I had no real conceptual understanding, let alone appreciation of risotto until I encountered Nigella Lawson, from whom comes so much of my formative knowledge of food and the joys therein. In her 2010 book Kitchen, she speaks of “the solace of stirring” reiterating her stance that risotto’s comfort and calm emanates not only from its soft babyfood texture, but from the stirring itself, “the ritual of unchallenging but repeated actions”. There’s no fast-tracking risotto — or at least, if there is, I don’t want it — for twenty-five minutes you and the stove and the spoon are one, watching the rice rise under your clockwise or anticlockwise motion. It’s positively meditative.

Considering I lost most of Feburary to repeatedly testing a peanut brittle recipe where the science never quite matched my vision, it was a relief to have this recipe for triple tomato risotto stick the landing perfectly, its deliciousness providing as much comfort as the process of making it. I guess it’s good to be culinarily humbled now and then, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it, though more for cost-of-living reasons than maintaining my ego.

This is a real late summer, first blush of autumn risotto — yes, it capitalises upon fresh tomatoes and their acid sweetness, but it also leans heavily upon the preserved, pantry options of tomato paste and sun-dried tomatoes. This wasn’t just to make a risotto the colour of radioactive blood, which seems to almost glow from within like flowing magma from a lively volcano; indeed, I assure you that each of the three elements of tomato has its purpose.

First, you let the fresh, chopped tomatoes marinate in olive oil, salt, and pepper, drawing the sweetness and liquid from the glossy red pieces, and eventually turning up the exposure on the risotto once stirred in. Even a slightly average tomato will improve under this tutelage. Next, you fry a considerable quantity of tomato paste in butter, allowing it to almost caramelise and lose its metallic, can-opener edge. It brings pungent, unabashed tomato flavour and an almost-creaminess of body to the risotto, but the frying step is essential. Finally, sun-dried tomatoes, chopped into a paste, add dense richness and a ferrous, near-meaty heartiness. Even if you don’t consider yourself a sun-dried tomato enthusiast, they are the necessary bridge between the other two elements.

The resulting risotto is a symphony of tomato, tasting as if a margherita pizza was put through one of those hydraulic compactors that compresses impounded cars into small cubes. It’s intense, it’s rich, it bevels off any of the tomato’s too-sharp sting and replaces it simply with heavenly, high-summer fragrance. With only a little garlic and vermouth to distract, it suggests that the tomato’s best friend really is itself.

I think this would pair excellently with its photo-negative counterpart, my Green Pesto Risotto, but for more tomato-hearty recipes, I recommend my Spaghetti with Caramelised Tomato Sauce; Salmon with Roasted Cherry Tomatoes and Fennel, this Zibdiyit Gambari and this Tomato Couscous with Cinnamon, Peanuts and Coriander — something for wherever your proximity to tomato season may be.

Triple tomato risotto

The most intensely, glowingly tomato-centric risotto imaginable, but there are ways around it if you’re cooking outside of peak tomato season. I realise I’ve mixed my measurements but I find rice easier to measure by the cup; the rest of the ingredients aren’t particularly strict, quantity-wise, anyway. Oh, and I haven’t tried it but I just know the leftovers would make the most spectacular arancini. Recipe by myself.

• 2-3 large, ripe tomatoes
• Salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 170g tomato paste
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 litre water
• 1 cup arborio rice
• 80ml dry vermouth or white wine
• 2 chicken stock cubes, or your preferred flavour
• 1/3 cup sun-dried tomatoes, drained
• 3 tablespoons freshly grated parmesan
• A handful of cherry tomatoes, to serve (optional)

1: There are a couple of steps before you get into the risotto, the first being marinating the fresh tomatoes. Roughly chop the two or three tomatoes — two is fine, but if you’ve got three, go for it — and place them in a bowl, with all the juices that have accumulated on the chopping board, along with a hearty pinch of salt and pepper, and the two tablespoons of olive oil. Set aside.

