French Onion Risotto

2 med/large onions

1 Tbsp butter

Get a pan onto the stove on a medium heat.  The key to carmelizing onions is cooking them slowly,  so you don't want the pan too hot.  Melt the butter in the pan, cut up the onions and pop them in.  If I'm making carmelized onions for burgers or something like that, I'll use onion rings, or half rings, but for this, you'd want them closer to bite-sized, so I cut quarter rings.

Keep the onions moving, and if they start to brown too quickly (like mine did as I sat here typing out how to cook them as slowly as possible) turn down the heat.   I read a tip for housewives once...  if your husband is coming home and you haven't started dinner yet, just put some onions on the stove.  It'll smell up the house and he'll never know.  I'm not sure why that matters, I'd just tell Husband to make his own dinner if he was that concerned. I'm liberated.

pepper to taste

1 tsp hot mustard

1 tsp Worchestershire sauce

Once your onions are soft, brown and you're starting to wonder where all the onions went, they're done.  Add some pepper and a teaspoon of hot mustard and Worchestershire sauce for a bit of a kick and empty them into another dish to wait for a while.

glug of white wine

1 cup arborio rice

3-4 cups beef stock

Put the stock into a small saucepan and get it simmering on the stove, you don't want to add cold stock to the hot rice.  De-glaze the pan with a good sized slosh of white wine.  This gets all the tasty stuff off the bottom of the pan and into your rice.  The size of the glug depends completely on you (and how much you want to have left to drink).  

Add the rice, and stir it around until the wine is completely absorbed, then start adding your stock half a cup at a time, stirring in between until the liquid is absorbed.  Don't neglect the stirring, it's what makes risotto more than just good rice.  The starches come out and make a deliciously creamy sauce. 

Once you've use up more than half of your stock, add the onions back in, and start tasting, season as you need with salt and pepper (I needed to add a bunch, because I used homemade stock that had virtually no salt in it, storebought stocks tend to have much more, so taste, taste, taste!)

I ended up using about 3 1/2 cups of stock, but have extra on hand, you don't want to run out and have to start adding water.

This stuff is pretty much amazing to eat as is, but for extra special dinners, put it into a french onion soup bowl (or any other oven safe vessel)  top with grated cheese (swiss is traditional, but I find it a bit strong, so a mix of mozzarella and swiss is better for me), and broil until the cheese is bubbly.