Chilli con Carne Risotto

So now that the bottle of Basics red wine used in the previous post was open, I had to use it quickly before it turned bad. I was also trying to work out a way to use up the Basics beef mince sitting in my freezer.

I remembered in my days at university that I used to make bolognese sauce with the Basics canned tomatoes. One problem I had with it though was there was always too much liquid which I had to boil off. Some time later a friend of mine briefly outlined to me how to make risotto, and in coming up with something for this post, I realised that the excess liquid that would come from the tomatoes and kidney beans could be used to cook the rice.

This time round, in making this dish I decided not to boil the minced beef like the last time. I wanted the end-product to taste like something, after all.

So after rendering the fat from the mince and draining off the excess, I fried a Basics onion I minced earlier until translucent, added the beans and two cloves of Basics garlic, re-introduced the beef, and washed one cup of Basics long grain rice before adding to the wok to fry for a bit. Care should be taken not to burn it.

The tomatoes were then added followed by the wine, and the whole thing was left to simmer for the time it took me to catch up with my mail and my news feeds from Google Reader.

And the end-result was good. It would probably have been better had I used better quality ingredients, but that's beyond the scope of this blog.

Description	Price per Unit	No. of servings	Trade-up Premium	Trade-up Benefits
Chopped Tomatoes	£0.35	2	+£0.24	Not much
Kidney Beans	£0.19	2	+£0.09	Not known