Kedgeree Risotto
By: Sarah Mckenna
Published: Thursday, February 18, 2010 - 6:23pm

Ingredients




1 liter chicken stock
30 grams butter
1/2 large onion, diced
1 cup sliced mushrooms
300 grams arborio rice (~1.5 cups)
2 teaspoons curry powder
75 ml white wine
250 grams pickled herring or smoked haddock
1 chopped tomato
3 chopped hard-boiled eggs

Preparation

1 Put the chicken stock in a saucepan and heat on low. 2 In a Dutch oven,over medium heat, heat the butter until melted. 3 Put the onion and mushrooms in the Dutch oven and cook until the onion is soft. 4 Add the arborio rice and the curry powder and stir until the rice is coated in butter and makes clicking noises as you stir. 5 Add the white wine and stir until the wine has evaporated. 6 Ladle in 1/2 cup of chicken stock and stir until it has been absorbed by the rice. 7 Repeat with the chicken stock until the rice is tender. 8 Place on a serving dish and top with fish, egg and tomato.

About


Kedgeree is a dish that I first read about in a Rosamunde Pilcher novel.  I’m often inspired to make things that I read about and this is no exception.  It doesn’t seem to be well known outside of the UK. 
I did some searching online and found a few different recipes.  I couldn’t find smoked haddock at the grocery store so I decided to use pickled herring instead, mainly because it was on special at Costco.  Kedgeree is a bit low on veggies so I threw in a few to make the dish more colourful. 
I turned it into a risotto because I had lots of arborio rice and I find making risotto quite relaxing (when my husband is home to wrangle the kids).  There’s something  very soothing about standing at the stove, methodically adding ladles of water or stock to the pan. 
Kedgeree Risotto Recipe
To start the kedgeree, I put three eggs into a pot of boiling water and cooked them for 10 minutes until they were hard boiled.   Once they were cool, I peeled and chopped them. 
I put about 1 L of chicken stock in a pot and heated it on low.  You might not use all of it. 
Next, I chopped half a large onion and sliced up some mushrooms.  I melted about 30 g of butter in a large pot and added the onions and mushrooms.  I cooked them on medium heat until they were soft, stirring frequently.  I put in 300 g of arborio rice (~1.5 cups) and 2 tsp of curry powder and stirred until the rice was covered in melted butter and the grains made little clicking sounds as they were stirred. 
I added 75 ml of white wine and cooked until the wine had evaporated.  At this point, I started ladling in the chicken stock.  You pour 1 ladle of stock into the pot and then stir until the stock has been absorbed.  Then you add another ladle and repeat until the rice is tender. 
To serve it, I added some chopped tomatoes, 250 g pickled herring and the chopped egg on top.  It was very yellow and the tomatoes gave it a nice dash of colour.  Some chopped parsely wouldn’t have gone amiss either but I didn’t have any.
Kids’ Verdict
Toddler :  Ate the chopped tomatoes and poked at the rice.  Asked to be excused from the table after about 3 minutes. 
Baby:  Loved it.  All we heard from the high chair was grunting and snuffling sounds as she gobbled up her meal.