My dream (in terms of cooking) has always been to be able to create dishes based on whatever ingredients look the best.  I feel like I’m finally starting to understand what it takes to create a dish from scratch, not just in terms of ingredients and a recipe, but also an idea.  Today I feel like I created a recipe that is actually mine.  When I was wandering through Lazy Acres, I decided I needed to make something with corn to go with my very expensive salmon.  I also wanted to make a risotto, so I thought why not combine the two?  I’ve learned to make a pretty decent basic risotto from my previous cooking experience, and I’ve also learned the method for making a more complicated risotto.  The engineer in me wants to come up with a term for this, such as a compound risotto, or maybe even a hetero-risotto.   You know, like a heterostructure?  I’m sure the humor was lost on about 99% of the people that read this blog, which probably puts it at a fraction of a person.  Let’s settle with compound risotto, since it’s really not that complicated.  A compound risotto is a basic risotto with an additional ingredient mixed in at the end.  So, I turned to one of my stand-by corn recipes for that additional ingredient.  I originally got it from a Mark Bittman recipe published in the New York Times a couple years ago.   I’ve made it so many times with so many different variations that it feels like its become my own.  So, tonight, I attempted to make a roasted corn risotto…and it worked!  I’ll post the recipe later this weekend, once I get a chance to actually write it down.  There aren’t a lot of things I’ve made that feel like my own and were actually good, but this is one of them.