this is how to make a makeshift sausage risotto:

buy some nice sausages. (today at about life, we picked a pack of toulouse sausages from eumundi smokehouse: pork, with pepper and white wine.) split the sausage skins and fry the meat in a small amount of oil, just to break it up and brown it a little. remove the meat from the wok. there should be a puddle of sausagey oil in which you can now fry a finely-diced onion. and some risotto rice.

you would have had you stock on another burner, of course. this may be that stuff out of the freezer that you made three or four months earlier by boiling the remains of a roast chicken dinner. add the stock one painstaking ladle at a time, while it is slowly absorbed by the rice.

i think you generally have to stir for like, thirty to forty minutes? halfway through, return the sausage meat to the rice, then keep going. you might want to sample a couple of grains of rice from time to time, just to see if it’s cooked through enough. you will be excited by the rich, meaty flavour of the broth — the extreme savouriness — and encouraged by the cries from across the counter in the loungeroom, “oh my god, that smells so tasty!”

when the rice has just about lost its al dente-ness, it’s time for mantecatura! i don’t beat in quite as much butter as locatelli prescribes (75 grams), but i like the symbolism. also, i don’t generally add parmesan because i don’t crave the cheesiness.

this is how to fuck up a makeshift — though promising — sausage risotto:

the last couple of times i made this, i added a handful of rocket after turning off the heat. it wilts and adds colour, and a foil to the meatiness.

this afternoon at about life, we’d procured a bag of organic rocket — wild rocket, actually, from ladybird organics. and now i think the “wild” makes all the difference in the world, because where the rocket i’d been buying previously from the local fruitshop was mild and pleasant, this organic stuff was really something else. a vile weed from hell!

the thing is, after plating up, i also dolloped a spoonful of rocket pesto onto the mound of risotto, for dramatic effect, so you can stir through for a uniform green tinge, or a burst of something extra. again, when i’ve bought this at the fruitshop up the road, it’s been like the icing on a cake, a little salty green accent to the grand starchy statement. the about life house pesto is a startling emerald green, just gorgeous, but it was like eating poison. the bitterness, just from the tiniest first contact with our tongues, was like one of life’s harshest lessons. i guess in this case, that lesson would be: taste the damn pesto before you use it. or at least, read the label to discover that it contains just a healthy blend of rockets (sic), pistachios, lemon juice and olive oil, and then choose another pesto with salt, and maybe even cheese.

i put an empty bowl on the table, to contain the pesto i was not ashamed to scrape off the top of the risotto. we thought that would take care of things; we trusted that the bitterness had been contained. but we were wrong: it lingered. and that was when we realised what set wild rocket apart from the regular tame stuff.

we scraped the risotto off our spoons with our teeth so that it would not touch our lips, and at least one of us contorted herself so that she could swallow each mouthful without it touching her tongue. did you succeed, nellicent?

we made it through the meal, giggling from the awfulness, and we did not go back for seconds even though there was plenty left in the wok. in fact, after dinner, i spent a good few minutes picking out each strand of wilted rocket from the rice. and then when i had amassed a sizeable tangle, i took a photo of it. sigh.

but see, i’m not discouraging you from making your own sausage-and-rocket risotto — no way, it can be wonderful — but you might just want to check that you’re not using any hardcore, top-of-the-line, clean-living type ingredients.