The one dinner every guy should know how to make.

Every guy and every gal for that matter should have at least one date night dish in their arsenal and today I'm sharing my nomination for that dish. It's got just 10 ingredients but it feels and tastes like a restaurant quality dish. Now to see if this recipe is actually simple enough for anyone to make, I'm going to bring my partner Max into the kitchen to make it for us. He is not the most experienced cook but I'll be guiding him throughout the process. You can find the full recipe at NYTCooking, where I'm a contributor, and I'll share later in the video how you can get it for free. But for now, let's get Max cooking. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Today, we're making a creamy orzo risotto with roasted vegetables. It has the luxurious texture and richness of classic risotto, but it's a lot easier and faster. Easy sounds good to me. Okay, so we're going to start with the roasted vegetable component of the dish. So we've got Carrots and kohlrabi. You know what this is, I cook with it all the time. Carrots and fennel. Carrots and fennel. Okay, let's start by chopping the carrots. I have already done you a favor and scrubbed and washed these. This is very useful. I'm just gonna eat them. Oh, okay, go ahead. Not anymore. Really showing the audience the natural chemistry we have. So these carrots are pretty uniform throughout. Something like this, maybe there's a bit more difference in the top and the bottom. So for these, cut off where they start to get fat. This is so much fun. I don't have to do anything. Does it bother you to watch me do this either slowly or poorly? You're doing it great. Literally you're criticizing how I cut off the ends of the carrots like two minutes ago. That's just for waste purposes. All right, carrots done. Now we move on to the fennel. I'm gonna have you cut the fennel. Typically you do a cut right here. Yep. And you will save the fronds for... Garnish or we are gonna use them today kind of like an herb or something so exactly and then you're gonna slice it crosswise into a Third of an inch pieces. Do you need me to get my measuring tape more of an eyeball it enough? Is this stressing you out? Yeah, why I'm like, is that a third of an inch? You normally cut this part out of the video. You think we can edit this so it looks like I'm chopping really quickly Such a good job. All right vegetables are prepped. We forgot to turn on the oven. So let's get that preheated All right. 425. I'm also going to have you turn the stove on to heat that water up. So that's four cups of water that we're bringing to a boil. We should have started that earlier, but we are a little all over the place because there's actually no one manning the camera as Max normally films everything. So we're figuring things out as we go. All right, roasting vegetables. What would be the next step? Sheet pan? Yes. You could eyeball this, but I'm going to give you exact measurements. Extra virgin olive oil, tablespoon and a half. And now you can season with salt and pepper. Do it from up here. And some pepper. What you're looking for is it should feel well seasoned, but not like super oily. What's the first rule of roasting vegetables? Don't overcrowd the pan or else it's going to steam. I taught you so well. Couple other tips, your larger pieces of vegetables, put them on the perimeter, the edges of the pan, because that's where the pan gets hottest. And then any flat sides on the carrots, face down, those will brown nicer. These are gonna go in the oven at 425 Fahrenheit for 15 minutes. Do you want to put them in now or wait a little bit just because you think I'm a little bit slower as a chef? And we're kind of talking this out together? We're talking it out together, we're filming it, so maybe we'll hold off on roasting this for a few minutes. The second element is the orzo risotto obviously, that's the main thing. I'm going to have you measure out 12 ounces or 340 grams. So the reason I like using orzo here is because it cooks a lot faster than the traditional grain used for risotto, which is an arborio rice, but you still get a lot of that creamy, luscious, rich texture. So one of the things about orzo is that it clumps quite a bit when you're cooking it. So to prevent that, I'm gonna have you pour some boiling water on top of this that we just heated on the stove. Just give it a stir. So this is how you cook orzo, you just soak it in hot water. No, this is the prep step, like prepping your vegetables, prepping the orzo. I've read the recipe, I know. Okay, we'll set this aside for 10 minutes and you can start that 10 minute timer I have over there. So while that's soaking, I understand we're going to make the topping. Yes. Pine nuts, we've got a third of a cup measured out. Yes, we're going to toast those. All right. What heat? Medium. And let that go for about two minutes. The pan is nice and hot. Once you start to see some color on them, then I would start stirring frequently. I can see a little bit of color on some of these. I'm going to move this out of the way for you. Thank you. We should put the vegetables in the oven now. What do you think? Yes. 425 Fahrenheit on the bottom third rack for 15 minutes. Then we'll rotate the pan and give it another 10 or 15 minutes. In the meantime, we will finish our topping. The orzo's actually, we should drain that as well. Oh, yes. Let's drain that. Now you're going to use your hands to just break up those clumps. That way the orzo doesn't stick together when we cook it. For the rest of the topping, I'm going to have you chop a small handful each of... Parsley. And some of the fennel fronds. Is there a substitute for pine nuts? I know they're a little on the pricey side. Yes, I would say walnuts would be a good substitute. Obviously toast them like you toasted the pine nuts. But yeah, they have a similar texture and they're cheaper. I think that would work nice. Straight in? Yes. A couple pinches of flaky sea salt. Okay. Now I give you the pestle and you're just going to muddle this or mix it up until the herbs start to cling to the nuts. Cling to the nuts. I didn't say anything. It's a scientific culinary term. If I lived alone, I would say there's a 0% chance that I own one of these. A mortar and pestle? Yeah. Okay, fair. Put this mixture in a bowl, just