While I was at the Acoustical Society of America meeting (see prior post for highlights), I roomed with an Italian guy, Gianluca. I did the work booking the room (which wasn’t that much work really), but apparently he thought I should be rewarded, so he bought me a cookbook. He definitely went out of his way to get the cookbook, since he first wanted to get me an Italian (i.e. written in Italian) cookbook, but since I don’t know Italian, that wouldn’t work so well. So he found a nice cookbook for me while he was visiting friends in New York called Verdura: Vegatables Italian Style. So far I have only tried one recipe, but there are lots of tasty sounding ones.

As the title of the post suggests, I tried Risotto with Porcini Mushrooms. For possible copyright infringement reasons I won’t post the recipe here, though I did find a nearly identical recipe on the internet. You’ll have to track down the book if you’re interested. I mostly followed the recipe, with a few exceptions — I used normal (champignon) mushrooms instead of porcini, because I had them on hand, and I also substituted some cream with soy milk. After serving, I topped it off with a little vegan parmesan cheese (nutritional yeast + almonds + salt). I’m looking forward to trying some of the other recipes such as Whole wheat spaghetti with fresh tomato mint sauce or Fusilli¹ with spicy tomato and roasted pepper sauce.

¹they really are silly, aren’t they?