2: Next, melt a tablespoon of the butter in a wide, high-sided saucepan, and fry the 170g tomato paste for a couple of minutes, stirring it — it will splutter a little, so be careful — until it thickens and slightly darkens in colour. After your two-ish minutes have passed, or you feel it’s ready, spatula the tomato paste into another bowl and set aside along with the chopped tomatoes.

3: Now, risotto time. Roughly chop the three cloves of garlic, and either bring the litre of water to the boil in your kettle, or in a second saucepan. If doing the latter, turn the heat off once it reaches the boil.

4: In the same pan, and don’t worry about cleaning it, melt the remaining two tablespoons of butter over a medium heat, and stir in the cup of arborio rice for a minute or so, then pour in the 80ml dry vermouth, letting it bubble up merrily. Stir in the three cloves of chopped garlic.

5: Crumble in the two stock cubes, then comes the actual risotto work — add a small quantity of the hot water at a time to the rice, stirring constantly over a medium simmer until it’s mostly absorbed before you move on to the next. This requires some patience — I reckon around 25 minutes to let the rice cook completely.

6: Once the rice has started to soften, but still has some gritty bite to it, stir in the reserved fried tomato paste. Roughly chop the 1/3 cup drained sun-dried tomatoes with a large knife, so they almost become a paste, and stir them into the risotto as well. Keep stirring in the hot water in small quantities until the rice has thoroughly swollen and softened.

7: Finally, stir in the marinated chopped fresh tomatoes, including all the juice that has pooled in the bowl, and the three tablespoons of grated parmesan, letting them respectively warm through and melt in the remaining heat. Garnish with the cherry tomatoes, if you happen to have them, but there’s obviously plenty going on already.

Serves four with the promise of a course on either side, or two people with leftovers.

Note: If you’re making this out of season, the salt-and-pepper marinating process can draw a lot of flavour out of unlikely tomatoes; but if you can find cherry tomatoes in the first instance they’ll likely have a lot more flavour than their larger, usually paler winter counterparts. And if you really can’t find any fresh tomatoes, replace them with a can of cherry tomatoes and you’ll still have a good time.

music lately:

Glycerine by Bush. Yellowjackets is back and with it comes the killer soundtrack (and my obsession, which never abated in the cruel two years since the previous season) including this song which featured in a heartstoppingly crucial moment. It took me a while to warm up to this song contemporaneously, not understanding what I was hearing — and perhaps there’s not that much to understand — but its undeniable power remains, even, if not especially because of its unsettling lack of drums.

Pearl by Chapterhouse, it has a shimmering, glistening quality that makes it feel like you’ve just received exceptionally good news.

Smooth Operator by Sade, over the weekend I went to see an excellent play written and directed by my friend Sam Brooks; Sade’s seismically timeless music was both diegetic and a pivotal plot point. And, it’s always the right time to hear more of her.

Meadowlark, from The Baker’s Wife, as performed by Liz Callaway — what is there left for me to say about this song! And yet. The storytelling through words and orchestrations are so intertwined, the shift from story-through-story into present day always makes me gasp, the way Liz Callaway attacks her lyrics so fully yet so gently, so when she sings “just when I thought my heart was finally numb” the words are so true and clear that it’s as if they’re coming from your own mouth; the fake-out ending which makes you feel as though you’re running through an airport! I can’t listen to this song in public because I will start crying.

PS: The people in Gaza still desperately need help, ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal continues to work to deliver food and water so give it if you’ve got it. Last week we went to the Defying Destiny protest in Albert Park held by People Against Prisons Aotearoa, it was powerful and invigorating and frequently joyful and heartening, if grim in its necessity. The parliamentary petition to remove the violently erroneous charity status from Destiny’s Church that I linked to last time has since quadrupled in signatures, I’m not sure how much weight it carries but it only takes a moment to correctly agree with it and sign.