My Chef's Hat - Roasted Sweet Potato Risotto

I'm giving platelets tomorrow, so I've been on a red meat binge for the past 10 days. My iron is really low because I have the sickle cell trait. Thankfully I'll never have the disease because only my dad is the carrier. Apparently it runs pretty strong on his side of the family. My parents knew from the time I was a baby, but since I've always been a big chicken when it comes to needles, I never voluntarily gave blood until about 6 months ago...and that's when I found out. They can't separate the bad cells from the good when you give whole blood, so I have to sit through the much longer process of giving platelets. But its the right thing to do. I could do it weekly, and they call me all the time asking, but I still hate needles and I don't want to live on supplements so I go every 3 months.  Iron pills, red meat and leafy green veggies are my daily diet starting 2 weeks out. And since I had spaghetti & meatballs at lunch, seafood it was for dinner.  I still wanted something comforting because it has been gloomy and icky weather the past 2 days. So I decided on roasted sweet pepper risotto for the side dish.  I haven't made risotto in ages, and I really don't know why. Its really not that bad for you, especially because I don't use butter.

 After I started roasting the potatoes, I realized I had no white wine. I have 18 bottles of red... but no white. I had already changed into comfy clothes so thought about making it without the wine, but that would be sacrilegious.  I mean seriously... you can't make risotto without wine. So I ran to the liquor store and got this great bottle of inexpensive, light white.

Here is the recipe photo

 And here is my version

 Wow, this is amazing.  The spices in the roasted sweet potato add such a wonderful earthy flavor. It just kind of tastes like winter. I smashed the potatoes instead of a purée, but I kind of liked having pieces of sweet potato throughout. And besides, I don't have a potato masher. After my last roasted potato disaster I cut the pieces bigger, cut the time back by 10 minutes, and then turned off the oven and left them in there for another 10 minutes. They came out perfect. I did add a little more parmesan than I normally would, but I  needed to with the potatoes. The recipe calls for brown butter but I was too lazy to make it, and honestly it didn't need it at all. I tasted it both before and after adding rosemary. I should have stuck with before. Maybe I put too much rosemary, but it was too strong. but believe me, I ate it anyways. I didn't have any parsley or sage. I very rarely use sage so I never buy it, But I do use parsley a lot.  Next time I'm gonna add just a little on the top and see what happens.

 I'm already looking forward to making this again soon.

Recipe found on How Sweet It Is

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