 Today we're making butternut squash risotto with some sage and cauliflower rice. We're adding more veggies to this, cut the carbs a little bit, but the flavor is there. I'm Rockin' Robin and I'm going to show you how to make it right after my chef joke. Why did the beauty company add rice to their face mask? To make it easier to peel off. To make our delicious, and I mean delicious, risotto rice here, we're going to start off by roasting our butternut squash so we get the most flavor into this dish. It's going to take about 50 minutes. Now I bought my butternut squash already chopped up just to save a little time, but some of the pieces are large so I'm going to go through and chop those up to bite-size pieces. You'll need about three cups of this and you can get the written recipe below the video in the description area. I've placed some parchment paper here on a baking sheet and I'm just going to pour out the butternut squash right on that and we're going to add a little bit of olive oil and then I'm going to massage that in a little bit to coat all the pieces. Next I'll season that with a little bit of salt and a few cracks of pepper. This is going into a 375 degree Fahrenheit oven that is preheated for about 50 minutes and we're going to turn the squash over about halfway through the cooking time. While the squash is roasting now we're going to take, I have some sage from my garden, nice and fresh here. I've got several leaves I'm cooking up quite a few. There's probably about 18 leaves here and I'm going to stack them and then I'm going to roll them and then I'm going to slice them. Sage has such a beautiful earthy flavor with little hints of pine and mint that you're going to love this. It goes great with the butternut squash risotto. I know it might look like a lot of sage here, but trust me it's not. We're going to fry this up now on the stove. So here's how we're going to fry up our sage and get it nice and crispy. All right I've got a large frying pan over here. You don't need one this big but that's what I have. So you'll heat up some olive oil over medium heat and once that gets hot we'll place our sage right into the pan. Add just a pinch of salt and we'll stir this for probably two to three minutes or until it starts to get crispy and the color turns a dark green. Now if it starts to turn brown you're definitely done. Don't don't let it turn brown. Now you want to make sure you have just enough oil like I have here so that it has you know some moisture in it and it can brown up nicely but not too much oil. It's crisping up nicely here. It's a nice dark green not very brown so I'm going to take it off. I'm going to place it into a plate that's covered with paper towels to just absorb some of the excess oil. We have time for chef's joke number two. All right here we go. What is the name of the Greek philosopher who loves rice? Eresotto. Now we're ready to start cooking our rice. I've got a half of a yellow onion here and I'm going to do this super fine dice on it. First I'll do some horizontal cuts and then some vertical cuts and then the final slice down which gets it pretty fine. Then I give it one more run through with the knife. Next is four cloves of fresh garlic so I'll cut off the tip and then smash it with the old knife just like you would the like button if you're enjoying this video and then peel off the skin and run it through the press. You know that grip strength is necessary for this and did you also know that grip strength is related to longevity so stay strong and press lots of garlic. So here's our butternut squash. It's been roasting for about 40 minutes and it still has a little bit more to go so I'm just going to give it a little flip toss it over a little bit and put it back in for another 10 minutes. After about 55 minutes total time cooking here's our butternut squash nice and golden brown and all I'm going to do now is just take it out keep it warm and just leave it here on the stove until we're ready to add it to the risotto. Now before we get cooking I want to show you all the ingredients we have here all right I have some chopped up butter over there on the right I have my arborio rice I have some cauliflower rice I have my garlic and onions like we chopped up there and I've got some white wine salt olive oil and some parmesan cheese I also have some chicken stock here and what you want to do with this is you want to heat it up and get it nice and hot before we start cooking the rice I'm going to pour this into a saucepan right behind the pan and I'm going to be cooking the rice so it's nice and close I've got my large frying pan over medium heat here and I'm adding a fair amount of olive oil to the pan once that gets hot I'll swirl the oil in the pan and then we'll add the onion I'll add a pinch of salt and then we're going to saute this for about seven minutes stirring frequently now it's time to add that minced garlic and we'll saute that for one minute more give it a good stir I wish you could smell the aroma delicious you haven't used arborio rice this is what it looks like in the package and it is a short grain rice and it has a lot of starch so it makes our dish nice and creamy so we'll pour in some of that and you want to coat it in the oil and the onions in the garlic for just like one to two minutes next come some white wine I'm using sauvignon blanc here but you can leave it out if you don't want to use any wine so I'll stir and cook this for medium-high heat until it cooks down we're ready to start adding the chicken broth about a cup at a time now that's why we have this hot so it won't cool down the rice so we'll add that to the rice and we're going to keep the temperature up we want this to be a nice simmer so that it'll cook the rice and it needs to cook the rice in about 25 to 30 minutes so the process is we add the liquid and then we make sure that the temperature is high enough so that you actually see a simmer and we stir it until that rice is absorbed the liquid then we add more liquid again same amount and then do the same process over and over until we use up about it you know anywhere from four to five cups of broth so once the rice is soft enough and you want to taste it just to make sure then it's time to add the cauliflower rice so I bought mine at Trader Joe's and I defrosted it and just let it sit in the fridge for a while and then now it's ready to go I'm just sprinkling it in and we'll stir that in and the heat from the rice will definitely thaw it completely and warm it up at any point you can add just a little more liquid to this as I'm doing right here and just to you know make sure it's nice and moist I'm into a nice creamy risotto now I need to add a little bit of salt here maybe half a teaspoon because we have other ingredients that have salt so you don't need too much here so now I'm going to add the butter now you notice I cut small pieces here so that way it will melt very quickly then we'll give that a stir to melt it in now for some grated or shredded parmesan cheese and that's going to make it nice and cheesy and creamy it's time to add that butternut squash that was roasted to a beautiful golden brown my squash isn't quite as warm as I'd like it to be so I'm going to just stir it in and then we're going to put the temperature in the pan to low and then we're going to cover I am ready to serve this up and take a taste notice how cheesy and creamy this is imagine if you will of serving this up with some barbecue chicken or tri-tip or anything I mean this is so good it makes a fantastic side dish and don't forget we have that crispy fried sage that we're going to sprinkle over the top to garnish it up this is such a great dish I mean we sneak in a little bit of cauliflower rice and you hardly even know it's there and it's creamy and it's just silky delicious and it's got that little sage at the end so good I want to know who's going to make this let me know down in the comments below who doesn't love a delicious Caesar salad well I've got a healthier version here that you might want to check out click the link on the screen and it'll take you right to the video I hope you enjoyed today's recipe if you did let me know by giving the old like button a good smash and share the video if you know somebody who might just love this recipe all right we'll see you back here next week for another delicious and healthy recipe