RISO ALLA PILOTA This one's not a risotto but just a simple, tasty rice dish, loosely based on a Northern Italian recipe from Carol Field's "Celebrating Italy" called Riso alla Pilota (Rice in rice-huskers style), allegedly a traditional dish that the folks around Mantua who husk the rice enjoy every year at festival time. As converted (I substituted sausage for the traditional lean pork), it contains a fair amount of sausage, butter and cheese, but I cut it back some, and with a good ration of rice, you can get away with a fairly small portion of sausage and make the numbers work out rationally. Cook 1 cup rice in 1 1/2 cups chicken broth with a smashed garlic clove in the liquid (discarding the garlic when the rice is done). Slice two mild sausages quite thin (I used a gor-may chicken-apple Gerhard's sausage imported from the Napa Valley), and cook them in a little olive oil with a lot of finely minced garlic. When the rice is done, stir into it 1 tablespoon butter and 1/2 cup grated Pecorino Romano with salt and pepper to taste; when the butter and cheese start to melt, add the sausage and garlic and stir just until everything's mixed together. Bread and something green completed the meal, and it went quite well with an inexpensive Chianti.
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