Barley, oops, Regular Risotto

A while back, Brandon decided he wanted to start experimenting with barley, so he found a few great sounding recipes from the Food Network site. While going through our collection of recipes trying to decide what to make this week, I came across this one for Barley Risotto with Roasted Winter Vegetables.

We headed to Trader Joe's, assuming barley would be easy to find there. Eh, not so much. We picked up some of the other ingredients, including the butternut squash, and figured we'd find the barley somewhere else. For some reason, B is totally opposed to Whole Foods (he claims the people who shop there are too douchey) so we only looked at Albertson's, to no avail. He gave up very easily and decided to adjust the recipe just using arborio rice instead. To my surprise, the rice had less calories than the barley.

We doubled the recipe so we could eat it all week. Other changes:

• omitted celery root
• used kale instead of mustard greens
• used frozen chunks of butternut squash
• added sun dried tomatoes
• added some red pepper flake and garlic salt
• only used a maybe 4 tablespoons of olive oil to sauté the onion and roast the carrots and squash, rather than the 8 tablespoons

Also, B has some aversion to not having any meat at all in his meal, so he decided to throw in one sausage, finely diced. In a bit of a callback to last week's jambalaya, we were very excited to find a chicken andouille at Trader Joe's. We actually bought it to use in this recipe for breakfast Sunday morning (it was soooooo good), so we had some leftovers. [Side note: He took them out of the package and put them in a baggy, but he claims they were only 160 cals each, so I choose to believe him.]

Here's a pic of the incredible final product:



It was insanely delicious. I am a huge fan of butternut squash to begin with, and it really added a great little zing. Brandon is not much of a fan, and feels that it would have been better had we used fresh and roasted it with the skin on rather than frozen. The kale has also become a fave of mine; many props to Julie for introducing it to us. We put it in a soup a couple weeks ago, and it was just as good in this meal. It stays firm and crisp, and the flavor is a bit spicy. Unfortunately, B has a problem cutting it up, though, so the pieces are WAYYYY too big. However, that's the one and only complaint I have about this meal. I am still very curious how this would taste with the barley instead, but I guess the selling point on the barley would be the nutrition rather than the flavor.

According to my calculations, this actually turned out to have less calories than listed on the recipe, coming in at around 315 per serving. This was despite the added sausage! The one and a half cup servings aren't huge, but I found it very filling.

Brandon always says that he doesn't understand why people fear risotto and seem to think it's complicated or difficult, when all it takes is a lot of stirring. Don't be afraid to give it a shot! I even helped with the stirring for a while. Super easy!