Porcini but not heard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZb-xmGfq0

You imagine you can live your life without the porcini mushroom. You'd be right. Shrivelled and dry, unscrewing the lid of a jar of the things and sticking your nose in is like rolling around in the hamster cage.

A questionable analogy; I've never knowingly harboured a hamster.

But I'm offered a recipe for a mushroom risotto and one of the two types of mushroom required is the porcini. I head to +Waitrose Kenya. Oh. No I don't, well not to Waitrose Kenya, more to Waitrose Ely. Dhruv's recipe (I think Dhruv rhymes with prove and not with dove but I might be wrong) asks for a handful of the porcini.

In the stocks and gravies and handy things in packets aisle I discover Cook's Ingredients. Helpfully I find a plastic jar, even more helpfully labelled A Handful of Porcini Mushrooms.

Back home I've gathered all the ingredients together. I'm enjoying the Madeleine moment now with the jar of porcini, even if I never knowingly harboured a hamster. Maybe I was a hamster in a previous cage. I dash them into a porcelain bowl and add 150ml boiling water.

Long story short, the boy's going to go far if his mushroom risotto is anything to label him by. Even further when we realise that he's right in saying that making a risotto requires one of those recipes which we really should embed now. Like making tea.