Making arancini just got easier with this clever shortcut

This is no news to parents, but here it goes anyway: Kids just don t know how good they have it. Take Anna Gass. When she was growing up in New Jer...

This is no news to parents, but here it goes anyway: Kids just don’t know how good they have it.

Take Anna Gass. When she was growing up in New Jersey, she said, she didn’t appreciate her mother’s risotto. "I was so spoiled,” said Gass, who hosts "Instant Italian” on the FYI Network. "My mother was putting in all this great stuff, like porcini mushrooms, and I was like, ‘Yuck! Porcini mushrooms!’” Even more to the point, Gass realized that if she pushed the risotto around her plate rather than eat it, the odds increased that the next day her mother would turn the leftovers into one of her favorite dishes: arancini.

Who could blame her? What child - or adult, for that matter - can resist fried risotto balls enclosing melty cheese or a ragu?

To those of us who didn’t have Italian mothers making us risotto or arancini when we were growing up, Gass’s experience is positively enviable. And when she told me about it, I had to share the story of my own recent experience making arancini for my family. I had never attempted them before, but they had been such a hit with the teenager at Italian restaurants, I was confident they’d be met with delight - or at least the closest thing to delight that a too-cool-for-school 17-year-old can express.

Taking my cues from recipes in Gass’s 2019 book, "Heirloom Kitchen,” and Lucinda Scala Quinn’s new book, "Mother Sauce,” I first tried a Sicilian-style arancini, stuffing it with a meat sauce (using Beyond Meat to keep it vegetarian) and peas. What I loved most from their recipes is the initial step of making a stripped-down version of risotto rather than relying on having leftovers. (The upshot: If you use arborio or another risotto rice and cook it simply, even with just water, you still get that starchy creaminess you need for the balls to hold together.)