For more recipes, take a look at my Flickr "food" set.

One day I will sit down (or stand up, more likely) and really take the time and trouble to learn how to make a decent risotto. For now, I settled on a quick and easy rice based dish, which probably has more in common with fried rice - but contained enough mushroom and bacon to make it into an adequate supper.

PART I - Preparation

You'll need to have the following ingredients to hand:

• Basmati Rice
• Sea salt
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Crushed black pepper
• Chopped garlic
• Thyme
• Tomato puree
• Medallions of smoked back bacon
• Mushrooms
• Small onion

PART II - Cooking

So far as timing is concerned, I don't multitask, and the following worked out fine for me...

Prepare the ingredients so far as you can. Chop the garlic, slice the onion, wash and slice the mushrooms, and cut the bacon into short strips. Keep everything else within arms reach.

I follow the Delia Smith approach to rice, which takes about ten minutes, plus you let it stand for a few minutes afterwards. In this instance, I seasoned the rice with salt, coriander and cumin. Set the rice off and immediately move to your other pan.

Fry the garlic and onions in a little extra virgin olive oil, and while they soften, fry the tomato puree for a minute or two. Mix, and then add the bacon and mushrooms. Season with salt, pepper and a little thyme.

With any degree of luck, your rice should be ready at about the same time as the bacon/mushroom and so tip it in and fry it all together for a couple of minutes.

Plate, and enjoy with ice cold beer. In this case, I'd picked up a 650ml bottle of Singha Thai beer, which was pretty good - definitely happy to have some again.

PART III - Eating

As I mentioned above, ultimately I want to learn to make risotto, but like many people I've been put off by the thought of standing over it and slowly adding the stock, etc. Until that time, this rice based recipe is not too bad. However, an occasional wild mushroom risotto would go down really rather nicely, so I'll have to take the plunge and see how it goes.

The above recipe is not particularly sophisticated, but it was tasty and you can't go wrong with the preparation. My biggest mistake was to eat it while watching Airplane 2, but short of employing a triple starred Michelin chef in our kitchen, I don't think anything would have helped make Airplane 2 more digestible.

Enjoy!