Risotto au poulet et aux légumes

I made another risotto on Monday, after having made the curried version for lunch one day last week. This one was a standard risotto made not with Italian arborio rice, but with riz rond that I bought at our local Super U market, and with grated cheese. I wanted to see if there would be a big difference between the two rice varieties cooked this way. There was — the arborio was definitely better, but it's hard to find here. Buying it requires a trip to Blois.

    
The vegetables for this risotto are a frozen product we got at Super U. It's mixed vegetables — carrots, turnips, green beans, garden peas, and flageolet beans that are called macédoine de légumes in France. For flavor, I chopped up and cooked an onion, a couple of garlic cloves, a stalk of celery, and a chicken breast cut into small cubes.

I find cooking dishes like this risotto, Asian-style stir-fried dishes, sautés and stews like bœuf bourguignon, and many other foods and dishes really easy in big stainless steel woks like the one above. I ordered a couple of them from Amazon.fr a few months ago. They have a thick, flat metal bottom for good heat transfer, and they have high sides that keep spatters on the stove top to a minimum. They also have glass lids. They're also good serving dishes because they don't have log handles that would get in the way at the table.

    
For the risotto, I again used 1½ cups of rice and between 4 and 5 cups of broth (chicken broth made with aromatics and some white wine added). The cheese was finely grated Italian peccorino. When the rice was close to being tender and creamy, I put the pre-cooked vegetables and chicken back into the wok, stirred them in, sprinkled on grated cheese, and continued the cooking for a few more minutes to bring everything up to temperature and make sure the rice was perfectly tender. We had more grated cheese to sprinkle on at the table.