Jamie's Rogue Ratatouille Risotto

Hey guys, me and Tesco are back with another cracking recipe. This is my rogue ratatouille risotto. It's so good. So I've got my ingredients from Tesco and because it's from my brand new cookbook, Five Ingredients Mediterranean, I only needed a few things. The great thing about this dish is it's two of your five fruit and veg a day. It's perfect for this time of year, right, but also the use of frozen veggies. You could make this even in the winter when you want a little bit sunshine. It's beautiful to do. So look, let's get cooking. To make a risotto we want to have a nice high-sided pan. Put it on a high heat. So in we go with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Take our frozen veg. So this is roasted Mediterranean veg. Now the brilliant thing about these is they're already cut and they've already been roasted. It's a fantastic little time saver. We'll give it a little pinch of salt and pepper. So give that seasoning a nice little stir in. We're going to cook that down for about 10 minutes, giving it a stir every two or three minutes and that's going to concentrate the flavour and make it utterly delicious. But look, using your freezer and having some good key things in the freezer is what you need for really contemporary modern day cooking. It already smells amazing. Now the stock. So about 1.2 litres of water boiling from the kettle and then add one or two stock cubes. I'm going to use chicken but you could use veggie if you want to take it veggie, no trouble at all and that'll give you a nice little base flavour. Of course if you want to make your own chicken stock you can but this is really good for sort of midweek meals, nice and quick and just put that to one side. We'll go back into the pan here. Look at that, smells amazing and the colours are fantastic. What I love about this meal, it's a really good way to get really lovely healthy veg into the family, so that's nice. I'm going to take half of this out to retain texture and colour and form, right. The form that it comes in and then the rest I'm going to leave in. So this I'll add back in later on so you can see it and feel the texture of it and then this in here we're going to carry on cooking and almost overcook and bash up and break up and it's going to go mushy and that's going to give you and guarantee you the most delicious flavour. Let's add the rice. So 300 grams we're going to put in. It's a plump short little rice and the reason that you stir it regularly is to massage out the natural creamy starchiness from the rice. That's the whole point of risotto. So let's just stir that around. The first thing that the rice gets is that kiss of flavour from the veg and the oil. So we'll just let that just toast off just a little bit for a minute. Traditionally you would have a sofrito at the base, which is onions and celery, but this Mediterranean frozen veg just gives you so much more flavour and it's utterly delicious and obviously when I'm writing recipes for five ingredients I have to be really clever, really resourceful about big flavour and few ingredients. So that's the promise but as you can see it's very, very simple to do. So once it's toasted off a little bit go in with a little swig of the stock. So just a little bit, stir it in, turn it down to a medium and you're going to go from frying to simmering and we give it a nice little mix around. Now why do we add little bits of stock and not a lot? If you just throw a load of water in it's just going to boil right, we don't want that. So by having just enough water in you can see as I move it around the rices are all kind of like bashing up next to each other and that's going to extract that beautiful sort of starchy creaminess that's going to give you such an amazing texture. So mix it around. Once all the beautiful stock has gone then we'll add just a little swig more. So for about 18 minutes we're going to add, stir, add and stir. The sauce in between the rice is getting kind of like creamy looking and that's because we're doing that beautiful mixing and adding slowly but surely. As I'm doing this I'm going to start thinking about other flavours. So we've got some basil and getting basil in pots is absolutely brilliant. So just pick off the leaves and then the stalks that you're left with, you don't have to throw these away, what you can do is just slice them up and they can go in right now. They'll be really sweet and delicious. So this is nearly getting there which is very exciting. So look let's have a little try. Let's test the rice. Absolutely delicious. So this is about a minute and a half away and what you want is a rice grain that is cooked, a pleasure to eat but still holding its shape. You don't want it to be like fluffy because you've gone too far. So don't overcook it. I'm ticking away now, instead of like traditional parmesan that you see so often in risottos, I'm switching things up which actually you do see around Italy and in this case we're going to go for a beautiful soft goat's cheese. 100 grams of goat's cheese. So I'm going to crumble some on top and I'm going to stir some of this in and it will just melt. It'll go creamy, it'll give it a lovely sort of pale look which is beautiful and then I'll put a little bit on top, sort of crumbling it. Just a little kiss of olive oil. You can stir that through and it will give it a nice little sheen and a nice texture. So this is going to be cooked now and I want to add just enough stock so that it's oozy. If it's hard and dry it's not risotto, you want it to be oozy. So if you look in here now can you see how that natural creaminess from the cheese, from the olive oil and from the starch in the rice has all come out, it's looking amazing. So at this point we're going to go in with our basil, the bigger leaves, tear them, stir that in. I'm going to put these veggies back into the risotto and they're fresh, full of texture and colour. Look at that, stir that through. Now we turn the heat off, just leave it for a minute just to relax. You can serve it in the bowl at the table, it's nice on a nice big platter or a large bowl, really, really beautiful. It's a nice little centrepiece, very easy to do, five ingredients. The great thing about risotto is you can change it up, you can put different things in it but this recipe's brilliant. We're really kind of hanging off of the quality of the veg that's picked in perfect season and then frozen and you can use it all year round. So it's really, really super, super helpful. So at this point it's had a little chill. Look at that, can you see the texture? How it's like nice and oozy, that is really important and then we can serve it onto a nice platter. Look at the colour, look at the consistency. This is such a beautiful meal, loads of nice veggies in there. Two of your five fruit and veg a day in one meal, absolutely beautiful. I'll just take a few of these basil leaves and then we'll have some nice little bits of goat's cheese on top. In this series I travel around the Mediterranean getting inspiration from these incredible countries. The idea of taking the ratatouille French and blending it with the risotto Italian, you know, it's just fun and that's actually what cooking's always been about. You know, fusion, evolution. So look at that, it's a beautiful meal, fit for a king. Let's have a little portion. Look at those colours, come on. It really does look like the colours of the Mediterranean. So look, there you go, my rogue ratatouille risotto. Smells amazing, let's have a little try. It's just food that makes you really, really happy. The goat's cheese is kind of genius because it's so fresh and tangy and with the sweetness and depth of flavour from those incredible frozen veggies. You know, the fact that you could make this in winter, let alone summer and have a little bit of sunshine in your life. It's comforting, it's delicious, it's oozy. Oh, I just love it. So there you go guys, I really want you to have a try of this. From my new cookbook, Five Ingredients Mediterranean, it's what you're waiting for. Get down to Tesco, get the ingredients, get cooking, you're gonna love it and if you want to get the recipe, simply go to Tesco Real Food online.