Mushroom Risotto: Sage Against the Machine

Heat 1 quart vegetable broth in a pan, and add ~1  ounce of dried Portobello mushrooms ( a small package). Keep at a simmer.

Heat a little olive oil in a pot, stir in some Arborio rice.  When rice is light gold, add a ladle full of hot vegetable broth, let it absorb, then add ½ cup of white wine, and let it absorb. 

Keep adding the simmering broth to the rice, one ladle full at a time, letting it absorb, stirring a bit, after each addition, keeping the Portobello mushrooms in the simmering broth until the last ladle is added. At this point the mushrooms should be fully reconstituted, and you just add them with the last ladle of broth to the rice.

Meanwhile, arrange for someone who isn't cooking to do the dishes. Then, in yet another pan, heat some more olive oil, and add:

         3 cloves minced garlic

         ½ finely chopped onion

Cook until onion is getting soft

         Add 3 Tablespoons of chopped fresh sage, a generous dusting of freshly grated of nutmeg, and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

         Slice 8 oz fresh baby Bella mushrooms, add them to the onion mixture.

         Add 1/3-1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts.

Cook until mushrooms are soft, and then keep warm until you are ready to add the mixture to the cooked rice.

When all of the broth has been added to the rice and absorbed, and you have a warm creamy texture that makes you happy (you can add a little boiling water if the rice needs to be a bit softer, and you are out of broth), stir in 1/3 cup of grated Parmesan. Then add the mushroom/onion mixture to the rice.  Then stir in a splash of heavy cream as a finish.

Serve really warm, with freshly grated Parmesan and sage leaf on top, and snow outside the window.  If snow is unavailable, a freezing rain or a blanket of fog would do in a pinch. 
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This week we had one of those winter storms that devours the country. It settled down with its freezing rain, its snow, its howling wind. Unfamiliar negative numbers were digitally declared on the Bank-time-and-temperature signs on Main Streets all over America -- an acknowledgement of the bitter touch of February, just in case we hadn’t noticed our ears were frozen and that it hurt to breathe.

I was trying to get home from Boston just as the storm sat down on Logan airport. Logan was almost closed down, concourses strangely empty except for the little huddle of humanity perched at our gate, staring though the windows at white-on-white through the empty hours of Delay. Then miraculously the nose of a great jet emerged through the blanket of snow, and by some grace that magnificent plane was allowed to fly us over the weather and winds, to bring us rocking and rolling home. On the last leg of my journey, I skated the car home over 100 miles of midnight ice, through screaming winds with snow swirling and lovely and lonely on the dark road ahead.  There is a fine existential road sign on the way between Albuquerque and Los Alamos (home) that reads, “Gusty winds may exist”.   I’m here to tell you: they do.

The next morning we woke to learn cars were frozen in place in Chicago.  Freezing rain coated DC in ice as The Winter Storm Watch watched. The fog was so thick in Northern California you couldn’t see across the street, the condensation on trees dripped coldness from leaves like rain.  25,000 homes were without heat in New Mexico, as the Storm, in a particularly nasty prank, had taken out the natural gas compressors in Texas. So all of Taos was left shivering because the Storm was snarling at Texas; good people were heading out in mittens and coats to chop wood in the bitter cold for their Grandpas and Great Aunties before the darkness settled in.

The storm continued with its carryings-on the next day, and we were granted respite from our laboratory.  "Go home", said The Bosses, "it is too cold to do anything, just go home. Turn off your computers, turn off the lights, turn down the heat, save energy for our neighbors without."  My husband and I stopped by the store on our way home, along with half the town. Here was a cold day of grace granted us: no work, a bitter storm, an irresistible desire to Stock Up, and the oddest feeling of crazy joy about the whole thing.  I passed young men in the pasta aisle singing “hunker down, hunker down, hunker down, hunk” and doing the Hunker Down Dance.

Ironically, from what I could observe, the Hunker Down Dance appears to be a sort of samba, with deep origins in the eternal summer of the Brazilian Carnival. The nerd boys in Los Alamos weren't quite as impressive in their form, but they had the spirit:

We bought mushrooms and a bottle of wine, then clutching our mushrooms close, we went home and hunkered.