Risotto recipe

I can't believe it's been more than a week since my last post! I do feel a bit swamped at the moment though... Lost of reading to do and my mother just had surgery on her foot so. It's nothing life-threatening, but she can't walk further than the bathroom for a while... Which means I have to do most of the cooking! (My dad can only make things that start with a p: pasta, pizza, pancakes and potatoes :P) I don't really mind though, because I can make anything I want now :)

Yesterday I made a mushroom risotto inspired by a recipe I found in the newspaper which was by Edwin Florès. I changed a lot of things though and it was delicious :)

This is what you'll need for three persons:

• 1 onion
• olive oil
• 300 g arborio rice
• a dash of white wine
• 400 g assorted mushrooms (I used a mix of oyster mushrooms, chanterelles, common mushrooms and some other things I don't know the names of but tasted very good)
• 1 l mushroom stock
• 2 spoons of crème fraîche
  
• 200 ml cream
• 50 g parmesan cheese
• A few leaves of fresh basil

What to do:

• Heat the olive oil in a large pan and chop the onion
• Fry the onion and add the rice
• Stir until the ricebecomes transparent
• Add the wine and a ladle of stock
• Fry the mushrooms in another pan with a few spoons of olive oil
• Keep adding stock to the rice until you've added about half of it
• Add half the mushrooms to the risotto
• Add more stock until the risotto is done, but not mushy
• Stir the crème fraîche and the cream through the risotto and let it cook a few more minutes
• Divide the risotto and the rest of the mushrooms between three plates
• And serve with some grated parmesan and fresh basil

I promise you it'll taste good!

Notebooks, Books and Cupcakes

This will be just a little update aboute the things I've been up to lately! My lessons will start in a week, so I'm spending the free time I have now making notebooks and doing fun stuff with my boyfriend.

I made a pile of new notbooks a few days ago. I bought some more colours of linnen to experiment with and a lot of pretty patterned paper! I'll show off the final results tomorrow :)

Also, my books for school arrived... These packages looked pretty ominous to me...

Look at those two enormous English literature books! And they made the paper so thin they managed to cram three thousand pages in one book...

The one on the top has already found it's place to my nightstand though :)

Yesterday was the last time my boyfriend and I were able to spend a whole day together for a while, so we decided to have an elf themed day. We wore green clothes, though about going outside (we would have if it wasn't only 13 degrees...), watched Lord of the Rings and made pretty cupcakes :) We both had no experience with marzipan whatsoever, so I'm pretty satisfied with how they turned out! Even though we got bored with it and just put some leftover leaves on two of them :P

The weather hasn't really gotten any better lately... It almost feels like winter! Most of the time it just looks like this:

I catch myself dreaming about long, wool gloves and hot tea with applepie every time I go out... I hope the weather is better where you live!

A gloomy but cheerful day

Todays gloomy gray weather sucked me right back into a small winter depression. Luckily, there are always things to cheer me up :) The first thing was cheese fondue! I love cheese, I love melted cheese even more, so I go absolutely crazy over large quantities of melted cheese :)

I didn't take any pictures of my own fondue because it was all gone too quickly, but I found this cute picture! This sweet heart shaped bowl actually contains brie cheese fondue, for which the recipe can be found here. I don't know if it is any good though, but it looks yummy!

Besides cheese, something that always cheers me up is the comics by Natalie Dee. I think everyone has come across them some time or another. A few years back I followed them daily and today I read through the archives since january just to put a smile back on my face :) They're just so wonderfully random!

This one is my absolute favorite!

And they've got t-shirts! They had t-shirts of the walrus life cycle one, but they don't sell those anymore :(

But they've got other cool ones!

I hope you have a cheerful day too!