Enlivened by the food culture that I've experienced from having lived in a few countries, my time spent in Europe has opened up my fascination for the Mediterranean cuisine more than I could ever have imagined. Sure enough, with the click of a mouse, nowadays you can "travel" to any country's kitchen, but living the experience is astoundingly peerless. Of the many dishes that I have literally come to enjoy, risotto has been one that it is now pretty much a bi-weekly menu staple at the Lovlie Cocoon.
Where this dish gains its singularity though is from my inherited Mauritian food culture. While I have blogged about what the Mauritian cuisine is like before, it is always an enchantment to hear about your home country from the perspective of a foreigner. Much to surprise today, I came across a colleague who has actually been to Mauritius for a three-week vacation. She described Mauritius as this land lost in the middle of the Indian Ocean where you have people from Indian, Chinese and African origins all mix up in one pot but where the common spoken language is a Creole-French. Well that's pretty much a concise all-rounder description. Back to the food culture, kitchri is a wonderful homey lightly spiced rice dish that is popular in many Mauritian households and inherited from India. It is cooked with lentils and / or dal (yellow split peas or mung dal) which melt into the rice resulting into a hearty meal of earthy comfort. In Mauritius, this rice dish is very often accompanied by a Mauritian Rougail.
Medleyed with my love for spices and a little bit of added Mauritian pizzazz, on one day where a one pot rice dish was calling, I whizzed up something between a traditional vegan risotto and a kitchri.
Featuring turmeric infused dal and red lentils into an oozy brown rice 45-minute one-pot meal with no added oil, I quite inadvertently coined the term kitchrisotto - when risotto meets kitchri.
