively small-sounding 'cups', because sugar is so heavy relative to its volume you realise you're being asked to make a pie filling with something like eight ounces of sugar in it... "Chocolate cobbler" sounded appealing, until I looked at the quantities and realised it wasn't just 5oz sugar in the main mixture, but another 7oz sugar in the topping -- a couple of weeks' worth of sugar in a single dessert! And even "Water pie", supposedly a super-economical recipe from the Great Depression, involves 5 tablespoons of butter and 7oz sugar in addition to all the ingredients required for a large pie-crust -- a very big change from the English economy recipes I've been baking that rely on beetroot to save on sugar and potatoes to save on fat and flour. The chocolate pudding from a few days ago had one ounce of fat and one and a half ounces of sugar to eight ounces of grated vegetables and six ounces of flour... and was still very moist and tasty after being steamed for a couple of hours. I'm pretty sure I've got a 'self-saucing' pudding in the National Trust cookbook that is similar to the 'cobbler', because I remember accidentally putting twice too much water in it and still getting successful results -- and I'm pretty sure the proportions are nothing like the US ones!