like a regular bowl like here. I also wouldn't own any mixing bowls. Okay, well then this recipe's not for you. Like a cereal bowl? You get no dates. A cereal bowl? A cereal bowl is fine, yes. You're gonna take the bottom handle of a wooden spoon, and that works just fine. What if all you have is a hammer? You're canceled. You're no longer welcome on this show. I can see you're getting stressed out. I'm going to stop with this line up. Does that work okay, though? Yeah, it actually kind of works better in some ways. Oh, okay. That's a nice texture. This is kind of what you're looking for. All right, it's time to rotate the pan. No need to flip. Perfect. Perfect. Time to cook the orzo. You've cooked pasta before, maybe not orzo, but when you cook pasta, what do you typically do? Big pot of water, a lot of salt. That is a totally normal way to cook pasta, but because we want the orzo to mimic the texture of risotto, be saucy, creamy, rich, luxurious, we're actually going to use as little liquid as possible. Okay. All right, that hot water over there that we boiled earlier, it's still hot. I'm gonna have you measure 1 1⁄2 cups or 360 mLs. Okay. That's going to go in the pan. Quite a bit of kosher salt. Again, we're cooking pasta. We need to season the water well. How much do we need? One and three quarters teaspoon of kosher salt. If you're using sea salt or table salt, use about half the amount. There's such a thing as a three quarter teaspoon measure. I've had that for about six years. You've never seen it in the drawer. Maybe I thought it was three or four. Three or four teaspoons. They didn't measure that closely. I had to have my eight year old cousin teach me what that was. Black pepper, lots of it. I would say 15 twists. Or a half teaspoon. Oh, you don't do twists like I do twists. I don't know what you do. I like a lot of black pepper in this dish because it kind of gives you that cacio e pepe flavor. And then I have two more ingredients for you. One is... Were you waiting for me to say that? Yes, I was waiting for you to say that. One is cashew milk. And this is going to enhance the richness of this risotto-style dish. And we need the same amount we used as water, one and a half cups. We'll start bringing this to a simmer. And one more ingredient. What's my favorite ever ingredient besides salt, maybe? Tahini. That is a good guess. This is something I use every single day. Olive oil. Yes, extra virgin olive oil. Risotto is typically very buttery, has that nice mouthfeel. Olive oil's gonna help us get there. Look how pretty the olive oil looks. Sorry. All right, this is at a simmer now, so you can go ahead and add the orzo. We wanna simmer it for about 11 minutes, give or take. And like regular risotto, you're gonna stir pretty frequently, about every 45 seconds. So the regular stirring is gonna prevent the orzo from sticking, but it's also helping to agitate the starch in the orzo, so you're releasing that starch, which is naturally creamy. And I believe our vegetables should be ready. Do you wanna check on those? Yes. How are they looking? Oh, these look good. So we've got a nice texture base in here but we need a few things to make this more flavorful. One of them is one of my favorite ingredients. Miso. Yes. But if you were to just add miso directly in here it would clump, it wouldn't dissolve well. So we're gonna make a slurry. Two teaspoons. How much hot water would you add to this? Eyeball a few splashes if you don't want to measure out. That's good. What do you call this sound? Reverse ASMR. It's one of your commenters called it that. It is pretty crazy how well the orzo, just taking on all this liquid. All right, I'm gonna lower it so you can try a bit. Let me know if you think it's done. I think it already tastes pretty good. We're gonna make it even better. So I'm gonna kill the heat or just put it on low is fine. Another one of my favorite ingredients. What is that? This is nutritional yeast. Just a tablespoon. It's gonna add a little extra savoriness. Our final item, I've already measured it for you, is a tablespoon of vegan butter. And if you don't want to use vegan butter, you could just use olive oil. Let's have you try it, see what you think. I would say that's good enough to eat on its own. Should we make ourselves some bowls? Let's do it. I can't believe you cooked it. I can't believe I did either. Are you proud of yourself? You held my hand a lot. I think I still need to make it on my own to be really proud, but at home. Look at those beauties. Probably could have played with that a little better. Maybe just leave it on one side. What do you think? It's your dish. Give me that really nice brown one over there. Oh, yeah. That's what I said when I saw you in law school. Give me one of those nice brown ones over there. I didn't say one of those nice browns. I said that nice brown one. Do your best impression of car me like really concentrating at the... Do you have any tweezers? No, you don't. I don't actually need the tweezers. All right, before we dig in, which I'm very excited to do, how do you feel like it went overall? Is there anything you would do differently? Was it easier or harder than you expected? It was definitely easier than I expected. I think anyone could make this at home as long as you were standing right next to them. Me? I'm standing next to them? Yeah, if you were right next to them, I think anyone could do this. We'll see what kind of holograms we can create. If I could lower the stress level even more, I might even make the topping. First, just put it off to the side, maybe do even the slurry earlier, just so that way it's like I'm focused more on one thing at a time. But it's really not that hard to follow. Nice. Happy date, date, day date. Cheers. Gosh, this is really good. It's so addictive. It's got that really just delicious savoriness that keeps you coming back for more. And where can everyone get the recipe? This recipe is available at NYT Cooking. There's a gift link in the description box. Or you can scan this QR code. QR code right here. I hope you enjoyed Max doing the cooking today. I certainly did. It made my job a lot easier. Let's hope we're in focus. We haven't checked. Let us know in the comments if you want to see Max more often in our videos. And we'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.