Lemon Shallot White Wine Risotto

Risotto is frequently heavy, luxurious, and wintry in style. Especially when you cook it with mushrooms and butter and wine and bacon. Add to that the overall creaminess of the arborio rice and you have a bonafide substantial and hearty dish.

Yum.

This dish, however? Light and bright and zingy.

I read a blog post about lemony risotto with peas, but couldn't find an accompanying recipe to save my life. But the idea was enough. With spring just around the corner (or in my case, happening here in NorCal), this is a glorious revision of risotto in our house.

Ditch all of the heavy things I mentioned. No butter. No cheese in sight. Not even your regular onions. Cook with the following:

Shallots
Olive oil

When the shallots have softened, add the grains of rice, stirring until they become translucent.

Start adding the liquid. This always takes me a whole hour (if you haven't made risotto before, you stand over the stove adding liquid bit-by-bit until the whole thing seems like a terrible idea - that is, until you eat it). I combined white wine, stock, and lemon juice.

As the rice approaches the perfect al dente stage, grate lemon zest into the mixture, and add the peas. The peas should go bright green in the time it takes for the rice to reach the perfect stage.

Sprinkle with parsley. Enjoy! This is incredibly refreshing.

I'm Famoose!

Looks like the NYTimes has been reading my blog.

Probably not. But I like to see that recipes as easy as this have their place in a classy rag like theirs.

You Know You're a Grownup when...

Do you ever have those moments when you think, Wow, now I'm really a grownup? If you have kids or own your own house, these moments may happen all the time.

For me, the most recent reminder was a fungus. The fact that I want to wax lyrical about a mushroom makes me feel ridiculously grown-up. Of an exceptional three-course meal out to celebrate ten years with J, the taste I keep coming back to is a white mushroom which I wish I knew the name of that tasted like the juiciest piece of happy meat in the world.

My second recent mushroom revelation was when I sat at my desk hungry for a non-sweet snack, and all I could find in our CSA bag was a small damp bag of mushrooms. "Some people eat these raw," I thought. They were shiitakes. They were earthy with a lingering aftertaste of garlic. I ate almost the entire bag.

Mushrooms have been cropping up on our home turf much more often now.

One of their most useful properties when cooking is that they release their liquor into the pot, perfect for creating a sauce. So with a tupperware full of leftover noodles with no sauce to go with them, I fried up this batch of shiitakes in olive oil, added a dash of cream, hot pepper flakes, salt, pepper, and parm, and served them up. A great quick lunch.

A Lamborghini I Can Afford

Moving has a way of bringing any extraneous activity to a halt.

It's so nice to reach the point where you can start doing things like uploading and organizing photos again. It's one of those signs that things are starting to feel settled.

Hence the pictures from Peru.

Like this ice cream stand in Cuzco. These guys sell the Lamborghini of ice cream. Misspelled, but no less of an entertaining rip-off. Probably more so.

Bundt-ing

I would like to introduce you to my first Bundt cake in all its glory:

No icing. I kept it plain and buttery so that it could be tea cake, breakfast, or luscious dessert with cream.

Scrumptious.

Brought to You by the Color Yellow

Japanese Sweet Potato Fries

As you may recall, we are now the happy recipients of CSA veggies. One of my favorite new vegetables is the Japanese sweet potato. The first time we received them, I had no idea what to expect, and I threw them into my favorite, well-worn curry recipe thinking that they may be interchangeable for my regular bright orange potatoes.

Strangely enough, these potatoes in the coconut curry tasted like pieces of sweet butter cake. This may sound revolting, but in fact is a really interesting take on dinner because, boy, did it taste like a luscious dessert.

The second time around cooking with these rare, pale, and surprisingly sweet potatoes, I went with the tried and true vegetable roasting method - large strips, oodles of olive oil, and some cayenne to cut the sweetness. They caramelized beautifully. And still tasted like cake. Dessert-like vegetables are something I can really get behind.

(before pic)