How to make risotto

In the spring of 2020, an angel appeared to me in a dream and presented me with access to a most holy and beautiful artifact: Mrs. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the cooking blog that Emily Rogers, my cisgender self from an alternate universe, writes. What might seem to be a cooking blog at first is, instead, a window into the multiverse. You can read the archives here, and if you need to get caught up on the #lore, she has a Wiki. It is important to note, as always, that photos do not survive the transmission between universes, but the alt text descriptions of those images are provided in place. – ESJ

Happy New Year, Emmy's Army! Boom! Kablam! Pow! Fireworks!

It's rainy here in Seattle — stop me if you've heard this one before — and it was especially foggy last night for the big New Year's Eve fireworks and drone show here. Or so I'm told. I didn't even watch it on TV, as I was in bed at 10:30. But M watched the countdown at a party over at her friend C's house, and I salute C's dads for having a dozen sixth graders over and still being able to swing by with a basket of cookies this morning. They live just down the street, and a great joy of 2025 was getting to know them and their kids.

[Image: A group of girls watching fog-clouded fireworks on a big-screen TV. They are shot from behind, so all we see are the backs of their heads.]

I won't sugar coat it: 2025 was a tough year for a lot of folks, including us. The constant threats to M's necessary healthcare (though we're safe here in Washington for the time being), the general rolling chaos around the world, the disastrous aftermath of President Williamson's first annual national séance — they really wore me out! But it was a good year in so many ways too. I published my tenth cookbook, Kids in the Kitchen with Emily, and it was such a joy to feature G so heavily throughout it. David and I got a little time to ourselves with our big trip to Alaska. And both girls have finally locked down really solid friend groups here in our new neighborhood. As Grandma Molly always used to say: Life takes away as much as it gives, but it gives as much as it takes away, too. Words to live by! Or just a very nice sounding tautology.

Also, in 2025, I finally started getting to know my mom.

[Image: Two women, one middle-aged, one older, both with the same long, blonde hair and similar builds. They're sitting at a dinner table, obviously having had their conversation interrupted by the photographer. A young girl with similar blonde hair is in the process of clearing said table.]

No, not thanks to the disastrous aftermath of President Williamson's first annual national seance! I continue to have complicated feelings about the mother who raised me and passed away when I was in my 20s. I mean my biological mother, whose family we visited over the Thanksgiving holidays, as you Instergram followers surely know. She came out for a few days after Christmas and just left on December 30th. On her last night here, I wanted to make something comforting and warm, to cut through winter's chill. As I was contemplating just what dish might fit the bill while pacing in my kitchen at 2 a.m. and trying not to think about my complicated feelings around my bio mom, I heard a small voice from the bottom cupboard say, "Did you forget about me? Your dearest friend?" It was, of course, my Constant Pot*, and that made me realize it was time to make a lovely risotto.

[*-Longtime Emily Rogers fans will remember that certain brand names are different in her universe. From what research I could glean from the archives, the Constant Pot is her world's version of the Instant Pot, except it has several of the features of a Furby as well, including a very rudimentary ability to communicate and learn English and the capacity to speak when it is not plugged in. As always, this sounds horrifying to me, but what do I know? –ed.]

It's been a while since we did a giveaway here at the blog, and the good folks at Constant Pot were good enough to respond when I reached out over the holidays to ask if we could set one up. We'll be giving away three Constant Pot DeluXXXes to randomly selected folks who email emmysarmy99@gmail.com with the subject line "Constant Pot giveaway." In the body of the email, write the first song you want to teach your new little buddy to sing as it's coming to pressure!

[Image: A Constant Pot, sitting on Emily's counter. Hers is the famous "Sunset Jungle" version with the tiger claw tears across the display screen, which make reading it very difficult.]

I was a pretty big Constant Pot user when my kids were younger. A pressure cooker is simply the easiest way to prepare a bunch of dishes that require a lot of time and attention, and the fact that I could, say, set a batch of oatmeal in the evening and have it start cooking even before I got up was a life saver when M was a toddler and G was on the way. It's also the rare kitchen gizmo that drew David into my terrible web of domesticity. [You know I love when I can poke buttons, though I don't know what the "rat" button is meant to do.] Nobody does! In the section of the manual covering that feature, there's just a little old-fashioned smiley face emoticon. :)

Now, alas, my kids are older, and at least one of them loves helping me in the kitchen, so the Constant Pot grows a little lonelier every day. I still occasionally use it to make things like stocks and sauces, and I break it out every time I need to make a new batch of yogurt or mead. But I'm much less of a set-it-and-forget-it kinda gal these days. Also, we have to think about the demands of content generation! Would you rather see this...

[Image: A woman's hands shot from above, cooking something in a pan.]

