The temperature has dropped a lot in the last couple of days so I felt that a bowl of creamy vegan mushroom risotto topped with garlicky mushrooms may be what the doctor ordered. Coupled with a good glass of wine, a pair of warm socks (my circulation isn’t in the job of keeping my extremities warm apparently! 😉 ), a cat on my lap and a good Netflix show this could easily be my Saturday evening sorted. Oh wait, I have no sofa to sit on – think again, Ania! Oh well, you get the gist! Mushroom risotto is the very definition of comfort food, isn’t it? It is usually Duncan that cooks it in our house as, ever since I’ve started this blog, I tend to cook all the meals and that’s one meal that he can make with his eyes closed, so I am not going to pass up this opportunity to be ‘cooked for’ for a change, am I?

Thinking about food and provisioning day in and day out is taxing and gets rather boring. Sometimes I wish I could offload some of it to my capable husband, but it’s just not that simple in practice. For starters, as opposed to Duncan, I know what’s in either of our two fridges at all times as I constantly shop for food for my recipe tests and photoshoots. Secondly, as I am the main cook, Duncan is always at a loss as to where everything is, so him cooking something new is me being asked about where every single bit of equipment he needs is and then him struggling to put it back in the right cupboard afterwards. Plus watching Duncan cook is like him watching me use a computer – we both get frustrated as we know that things could be done better and it is soooo hard not to correct someone sometimes.

This is when working from home isn’t so fantastic as your work life bleeds into your home life. I did not know that starting this blog means that I will end up doing all the cooking, every day for the rest of my life – it just makes more sense especially that sometimes my photoshoot or test cook IS our dinner. To be fair, Duncan does wash up so it’s not that bad, but like everybody, I do feel a little uninspired / cannot be bothered to cook AGAIN sometimes – honest truth!

So while Duncan is the risotto man in our house, he is quite traditional when it comes to cooking and when I first suggested adding miso to a mushroom risotto, it did not go down very well. I am not as afraid of breaking old-fashioned rules although, as you can tell by my recipes, I am not a wild child either. I like twists!

So this vegan mushroom risotto has a couple of my twists that you can take or leave – it’s up to you. I used miso paste in the place of some salt as it adds a lot of subtle flavour to the dish. To compensate for the cream that is often added to traditional risottos, I blended some of the rehydrated porcini with a handful of soaked cashews to create a wonderful porcini cream that reinforces the mushroom flavour and adds a little extra creaminess that some risotto eaters enjoy. Finally, I feel that the richness of this dish benefits from a little bit of acid. In the recipe I suggest balsamic vinegar as it works rather well with the other flavours, but I will let you in on a secret – I used a little bit of sauerkraut liquid instead 😛 to preserve the risotto’s golden colour as, no matter how good it is, I still need to make it look appetising (or no one will want to cook it) and with a pile of food in different shades of brown that’s more difficult that it sounds, trust me. Enjoy!