Arancini Fail

Hey, I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy sipping espresso's and walking really ridiculously slowly with large groups of people who also enjoy taking up the sidewalk with their lackadaisical strides. In truth I've started up classes for this semester and took a weekend trip to Venice for Carnevale, good times, but mostly just walking around the beautiful city with crazy costumed people while drinking boxed wine (.69 eurocents, i still don't suggest consuming more than 2 liters in an evening) with a straw. The bellini, a persecco and peach juice (and also some soda that is particular to venice as some bellini vendor told me) cocktail, was also in abundance.

I've also been doing a lot of cooking, mainly experiments with Crepes, vegetables, hamburgers, and others. but without my camera i'm still attempting to collect those photos. One photo that I do have is of my failed attempt at making Arancini.
They're basically a rice ball with mozzarella and some meat or peas or whatever inside then rolled in breadcrumb and flour and quickly fried. I'll give you the scientific breakdown of my cooking process: Make some rice (you might want to make a bunch of rice if your serving a crowd, or planning on having the arancini as more than a side dish); the rice should be somewhat sticky so you'll probably want to use risotto as its thicker and fluffier, and not as much water. Drain the rice, put it in a large bowl and mix in an egg and flour (for stickyness and also taste). Then mix in whatever you want inside it, i used some ground beef that i had quickly fried up before hand, mozzarella fresh from the mercato dell'erbe, and some grated parmesan. I also suggest peas, and i also wanted to try using spinach, but you do not want to use too much stuffing, the rice keeps the ball together, to much additional ingredients and you will have sad looking arancini, similar to mine. After you make the mixture, roll it in a batch of breadcrumb, flour, some basil, a pinch of pepper, light dusting of salt (all measured to tast), and any other nonsense you want. Then throw a few quickly into a heated pan with plenty of olive oil and move them around, you want the pan to be really hot so that once they hit the bread crumb will bind, then you roll them around in the oil so that they evenly fry, once they're golden, toss them into plate. If you let them sit, like mine, they flatten out and explode a bit, still delicious, but sad.

tip: Arancini are typically fit comfortably in a hand, like a small orange, if you're having trouble making the balls stay together, just make them smaller dummy!

Arancini is italian for little-orange, which is what they look like... or should look like, after they've been fried.