Oh-Zoat Oh-Zoat, aka Risotto- gluten and optional dairy free!

Girlfriend loves her some "oh-zoat oh-zoat". If you have not had risotto, you are missing out. It's Italy's delicious version of a rice dish which means gluten free for all you pasta lovers who can no longer enjoy pasta! Though it looks creamy, the base is just white wine and chicken stock. Bonus points if you use your homemade chicken stock since it's one of the healthiest things on the planet to eat.

Here's my go-to risotto base recipe. It is, of course, Michael Symon. He uses vegetable stock since he was making a vegetarian dish, but I use chicken stock. And I typically only need half the amount he says to use. I also add meat because I'm married to a Serbian who needs meat at every meal. This time, I used zucchini and summer squash and a bunch of garlic scapes (it was clean veggie drawer dump day) and I didn't have tomatoes so I used salami. why not.

I threw in the onions first, then the rest of the veggies, then the salami, and then the rice. but I followed the directions for the most part after that.

pre-rice, all cooking up in the dutch oven

Mangia!

PS- the parmesan at the end is optional if you are dairy free.

Stackers- Zucchini, Summer Squash, Tomatoes & Sausage

I love love love me some squash. My mom hands down makes the best fried zucchini parm in the world. It's amazing any of it ever made it into the parm pan because as she was frying it, I was eating all of the slices as soon as they hit the paper towel.

I digress.

An easier, and healthier, way to eat my favorite things is to skip the breading and simply cut up the squash, heat up a splash of evoo in a cast iron skillet, throw them in there, salt em, and let em brown. I can't even begin to tell you how amazingly good that is.

For this recipe, I simply did the same thing to sliced tomatoes, then I cooked up some hot italian sausage and crumbled it. Stack em up with some buffalo mozzarella in between and add a little parm on top and you have a superbly yummy summer dinner with very little mess and effort.