Or this?

[Image: A Constant Pot sitting idly, its display reading "00:10."]

But! Risotto is a huge pain in the behind to make on the stovetop, and while I think it's better cooked that way, it's not so much better than what you can get in the Constant Pot that I ever particularly feel like I'm letting anybody (including myself) down by making it that way. Plus, it sings such soothing mysteries as it cooks!

All right. Ingredients.

[Image: Lined up left to right are boxed chicken stock, olive oil, a small onion, garlic, arborio rice, a pinot grigio, butter, and parmesan cheese]

All we're doing in this post is making a nice risotto base. You can — and should! — add your own ingredients to finish it off. My family loves mushrooms and frozen peas, which I usually stir in right at the end. (I'll tell you when to do this.) But a nice smoked pork product or some spinach or something would be great too! You might even mix in some cooked ground beef if you miss Hamburger Helpmate and don't hate yourself!

Another nice thing about risotto is that it's usually a side, but you can make it a main in a pinch with the right add-ins. It's a very versatile dish — all warm and creamy goodness that melts on your tongue and keeps well in the fridge or freezer if you've either made too much or doubled your recipe for funsies.

Let's start with chicken stock! I, of course, make my own, and I highly recommend it for recipes like this where the flavor that seeps into the rice is so important. But if you need to use the boxed stuff or a bouillon cube, I'm not going to tell. Regardless, you're going to need two cups of it all ready before you start doing anything else. Don't be like me and forget you're supposed to have it sitting right there. Also, while you're at it, dice up that small onion and mince a couple cloves of garlic, just so you're not doing 500 things at once. Mise en place! What happens next is going to happen pretty quickly, and you don't want to delay, not really. Timing is of the essence when it comes to risotto, even in the Constant Pot!

Anyway, turn on the Constant Pot's sauté function, and let two tablespoons of olive oil heat up. (A note: I generally turn the sauté to "low," rather than "high," as I've found it to produce more consistent results and almost never result in your Constant Pot bellowing "Am I dying? Is this how it feels to die?", which is just the error message it gives when it's gotten a little burn-y with your food.) Once it's nice and hot, add the diced onion and let that soften for 6o to 90 seconds or so.

Now! Add your garlic and a cup of arborio rice. If you don't have arborio rice on hand, you can use most other kinds of rice, though I recommend basmati or brown. But c'mon. It's worth it to go to the store and get arborio rice. It'll make everything that much better. Mix all of this around so the rice gets coated in oil, which looks like...

[Image: The rice, sleek and shiny against the metal bottom of the pot. Slightly translucent onions and tanned garlic rest alongside it.]

Then, you toast it for a hot second. [Which is...?] Oh, like two minutes, maybe three. You just want it to look a little more like...

[Image: The white rice is now ever so slightly tanned too.]

Boom. Now, add a quarter cup of white wine, the drier the better. You know I normally say that cheap wine is best for cooking, but here, you might want to grab something a little splashy because if the wine you use here is too sweet, it's going to make the whole thing a little cloying in the end. Let the rice simmer in the wine for 30 seconds, then dump in your chicken stock, which you prepared all those many steps ago! Good for you! Turn off the saute function, close the Constant Pot, and set it to cook on high pressure for six minutes. Listen to it sing as it comes to pressure. Mine has been offering REM's "Man on the Moon" lately, for reasons I cannot fathom. Someone else in this house must have been teaching it that song. [Don't look at me!] Well, it's not one of the girls! [Bryan's over here all the time. You don't know what he does when we're not looking!]

Now you can just walk away and think about what you've done. In my case, that involved going into the dining room and finding that my mom and G had already set the table for dinner. They were laughing like they had a really good grandma-granddaughter secret going, and that made me happy to see. It did! Then they looked over at me and laughed even harder, which made me both happier and incredibly, desperately sad.

I don't talk a lot about being adopted here beyond occasionally mentioning it, though I suppose the frequency with which my biological mother has been coming up in the past couple of years would necessarily suggest what's up with me. When I was a kid, I thought about being adopted often enough that my dad called it "a preoccupation" and suggested I'd better stop dwelling on it because the woman who'd given birth to me hadn't wanted me, so I'd wound up with people who did. I think I was 5 or 6 when he said that, and now that I've raised two 6-year-olds, I realize that was kind of a fucked-up thing to say! But whatever. He said a lot of fucked-up things.

