To celebrate, I turned to an old standby, the classic white risotto and cooked up something that looked the very picture of mediterranean al fresco eating, bathed in sun-dappled, summer evening light. However, while I like to think I cook as seasonably as most middle-class eco-conscious foodies, this was in reality more of a hangover from the freezing winter. Comprising mainly of your classic risotto aromatic vegetables (plus carrots), the only concession to spring/summer was the addition of some good old British broccoli.

Aside from the pretentious descriptions of outdoor eating and the blabbering about seasonality, the real reason this risotto was post-worthy was that it was transformed by the deceptively simple addition of two ingredients that most cooks would consider risotto staples.

Firstly, I tend to be a lazy cook whenever possible and tend to use bouillon stock powder for my risottos which I boil up once and then leave to cool off. However, after reading this super-informative article over at The Guardian, I realised the importance of good stock, and not just any good stock, but good hot stock.

So following a beautiful roast dinner the previous weekend from @stuartfowkes, I found myself with the necessary tools (and when I say tools I mean the limp, pathetic carcasses of two dead birds) to create some killer chicken stock, which kept at a simmering boil throughout the cooking process, not only (as The Guardian article says) helped keep the cooking time to a minimum, but also infused the risotto with the most wonderful depth of poultry flavour coming through in an otherwise vegetarian dish.

The second revelatory thing about risotto preparation that I realised was the importance of not doing what I normally do and skimping on the amount of butter you limply stir into the dish at the end. Let’s face it, you’re already sitting down to eat an entire plate of rice for dinner – why skimp at the end?

Reflecting this devil-may-care attitude towards my health, I added a good hunk of butter and set about blending by method of the “mantecare” – a vigorous whisking or creaming of the butter into the cooked risotto. Even if not reflected in the slightly over-dry appearance of the risotto in the photos, this beating of butter into rice seemed to really convince the starches that provide a good risotto with its oozing, silken feel in the mouth to set themselves free and gave the dish a fantastic, luxurious texture.

So the next time you decide to make a risotto, ditch the stock cubes and the kettle and don’t hold back with either the butter or with your forearm – offset that extra fat with some summer evening, sweaty whisking.

Oh and finally, following a delicious run-in with The Arancini Brothers in London at the weekend, I felt compelled to pay a (sadly) non-deep-fried homage to their spectacular wraps by working the leftovers of the previous night’s dinner into a wrap stuffed full of white risotto, grated carrot and sesame seeds with a caper mayonnaise. Which predictably went down an absolute treat for lunch.

Main support was from Phantom Theory, another addition to the swelling ranks of two-person noise-machine bands, who turned out what I thought was a bit of a Jekyll & Hyde set, starting off with a tangled web of pounding drums and throbbing bass guitar. Only once the bass was swapped out for a guitar did they really entice me to pay any attention as they unleashed what I thought was a stronger, more ambitious selection of tracks for the second half of their set.

Vancouver BC’s Japandroids upped the noise quota even further with a sound fleshed out by Brian King’s doubly amplified guitar and the amusingly named David Prowse’s relentless, high-energy drumming. Highlights for me were a blistering rendition of Sovereignty and a closing McClusky cover to end a set high on energy, noise and harmonic dualing vocals. To put it in a slightly more succinct fashion, check out the link below and grab the MP3s while you’re there:

Live Review: Japandroids on Mad Mackerel