Barley Risotto

I understand that I have taken a break with telling you some of my culinary school stories... I only have a few.  This one is one of my favorites, you probably see the title and are thinking of something that you have never thought of before.  This class was my first of lab classes where we got to cook every night, and I loved it!  It worked me harder than I had ever worked before.  This class was on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30-9:50 p.m. It was rough but I had so much fun, and one of the favorite things that I made was barley risotto, I saw this on our lab and I was really excited because I had not thought of making risotto with anything else but arborio rice (short-grain rice).  I was put in charge of making this dish all by myself.  My professor was French so he was hard to understand at times, but he was really fun to work with because he would crack jokes right and left when he was in a good mood. So anyways back to the dish... He told us that in order to get the perfect texture of the barley we had to par-cook it in boiling water... But that is all that he told us... :( Ok the thing to do here is to not panic... just kidding... I ended up cooking it in the boiling water for about a half an hour and it turned out the perfect texture to start the risotto!  So we took about 4 cups of chicken stock along with 1 cup of the par-cooked barley, a couple tablespoons of butter and about 1/4 of finely chopped onion.  After sweating the onion in one tablespoon of butter we put the barley in and "toasted" it before we started adding stock.  Anyone that has watched the food network knows that you add a little bit of the stock at a time and stir constantly over a low-medium heat until the barley has a chance to absorb almost all of the stock and then you repeat that process until all of the stock is used or the barley is cooked to the perfect texture.  Then once the barley is cooked add the last tablespoon of butter and add as little or as much parmesan cheese as you like and add salt and pepper accordingly.  This whole process of adding the stock and stirring will take about 20-30 minutes so this dish takes about one hour of cooking time but is a lot healthier than regular risotto but tastes almost the same. :)  After everything was cooked my professor tasted all of our dishes he commented that mine had good flavor and texture...  For the first time of me cooking risotto of any kind I was really impressed with how well it turned out.  So even though it is too late to make a long story short I gave myself a huge pat on my back for that.  I loved that class and I will never forget it.  Even though I am not a part of the culinary program anymore, I loved being a part of it because it gave me some cooking techniques and recipes that will help me out later in life.