Shopping on the Beach with Phil (Amazing Fossils); Mushroom Risotto

I hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend! My apologies to everyone left in suspense about Phil missing across the Bay from my last post: he got home soaked but safe and well Saturday night.

We go walking on the beach a lot: Phil, especially, can't keep himself away. The truth is, he's shopping! Almost every time he hikes the beach, he finds something that he would love to have. Usually, it's logs of Western Red Cedar, washed up after a thousands-of-miles journey. Taking possession of such a log involves levers, winches and ingenuity, and sometimes most of a day. A morning beach hike will often determine how he spends the rest of the day.

With a huge storm forecast but an unexpectedly sunny (blustery!) afternoon, we hiked Mud Bay, a beach in town that is almost always deserted. And for once, I was the one who found something that I had to have! I've mentioned more than once before that I tend to prefer small, hand-sized rocks. Not this time!
It's a flat rock, about two feet long by one foot wide...

...and it's covered in alder leaf fossils! Hard to see them in that bigger picture, so here are a couple close-ups:

...Some bits of reed or branch in there with the vein too.

And it's like that all over the slab! I couldn't get over it. Thankfully, it was only about 30lbs (although that's plenty heavy when you have a couple miles to hike). Phil and I took turns carrying it.

In a way, it feels odd to me to remove something from its resting place. On the other hand, resting places on our beaches are always temporary. This is such a beautiful work of art, I feel it needs to be seen.

Back in my A is for "Amaranth" post, I mentioned that I'd been having a hankering for risotto. I'm loving the amaranth, and that wild mushroom-amaranth dish worked great. But I have finally made some bona fide risotto too and want to share it!

The occasion was simply that I got some marked-down Arborio rice at the grocery store and had some cheap white wine for cooking available. It's probably a decade since I made risotto, back in college, not using fancy Arborio but probably the cheap broken-grain Basmati I used to get in big bags at the Indian grocery store.

I pretty much made it up as I went along, and was pleased with the result!

The measuring cup in the picture above is full of dried porcini mushrooms reconstituting in hot water, to be used as broth. I dropped a piece of ginger in there accidentally and forgot to fish it out: guess what was in Phil's very first bite of the risotto? Otherwise, he liked it a lot too, which means a huge amount to me, considering how different our tastes are.

Served with a pretty salad and some grapes, and some more substantial things for Phil (not pictured).

It looks pretty, even as something relatively monochrome, and it was just the right balance of creamy and chewy.

Here's how:
Mushroom Risotto (Vegan)
Ingredients:
1 cup Arborio rice
1/4 cup dried porcini mushrooms soaked in 2 1/2 cups boiling water*
1 tablespoon coconut oil
1 small onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup mushrooms (unusually, I used a can: there were no decent fresh mushrooms at the store)
1 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
salt and pepper to taste

*Soak the mushrooms in the boiling water at least 30 minutes before you make this. I only had 1/8 cup dried porcinis, so that's what I used and it was fine, but more would have been good too.

In a three-quart heavy-bottomed saucepan, melt the coconut oil.
Add the onions and cook until they start to turn transparent; then add the rice and mushrooms.
Stir until the rice is transparent, then add the wine and the garlic.
When the wine has reduced so that there are dry troughs when you stir, start adding the porcini 'broth' a quarter cup at a time. Fish out the porcinis and add them to the pot when you add the first quarter-cup.
Add the broth gradually like this, stirring regularly.
Right at the end, add the nutritional yeast and salt and pepper.
Grind fresh black pepper atop each serving when plated.

4-6 servings (we've already gotten five servings out of it, but we go small, it seems), and it only took 30 minutes or so. Easy, delicious, not too many ingredients!

Do you collect treasures when you go to the beach?
Any unusual places where you go 'shopping?'