Put the olive oil in a large, heavy saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the onion and pancetta and cook gently until the onion is translucent.
Add the fennel seed, and then the rice. Stir through so that the rice is coated in oil. Add the peas and some salt and pepper, then start adding the stock by the ladleful, stirring constantly and letting the liquid reduce a bit between additions. Do not let the rice become dry at any point -- it should be soupy at all times.
Cook for about 20 minutes, until the rice is al dente. Stir in the butter and Parmesan, along with a little more stock to loosen the rice if you'd like. Taste, adjust the seasonings and serve immediately, passing more grated Parmesan at the table.
I was thinking this is so cool. They are using grams because it's so much easier to weight stuff om my scale than to use a bunch of measuring cups. Then I read the comments, LOL. I cannot believe people are complaining about it.
Better solution: everyone learns some basic conversions (or starts using the metric system) and we'll all be okay. 95.6% of the world is not from America.
I definitely agree to either put both metric and American measurements in a recipe or only American. As someone stated, this is an American site! What country would do this for us?
Metric measurement is a lot more precise and quick, believe it or not; you can buy a Starfrit digital kitchen scale for $6.99 on Amazon.com and it's a must if you cook and bake a lot.
I agree that it seems a bit precious/pretentious to have the measurements in grams, considering this is an American website. (Yes, we all love Italy...)
for the record, made this a few days ago and just approximated ingredient amounts using common sense -- turned out great! eyeballed the proportions and made risotto how i always do -- gradually adding enough liquids until it's right. big hit with all who tried it so just go for it and use you common sense. it's delicious!
Sorry, but googling 4 measurement conversions is entirely different than translating an entire recipe. Not only is your reply demonstrating a certain amount of ignorance, it's not even a fair comparison.
Well, I guess they could have put the recipe in Italian, and google the recipe it would only take 2 minutes for each word and measurement. An American website, should have American measurements, European should be secondary. So, who here is lazy, which website are we on?!
I believe if I'm seeing this correctly that 1200 grams of peas is about 8 cups of peas! That can't be right... http://www.cookitsimply.com/measurements/cups/peas-green-shelled-fresh-or-frozen-0070-01j72.html
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