Wild garlic pesto & mushroom risotto with lemon-flavoured breadcrumbs – And the sudden rescue

There are things that match together so nicely, but they do not grow in the same season: like mushrooms and wild garlic. (All right, nowadays everything is grown in every season – very much true for the cultivated champignon – but it just sounded good put in this way.)

This recipe was created because I suddenly needed a handful of cherries urgently (for the summer issue of a food magazine) and in early spring I couldn’t find any. But then a nice friend of mine rescued me. I prepared this dish for her.

Wild garlic pesto & mushroom risotto with lemon-flavoured breadcrumbs

For the risotto:

- 2 tbsp. olive oil

- 1 tbsp. butter

- 1 onion (finely chopped)

- 2 cloves of garlic (finely chopped)

- 400 g risotto rice

- 200 ml dry white wine

- 140 ml vegetable stock

- 70 g butter

- 45 gr grated parmesan

- salt, pepper

Wild garlic pesto:

- 150 g walnut (roasted)

- 75 g wild garlic

- cc. 100 ml olive oil (an amount that makes the pesto creamy)

- 50 g parmesan

- salt, pepper

For the mushroom part:

- 1 tbsp. butter

- 1 tbsp. olive oil

- 1 onion

- 500 g mushrooms

- fress thyme

- nutmeg (freshly grated)

- 25 ml dry white wine

- salt, pepper

Lemon-flavoured breadcrumbs

- 250 g dry white bread (without crust)

- 6 tbsp. olive oil

- 1 lemon’s zest (grated)

Preparation:

1. Fry the onion and the garlic on the olive oil and the butter. Add the risotto rice and fry it for a minute stirring continuously. Add the white wine and stir until the rice absorbs the wine. Add gradually the hot vegetable stock to the rice: add only a ladleful at a time and then wait until the rice absorbs it, then add the next, and so on. Finally add the last ladle of vegetable stock, then mix the butter and the parmesan immediately in the risotto.
2. Blend together the ingredients of the wild garlic pesto with an immersion blender. (It doesn’t need to be completely homogeneous; you can leave small pieces in the pesto.)
3. Fry the onion on the mixture of olive oil and butter (salt it). Add the mushrooms, salt, pepper and season them, then fry them. (First they will let off some liquid, then you can fry them.) Add the wine and wait until it completely evaporates while stirring continuously for a minute.
4. Crush the bread and fry it on the oil. Flavour the breadcrumbs with the lemon’s zest.