Student Recipe: Pesto Risotto

Name: Student Recipe: Pesto Risotto
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 45 min
Yield: 4
Ingredients: 1 onion; 1 x glug of oil - vegetable, olive or sunflower; 1½ standard mugfuls of risotto rice - look for arborio or carnaroli; 1 chicken or vegetable stock cube; Pesto, to taste; 1 standard mugful of frozen peas; 200 g pack ham, chopped

Once you’ve mastered the basic recipe, experiment with different meats and vegetables.

By The Good Housekeeping Cookery TeamPublished: 09 September 2012

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Food, Cuisine, Dishware, Recipe, Serveware, Tableware, Dish, Kitchen utensil, Salad, Meal,

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Yields:

Prep Time:

15 mins

Cook Time:

30 mins

Total Time:

45 mins

Ingredients

1 onion
1 x glug of oil - vegetable, olive or sunflower
1½ standard mugfuls of risotto rice - look for arborio or carnaroli
1 chicken or vegetable stock cube
Pesto, to taste
1 standard mugful of frozen peas
200 g pack ham, chopped

Directions

1. Step 1
  Halve the onion and peel off and discard the papery brown skins. Then chop both onion halves as finely as you can and discard the rooty ends. Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium hob heat and add the onion. Fry for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until onion is translucent.
2. Step 2
  Add the rice and give the mixture a good stir to prevent it from sticking.
3. Step 3
  Crumble the stock cube into a standard-sized mug and fill it with boiling water from the kettle. Stir to dissolve the cube and pour it into the rice saucepan. Add three further mugfuls of boiling water.
4. Step 4
  When the liquid in the saucepan starts to boil, turn down the heat to low and cook for 15-20 minutes, occasionally stirring well, until the rice absorbs the liquid. Add half a mugful more of boiling water if all the liquid has disappeared but the rice still isn't cooked, then cook it for a little longer. Repeat until rice is tender.
5. Step 5
  Stir in the pesto (as much as you want), frozen peas and ham and continue cooking until the peas are hot. Check the seasoning and serve.

Try cooked prawns or a handful of spinach instead of ham.

Per Serving:

Calories: 489
Total carbs: 72 g
Sugars: 3 g
Total fat: 15 g
Saturated fat: 3 g

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The Good Housekeeping Cookery Team

An experienced and highly skilled team of food writers, stylists and digital content producers, the Good Housekeeping Cookery Team is a close-knit squad of food obsessives. Cookery Editor Emma Franklin is our resident chilli obsessive and barbecue expert, who spends an inordinate amount of time on holidays poking round the local supermarkets seeking out new and exciting foods. Senior Cookery Writer Alice Shields is a former pastry chef and baking fanatic who loves making bread and would have peanut butter with everything if she could. Her favourite carb is pasta, and our vibrant green spaghetti is her weeknight go-to. Lover of all things savoury, Senior Cookery Writer Grace Evans can be found eating crispy corn and nocellara olives at every opportunity, and will take the cheeseboard over dessert any time (though she cannot resist a slice of tres leches cake). With a wealth of professional kitchen know-how, culinary training and years of experience between them, they are all dedicated to ensuring every Good Housekeeping recipe is the best it can be, so you can trust they’ll work (and if they don’t – we’ll have the answer for why*) every time (*90% of the time the answer is: “buy an separate oven thermometer”!).

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