Packet Meals - Chicken and Mushroom Risotto

Risotto. From a box. Really? Yeah, I'm dubious about that. I have made it from scratch, and it doesn't feel like something a packet can adequately replicate. Sure, I don't think it's as hard a dish to make as many make it out to be, but there is just something about the constant attention it needs that is counter to the packet meal concept. I guess we shall see...

Continental One Pan Meals - Chicken and Mushroom Risotto

Contents of the box

1 packet of rice (looked like arborio rice at least...)
1 packet of seasoning

Additional Ingredients Needed

1 tablespoon Oil
500 grams Chicken Thigh, cut into bite sized pieces (I used Breast because it was cheaper, and I tend to prefer it)
200 grams Mushrooms, sliced
3 cups Water
80 grams Baby Spinach

Optional Extras I Used

1/2 Onion, diced
2 Shortcut Bacon, diced
1/3 Jalapeno, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon Butter

^{still doesn't look like a lot of food could come from this}

Method

Melt the butter in a large pan over a low heat. Add the onion and jalapeno. Stir.
After about 5 minutes, add the bacon and oil. Increase the heat to medium-high.

^{always gets the good smells started early. yay for bacon}

After about 3 minutes, add the chicken to the pan and brown it on all sides.
When the chicken is browned, add the mushrooms and cook for about 3 minutes so they are tender.

^{Almost ready for this to turn into a risotto}

Add the contents of the rice and seasoning packets, along with the water and stir to combine.
Bring the pan to the boil before reducing the heat to low and covering with a lid.
Simmer, without stirring, for 20 to 25 minutes until water is absorbed and rice is tender.
Stir in the baby spinach and allow to wilt for a minute before removing from the heat.

^{25 minutes later and the stove's done all the hard work for me}

Crumble some feta over your serving.

^{looks like a small serving now that I look at it, but it really wasn't that small.}

Final Thoughts

I went into this doubting that you could make a risotto from a box. I don't think this box convinced me that it was a risotto, but might have helped me in considering that it might be possible to have a packet mix for a risotto. Think of it more as a paella using arborio rice. As such, it was good, although not as good as the paella from last week's adventure in the world of packet meals.

Good things about it were that it made 4 reasonable sized meals, re-heats well as leftovers, and the feta suggestion is one of the best additions to this dish. Not so good things are all errors on my part. It could have done with a couple less minutes during the 'cook for 20-25 mins' phase, and needed either to leave the jalapeno out or have twice as much so that it actually existed in the dish. Also, I forgot to add the frozen peas 5 minutes before the cooking phase ended (and left them out of the ingredients above for that reason), but they would have improved the dish.

For 1 pan meals, it also created 1 cutting board, 1 knife, 1 wooden stirrer and 1 serving spoon in dishes, which is almost the absolute minimum you could possibly create from a meal, so I'm pretty happy with that. As with the paella, I don't think there was any noticeable deterioration of the quality due to being past it's best before.

That's it for now, still happy for suggestions to improve content or suggestions for packets to try. This was the last box of the salvage and it's now on to actual packets. I'll be using one of the finishing sauces (which will probably be a short entry in the actual meal it goes with's post) next, and probably a casserole after that. There is an issue with it approaching summer here where most of the packets aren't exactly 'summer meals', but I'll see how I feel.

Previous Packet Meals

Spanish Chicken and Chorizo Paella