Tyranny of the Calendar

We were very pleased with how the shrimp & asparagus risotto turned out.   We'd asked Marian over for the 4th, so Lynn made the barbecue shrimp that her daughter loves.  Then she took the shells and made a fabulous shrimp stock.  What to do with it?  She suggested a risotto and thought that asparagus would complement nicely.  I told Marian I'd make some if she & Josie could come over one evening before my next trip to DC.

Now that Josie is spending two weekends a month with her Daddy, the scheduling is getting more complicated.  This is particularly the case now that my travel schedule has once again become ridiculous.  I've been able to take it for granted these past two years that if I was in town on a weekend, it was more than likely that I'd be able to pick up Josie in the morning and spend much of the day with her.  I didn't really have to make time to see her and her Mom.  And that was more of a luxury than I realized.

A couple of years ago I tried to institute a rule that would restrict me to one out of town trip a month, and for awhile I was able to do a pretty good job of it.  It helped to give me a bit of discipline to turn down some invitations.  This year, though, I've had to abandon the rule altogether. 

When I got back from the annual MLA meeting at the end of May, I was anticipating a fairly relaxed summer.  I didn't have any work travel planned at all -- there'd be the trip to Wisconsin at the end of June to see my Mom and my siblings, and a beach weekend with Queenie & Bispo in the middle of July.  Nothing else until the end of August.

Then the roundtable thing came up, with four meetings in DC between mid-June and early August.  A big commitment, but not something I was going to turn down.  Then Lynn's dad decides to get married in the middle of August, so that's another weekend gone.  And, as (un)luck would have it, the couple of remaining weekends that I'll be home coincide with the weekends that Josie will be gone.  Hence the need to pay more attention to scheduling, which is how I ended up making shrimp & asparagus risotto for four on a Tuesday night.

I do love making risotto, though.  I learned the basic preparation from Jack Bishop's Complete  Italian Vegetarian Cookbook a few years ago.  (I have several of his cookbooks and the thing I love about them is not just that they have great recipes, but that I learn things from him that I can then use to make up my own stuff).  I browsed the web for a bit looking at risotto recipes that used shrimp and asparagus and figured out how I wanted to put it together.  When I got home, Josie & Marian were already there, so I got everything prepped, and then when Lynn got home, it was a simple matter of assembling everything and doing the gentle stirring that makes cooking risotto such a wonderfully relaxing and restorative process.

Josie liked it once her mom got her to eat some.  She can be persuaded to try most foods, but she never eats very much.  She's always trying to negotiate with her mom over how many bites she has to eat before she can be excused, particularly if it's something that's unfamiliar.  ("It's just rice, fixed a different way.  You love rice!").  "Five bites!" her mother said.   And once she had that first big bite (for which we praised her extravagantly), she liked it just fine.   (I managed to trick her into six bites when she lost count after the first two).

The fall is no less harried than the summer has turned out to be -- worse, if anything.  Brisbane, Breckenridge, Frankfurt, DC again, Memphis, Boston.  I haven't decided yet about Charleston.  But we'll manage to fit it all in.  We always do.

In the short term, though, I need to figure out what to do with those last three cups of shrimp stock.  Maybe paella?  Lemme check the calendar and see when we're all free for dinner again...

Comments

[janna]

I find risotto stirring maddeningly boring. Perhaps I just need to change my mindset... (because I really do love risotto).

[T Scott]

The trick, and the key thing I learned from Jack, is that you DO NOT need to stir constantly. Add a half cup of broth, stir it in, leave the wooden spoon standing in the pot, have a sip of wine, swing your granddaughter 'cause she's getting in your way, stir for another 10 or 15 seconds, get the parmesan out and try to remember where you left the grater, give it another stir, decide if you want to add some herbs, time for another half cup of broth and another stir...

I find that I get into a rhythm where the actual stirring is just a part of the much larger play of putting on the meal... Of course, there is at least one time where I engaged in too much play and the risotto came out far to al dente to be edible. But if you didn't mess up once it awhile, it would hardly be cooking, would it?