Mushroom and Sun-dried Tomato Risotto

YUM! I can't stand mushrooms, and still...YUM! Yet another wonderful recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance : Over 150 Delicious, Cheap, Animal-Free Recipes That Rock.

Cremini mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, rice, and...wait for it...black truffle oil! I have never had truffle oil before because it is so dang expensive. ($16 for a small bottle at Whole Foods) I decided to splurge this time and go for it and I'm REALLY glad I did. Now, I'm not saying that this made the meal because, honestly, I'm not sure if I tasted it or not because I didn't have any without the oil, but I got some on my finger, licked it off and it was YUMMY! Now I just need to find other recipes to use it in. I don't want a $16 bottle of oil to just sit on my shelf and never get used again!

Mushrooms aren't cheap. So this meal wasn't terribly affordable even though the risotto was the only thing on our plate tonight. (I didn't realize just how long the risotto was going to take to make, so by the time I actually finished making dinner, the kids were so hungry that they didn't want to wait for me to make a side dish)

Most of the kids LOVED it. My four year old wouldn't touch it, though. She likes mushrooms even less than I do.

Now, I've never made actual risotto. I've thrown some spaghetti sauce into my rice cooker with my rice and some water and called what came out of it risotto, but I've never spent 30 minutes standing at the stove stirring anything! It's not terribly labor intensive, so much as time consuming. With six kids, I'm not a big fan of being forced to stand at the stove or risk ruining my dinner. I get called away from the kitchen quite often during the dinner making process to solve one crisis or another, so any food that takes that kind of commitment doesn't usually end up on our dinner table. However, it's also nice to have an eleven year old who you can tell, "Here, stand here and stir this," while attending to the needs of other children. She got that quite a few times tonight.

I don't know what risotto is supposed to taste like, but this was absolutely delicious and perfect, if I do say so myself. ;)

Total price of the meal, with just enough leftover to send to work with the husband for lunch tomorrow: $36.10

The most expensive aspects of this meal were the vegetable broth (I am planning on switching to bullion with my next shopping trip because 1/3 of the price of this meal was broth alone!), dried shiitake mushrooms (oddly enough, I think fresh might just be cheaper) and the rice, which I don't have a cheaper solution for, since they don't sell arborio rice in bulk at my Whole Foods. Perhaps I could use a different rice?