Risotto with Italian sausages and dried porcini

Every cook has a repertoire of dishes and techniques that grows and changes over time. I can't always put my finger on when I started cooking a particular dish, but I know that this is one that I first cooked when we spent a few months in Bagni di Lucca in the autumn of 2009. It was a regular for a while, and then my kids became less than enthusiastic about it so I stopped making it. I was reminded of it the other day when I spotted a packet of arborio rice in the cupboard, so I decided to give it another go. The original recipe is from Maxine Clark's Flavours of Tuscany, although I have tweaked it a little bit.

I'm always slightly in two minds about committing a recipe like this to the page - there's a danger of obscuring the flexibility of the whole business. So long as you have the right kind of rice, the key proportions (three parts liquid to one part rice) and the basic technique (slowly add the liquid to the rice), you can make risotto.

Ingredients
800 ml of hot chicken stock
100 ml of white wine
10 g dried porcini
100g butter
300g fresh Italian sausages
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
100 ml of sieved tomatoes
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp salt
300g arborio rice
freshly ground black pepper
freshly grated Parmesan

Method

1. Soak the dried porcini in the hot stock. Remove the skins from the sausages.
2. In a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan, gently melt 50g of the butter, add the skinless sausages and fry slowly, breaking the sausage meat up as you go.
3. When the sausage meat has browned, add the onion and garlic and fry gently for another 10 minutes until the onion is golden.
4. Add the tomatoes, fennel seeds, thyme and salt, and simmer for 5 minutes.
5. Add the rice and stir thoroughly.
6. Remove the porcini from the stock and add them to the rice.
7. Add a few ladlefuls of the stock and the glass of white wine to the rice, and stir gently until the liquid is almost absorbed.
8. On a low heat, add the rest of the stock, a ladleful at a time, stirring while you cook, until the rice is tender but not mushy. (This should take about 20 to 30 minutes).
9. Remove from heat, add the remaining butter, stir well, cover and leave to sit for 2 minutes. Serve sprinkled with black pepper and Parmesan.