Truffle Cheese and Garden Greens

Decadent dinner alert, turn away now for those who do not wish to read about slightly luxurious market purchases in this fiscally difficult time (I'm a student so it really won't be that decadent) It was Friday, I had the whole day and night to myself and my uni work, so what did I do ... got out of the house!!! I wandered down to the Vic markets, persing the organic mushroom shop in the vague hope that the $160 a kilo chanterelles had miraculously become 1/64th of the price and I could afford a few for my meal. No surprises that the price reduction wasn't on offer, moreover there were no chanterelles to be had at all. Missed them by that much.

Undetered I ventured into the cheese section and headed straight to the french cheese shop which had, on earlier occasions, stocked truffle cheese. It seemed that the truffle cheese had gone the way of the chanterelles and the shop looked bare. Luckily it turned out that the family of 8 million standing in front of me nattering away to the shop lady was just in the way of the cheese and it was, in fact, there. $92 a kilo is cost prohibitive at the best of times but unable to fork out for a real truffle I decided this was my best option to get a bare glimpse of that yummy earthy taste. Most of the cheese stalls at the market have a minimum size to buy and I was prepared for a reasonable outlay having saved so much on the chanterelle n0n-purchase. However, happy chatty lady was content to cut any size I wanted, so I settled for a 50gram piece, which was more than enough for 3 serves of risotto!

Armed with the brown rippled cheesy goodness I toddled home to toil in the kichen. The risotto had to be a simple base, to showcase the truffle cheese. So I picked a few welsh sprouting onions and some silverbeet to use from the balcony garden.

I chopped the onions with some garlic and cooked them up in some oil.

Then made the plain risotto with little more than a vegetable chicken stock base.

Then added grated truffle cheese and some soft gouda for texture.

Served it up with a lovely side salad mostly procured from the balcony garden.

Et voila, one slightly decadent dinner but when you factor in that the cheese covered 3 meals, and was only $5.50 this really wasn't the bank breaker it could have been.