Risotto

Eastside Road, October 2, 2011—

RICE, PER SE, has never been one of my favorite dishes: but I do dearly love risotto, whose creaminess offsets the granular quality too easily overcoming rice cooked otherwise. Tonight Lindsey made a delicious risotto, flavored only with its onion soffrito, our almost-daily cheap Pinot grigio, and a little bit of saffron. With it, Franco's fine sausage — this time a “French-style” sausage, sweet and herbal, simply broiled in the oven.

I've written before about Elective Affinities. Sausage and tomatoes don't automatically describe that automatic kind of attraction — by “automatic” I mean an inherent, predestined, inescapable mutual leap, of the sort so beautifully described by Goethe's novel of that name (at least in English; I don't recall the original German title, but I think Elective Affinities is almost a literal translation). Tonight, though, that happened: the herbs in Franco's sausage and the peculiarly musky, complex flavors in the heritage tomato from up the road just hit it off from the cradle.

Dessert: an “Apple oven cake” from Sunset magazine (the recipe is here), made with a single Belle de Boskoop apple — we've picked a lot of apples from our trees these last few days. Belle is another complex of flavors, cider and musk, cinnamon and citrus; and she made a very nice cake, almost like a clafoutis, which is a very good thing indeed.

Cheap Nero d'Avola