Please, contain your jealousy. These came in today in an enormous Crate and Barrel box, with a bunch of other stuff. I love them. I adore them. They are so cute, I want to drink more orange juice. They make up for the fact that the highball glasses I ordered I evidently picked out while asleep–even though they’re only $1.75 each, I don’t want them. They’re ugly. But these little beauties I love to pieces. They’re available as part of the C&B outlet sale. Hooray!
When we went to my mother’s this weekend, I was on the prowl for this platter. Some time ago, Blair at wisecraft had posted about a plate or cup or something or other she’d thrifted with this pattern. I smiled when I saw it, as when I was growing up, my mom had a platter with this pattern. Hmm, I wondered, where could it be….I doubted she ever used it. I dug around the cabinets for bowls for pretzels and things, I came across the platter. It’s got one big ol’ chip on the edge, but I like it anyway. It’ll replace the summery platters I usually use, once the weather turns colder and stays that way. Just like thrift shopping, only free. And at my parents’ house. They’d probably suggest I do a little book shopping there and get all my stuff out of their house 
I made this on Sunday night. It’s a porcini mushroom risotto, inspired by a dish Mr. Pea had in Florence a few weeks ago. It’s really good, and even made good leftovers.
You’ll need:
3/4 oz dried porcini, reconstituted by soaking in warm water a half an hour (keep that juice!)
1/2 smallish onion, diced
2 scallions, white parts sliced, green inch or so sliced and set aside
1 T olive oil
2 c arborio rice
1/4 c white wine
4 1/2 c (about) combined chicken broth and porcini juice, after it’s run through a coffee filter to get out any grit
around 1/4 grated parmesan
1 T butter
Start by warming up a tablespoon of oil in a deep saucepan. Add onion and scallion, and saute until transluscent, about 5 to 10 minutes. Add rice and stir until it starts to get transluscent around the edges but still white in the center, less than a minute. Add wine and allow to cook off.
In the meantime, get broth up to a simmer on adjacent burner. Add broth to just cover rice, bring rice to a steady, low simmer, and cook, stirring every couple of minutes until you can’t see the broth on the bottom anymore when you stir–this is a sign that the rice has absorbed all the broth. Add more broth, around a half a cup at a time, until the rice is just tender–this takes most of the liquid and about twenty minutes. Dice your softened mushrooms and add about halfway through cooking. Start testing when you’re getting low on broth. I love Pacific chicken broth, incidentally–it has great flavor.
When the rice is cooked to desired tenderness, remove from heat and stir in butter until it melts. Stir in parmesan and green bits of scallion. Voila! We ate it with a light tomato and romaine salad, dressed with olive oil and salt. The next day the texture’s a little smushy, but it still beat any cafeteria sandwich in my building, as it was back to work today for me!
Clearly I’m not the kind of girl who hides that it’s her birthday. I’ve reached the age, too, where if I tell you how old I am, you won’t believe me and assume that I am lying and am indeed older. Today I’m 29. I’ve known so many thirty-plus-year-olds who claim to be 29 that I wouldn’t believe you if you told me that was how old you were, either. So there we go.
Mr. Pea gave me my gifts last night because we have to head out of here in just a little while. And my suspicions were correct! He gave me a sweet little Italian coffee pot, which I used this morning, but only after waking him and the neighborhood up by knocking a jar of wooden spoons onto the metal trashcan and the floor. I have not gotten any more graceful with age, I’m afraid.
I decided to make myself a fine little breakfast this morning. So I brewed myself some espresso (that little snowman cup is the smallest mug I have, so it’ll have to do even though it’s going to be in the eighties today), toasted up some of the bread I baked yesterday, and scrambled a couple of eggs. The eggs were first beaten with a little milk and two small, minced basil leaves; a teaspoon or so of parmesan was tossed on while they cooked. Yum! I ate it with some of those black cherry tomatoes. There aren’t many of those left, let me tell you. I’m hoping this will all keep me full so that later, at a cookout at my mother’s, I’ll leave the chips and whatever else alone. Though I’ll have to make an exception for cake
Today I walked myself down to my exceedingly early hair appointment in our little town square, and then moseyed to our Saturday farmer’s market. It’s a really small market–there’s often just one vendor, but today there were two! Hooray! And they all had tomatoes. Hooray!
As I unloaded my purchases on the table, I realized I’d bought on a purple theme. Check it out! Two wee eggplant, a purple pepper, and a half pint of black cherry tomatoes. I have no idea what a purple pepper tastes like, so my curiousity induced me to buy that. The black cherry tomatoes were bought from a guy selling heirloom tomatoes. What was great there was that looking at his Purple Cherokees made me realize that mine–though small–were indeed ripe, and I could eat them now. I’m having one for lunch. The black cherry tomatoes are really, really ripe, so I had to eat a couple on the way home to keep them from bursting. What a shame! Oh no! What tragedy! It’s a miracle I didn’t eat them all, truth be told.
I also got a zucchini and some plum tomatoes, so it wasn’t an entirely purple day.
Oh, and in case you’re curious, I cut a looooot of hair off today. It’s going to take a little while to get used to seeing my new haircut on me, and all my ponytail ties are going back into storage.
Me before: 
Me now: 
