Smoked Prosecco Risotto

Here we are at the first appointment of the year with the recipe for Light and Tasty. Let’s start with a very topical subject in this post-Christmas period: cooking with leftovers. 😄
For me, who is a champion of waste prevention, I couldn’t miss this appointment.

This year I didn’t need to recycle various lentils and cotechini, since we completely recycled the Christmas lunch on Boxing Day, and in the end, not much was left, but I had the opportunity to recycle – really, in the true sense of the word – half a panettone (I will tell you about this recycling in a future recipe), and above all, I ‘recovered’ all the meat I had bought, definitely in excess, for the New Year’s Eve bourguignonne. And from which a couple of very interesting recipes emerged, of which, of course, I will tell you one at a time. 😊

And then, I cooked this smoked prosecco risotto.
Using the half bottle of prosecco that was left over from the midnight toast.

However, among all these recipes, this prosecco risotto is the only one I hadn’t planned to publish. I didn’t want to do it. So much so that I didn’t take any photos during the process, and the two photos you see are simply two of the four that I hurriedly took with my phone just before eating, taken at the end of cooking ‘for memory’. The kind of photos that for archive, for reminder, sometimes for habit, I almost always take of almost everything I cook. Had I imagined that it would turn out differently, I would have at least taken a photo of the cheese strings! It would have made this prosecco risotto look great. 😀



This smoked prosecco risotto is my free interpretation (very free, not knowing the real original recipe, and having cooked it going backwards in time from memory) of a historic 80s recipe, the famous smoked risotto with champagne. A recipe that I am emotionally attached to and that, I must say, causes a certain knot in my stomach to talk about. But the circumstances, the chaos in which I live lately, chance, I don’t know what, all of this led me to decide at the last moment for a change of recipe and now… well, it seems it had to go this way, it’s time to talk about this risotto.

The smoked risotto with champagne, more or less three decades ago, was cooked for us on a certain occasion by a friend and his wife. And ever since, the recipe has always lingered in my subconscious, as a recipe to make and write sooner or later. But you know how it is? Postpone today, postpone tomorrow, and the years go by.

Then, just under a year ago, unaware of the upcoming future, we talked about it on the phone when Francesco called me to wish me a happy birthday. I said: ‘do you remember that risotto?’, and he replied: ‘of course, smoked risotto with champagne!’… And the idea of replicating it and writing the recipe had started to take shape again.
Then came COVID. And the cursed month of March.

But let’s face it, who really buys champagne nowadays? We’re not in the 80s anymore. Not in Francesco’s Milan, nor in Piero’s Bologna. Years gone by, that will not return.
Francesco, hello, wherever you are, this smoked risotto with prosecco is for you. I think of you often. But I know you know that.

Come on, let’s cook, it’s already noon. Daily life calls us.
🌼

👇 Below are three risotto ideas, plus another recipe, that Francesco had a hand in: 💝👇