Naturally, I couldn't stop thinking about it! You know me, Emmy's Army! I can't ever leave well enough alone. I just never talked about it in front of my family anymore. I didn't even write about it in my journals, in the event that my dad went pawing through those for all my secrets. I imagined her as a famous actress or musician. I imagined her as a high-powered businesswoman. I imagined her as a woman who had had so many kids that she wanted to spread the love. I imagined her as an astronaut or airplane pilot. I never really thought about my dad because on some level, I had given up on the idea of having a good dad. But I couldn't stop imagining a mom who wouldn't try to force me into the box of the life she thought she should be leading. Mostly, I held onto these thoughts so tightly that they kept me up most nights. I think Beth and I talked about it once in high school, and I shared all of my flights of fancy before she said, "She was probably just some teenager," and then we realized we were both teenagers and stopped talking about it. I tried to talk about it with my pastor once, but he said it was all part of God's plan, which shut me up good. Who would question God's plan?

Still, the second I turned 18, I sent in all the necessary paperwork to find out who she was. It took a few months to get anything back, but she finally wrote back and told me the rudimentary basics about her life. In her photos, she looked just like me. She had married some guy who wasn't my bio dad, and she had two sons and a daughter, and she had a good job, and she had had me when she was 20, and she just didn't think she could take care of a kid right then. And as I was 19 when I was reading all of this and couldn't imagine being a mom, it made a certain degree of sense to me. She somehow was nothing I had imagined her being — not even "some teenager" by the barest of technicalities — and like a person I had carried inside of me from my very earliest years. The second I knew even the slightest thing about her, all of the other possibilities sloughed off of me, but the sensation didn't leave me feeling fresh and new. It left me feeling heavier, somehow, as though the not knowing had left me a little weightless, incapable of ever really being pinned down. Now, I was starting to become real. My existence no longer felt quite so accidental. It had a story, even if I didn't know it yet.

She came to visit me in Chapel Hill that summer. My parents made the trek up from Florida, and they pretended to be happy to meet her. Dad prayed really earnestly about how glad he was that she had brought me into the world so I could be his daughter, and I don't remember much about his prayer beyond that because I opened my eyes and just watched him. He was sweating under the lights of the hotel restaurant where we all met up for dinner, and his lips were chapped, and I think he might have been trembling a little. He was scared, I realized, of me sampling the parent wares and finding him wanting. And I realized, thrillingly, that I was 19 years old, and I had options. The family who had raised me could have simply been a starting offer. You know?

(Your Constant Pot is probably shrieking now to indicate that it's done with your six-minute cook. Release the pressure immediately, okay? Don't wait! You want this to be smooth and creamy.)

After my parents left, I spent the day with my bio mom, trying to get a sense of her and of me refracted through the prism of her. After all the requisite small talk, she told me the story of how I had come to exist on this planet, and instead of being anything I could hold onto, it was really fucking sad. It's not really my story to tell because I wasn't there, but it's the same story you've heard a billion times before: A guy didn't take no for an answer, and a girl decided that was her fault, and all involved decided it would be best if the resulting baby girl went very far away.

But that baby girl was me. And I don't know what she wanted, not really, but I remember the way M curled up against me the second I first held her, and I know in my heart of hearts that what that baby girl wanted all those years ago was something other than what she got. I told my mom none of this, and I thanked her for giving birth to me, and I walked her back to her hotel.

And then walking back home along Franklin, I started crying as hard as I had to that point in my life, harder than for Grandpa Lou or Grandma Molly, harder than for any breakup. Until I had known my mom and what happened to her, I had been a story, just one possibility among many, and when I finally heard the truth of my existence, I started to be a person. And I hated it. I wanted to die. Except that wasn't true either. What I wanted was to stop being a person, to become the object of somebody else's story, to be part of somebody else's God's plan, because it was safer that way. It was the only way I knew how to exist.

Except I didn't know that then. I know that now because I've had a lot of therapy. Then, I just wanted to stop feeling. Which was how I found myself standing outside of a house party, a stereo somewhere blaring "Back to Dungaree High." I wasn't invited, and I didn't know anybody, but I walked right in, and I grabbed a beer, and I slammed it back. And then I grabbed another one and another one, and nobody seemed at all confused that I was there. It wasn't the first time I'd had a drink, but it was the first time I'd had one with the intention of getting drunk. I hung around the edges of the party until a guy started talking to me. He wasn't even that good looking, but I let him take me upstairs to one of the bedrooms, and the next thing you know, his hand was under my bra, and my tongue was in his mouth.

I wanted him to fuck me. I wanted him to push me out of myself and into some other life that made sense. I didn't want him to knock me up, but I also wouldn't have cared if he did. I was on the pill, but I wasn't particularly good at being regular with it in those days because I basically wasn't having sex. I hadn't figured out how to make my freakish tallness work for me, and I was the exact wrong combination of slightly nerdy and slightly Christian. But in that moment, I felt like I had finally figured it out.

Right up until the door to the room opened, and his girlfriend came in and called me a slut (still the only time anyone has called me this; I know you're surprised), and I threw up all over her shoes.

Right! This is getting away from me! We're making risotto! So, you've released the pressure on the Constant Pot, which means you need to mix in two tablespoons of butter — probably unsalted, but I never mind a little salted. Give that about a minute to get all incorporated, and if you're adding in other mix-ins, this is the place where you would do that. You might add some lemon juice for a burst of acid here, but what you should definitely do is mix in a quarter cup of parmesan cheese to add that little cheesy tang. You're basically ready to serve at this point, but I do think giving it another minute or two to come together never hurt anybody.

So! Back at the party. After I threw up, I needed to be anywhere else, so I made a break for it. But two blocks from the house, I realized I had left my purse there. When I went back, the girl sat on the curb, shoes still vaguely covered in Emily vomit, and when I tried to apologize, she looked up at me with the most savage expression, which softened second by second until she wore no expression at all. I told her I thought I had left my purse, and she nodded and waved me toward the house. I started to go, but before I got very far away, she said, "I think sometimes that all I am is a catastrophe." I didn't know why, but that comforted me somehow, so I said, "Oh, you too?" and she laughed. I didn't get her name. She was wearing a killer green top though. I went home and fell asleep and was only a few minutes late for brunch with my bio mom.

Now, with a lot of years and a lot of therapy, I know that the girl's words comforted me because to be a person, to exist in your own skin, is to accept the sheer catastrophe that is being yourself. When I was just a theory, a figment of somebody else's imagination, everything I did felt like it might be undone, like I might wake up one morning in another reality entirely and not know how I had gotten there.

But the thing is... I kind of did that? I basically never talk to my dad, and my adoptive mom passed away long ago, and the parental figure who's in my life the most is my bio mom. And every time I'm around her, I feel like I exist in two timelines simultaneously. In one, she's something like a beloved aunt, a family member you know pretty well but don't know as well as the people who raised you or the children you raised in turn. In the other, it's like I'm part of a continuum, the missing link between grandmother and granddaughter, instead of a dead-end on somebody else's family tree. I see the way people look at M and mom and me when we're all out together somewhere, and we make sense to them as three generations of women in the same family. It's all I wanted when I was idly wondering who she might be when I was a girl; it's all wrong because it's a lie. There is no past to serve as its foundation.

I placed the risotto on the table that night, and later, my mom took seconds, and I could tell how much she loved it, and I, a full-ass grown mother of two, felt like a little kid whose good report card just went up on the fridge. There is some person I didn't ever get to be, and she's the only one who knows how to pull that girl out of me. It's lovely; it's not enough.

Mom reads this blog, so I'm relatively sure she knows that my childhood wasn't all sunshine and roses. We also haven't talked about it because what would I say? "My dad was a huge asshole, and my mom wanted me to live all the dreams she didn't get to"? What good would that do her? She made a choice, and it's not like anybody can unmake it. I've made a good life out of what she handed me, and I love that she's as big a part of it as she's become.

And yet it's all true. My dad was a huge asshole, and my mom wanted me to live all the dreams she didn't get to. And for as much as they said they wanted me, they never wanted me. They wanted an idea of a person who sort of looked like me sometimes. The first person who wanted me was probably Beth and later David, and I'm not sure there are any other people on that list. Even the girls need me to be someone other than my whole self for them, which is part of the parenthood deal, so I don't complain.

Would she have wanted me in the way I needed to be wanted? I don't know. Probably not. To be a parent is to accept that something you do will be a thing your kid talks about in their 30s to a therapist who assures them that they were just a child and didn't deserve whatever it was. She would have hurt me somehow, maybe worse than I was already hurt. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

Maybe 19-year-old me was right all along and the main thing to thank her for is giving birth to me. The story of why I'm here is sad — it's so sad — and it's so unlikely. Every day, I am reminded what an accident it is that I exist, what a catastrophe it is to be alive. But I'm here all the same. And it's a new year, fresh and clean, and I, improbably, get to be a part of it. How good that can be.

That night before my mom's departure, as dinner was wrapping up, Bry came over with his new girlfriend in tow, and one of M's friends came over with her parents to drop something off. Suddenly, the house was full of people, and the only thing tying all of them together was me, and I felt so full of something I couldn't even begin to name. I looked at Mom, and I thought maybe her eyes were glistening, or maybe it was just that mine were. I thought of a billion things I might have told her or asked her or brought up, all the things I've always left unsaid or buried underneath decorum, but I felt, in that moment, that none of them mattered, and, instead, I asked if she wanted dessert, and I watched her smile before she said yes.

[Image: A group of people gathered around a table, empty dishes all around. So many of them are moving around its edges, several of them blurry, even, but two women sit still, right across from each other, almost a before and after.]

A Good Song

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