Have I mentioned that my nickname is “Calamity Jane”? Strange things happen to me that don’t happen to other people, I swear. Even in my kitchen.

I’ve been cooking a lot lately and looking for good, yet easy recipes. Preferably with few dirty dishes, too! So, risotto is one of my favorite things to make. I’ve written before about my experiment with Matt Bittman’s brown rice risotto, which substitutes parboiled brown rice in the standard arborio risotto recipe. Well, I tried a variation on that again for dinner tonight–with a small snafu! I boiled the brown rice for twenty minutes, while I sauteed cubed squash, a little red onion, a handful of spinach, and some slightly drained sun dried tomatoes. My sun dried tomatoes come in their own oil, so I left a little oil on them to impart the other vegetables with that great flavor. I love these tomatoes–they’re sweet and slightly smoky (I really want to make this smoky tomato risotto next). After twenty minutes on high, the rice was ready to be drained and put in the pan with the vegetables and a little white wine. All good. But what about the snafu?

I added in the rice and toasted it for a few minutes, adding white wine and a squeeze of lemon. But when I went to retrieve the one remaining container of chicken broth from the pantry, I realized it wasn’t chicken broth, but beef broth! And I was completely out of any alternative broth. I had to go with the beef, even though I only use it for recipes for my dogs (I don’t really eat beef, but they love it), not for me. Whoops!

Fortunately, it turned out to be delicious. More like a jambalaya, I think, than your usual risotto. Hearty and flavorful. Yum! I can’t decide what movie goes well with this, but I’ve been meaning to Netflix that John Cusack movie where he plays Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven. It looks so ridiculous that it might be fun.

The Calamity Jane Risotto

Cook brown rice, per package directions. Then in a wide pan, drizzle a small amount of olive oil and saute the following ingredients:

Two medium-sized squash, cubed

1-2 cups of spinach, stems removed

Red onion, to taste (I used a handful, sliced into thin strips like you would to caramelize them, rather than cubing them)

Two heaping tablespoons of sun dried tomatoes, lightly drained of oil (if yours are dry packed, add a little olive oil to the pan)

Salt and pepper to taste

When your rice is done cooking, drain it of excess water, then add it to the pan of vegetables. Mix and toast for a few minutes. Add in a splash of dry white wine and a little bit of lemon juice. Then get a 14.5 oz. can of beef broth and add it to the pan, in 1/2 cup increments, stirring the mixture on medium-high heat until all the liquid is absorbed. Since the brown rice is tougher, you want it to be very hot and bubbly. When all the liquid is absorbed, add grated parmesan and fontina cheese. I used about a 1/4 cup of each cheese. Then, you can add more pepper and even a little butter, if you want.

Partially in honor of Nora Ephron and her love of food and movies–I re-read some of her essays in I Feel Bad About My Neck today–I’ve decided to start a “Dinner & A Movie” themed series of posts. That’s something I always thought we had in common, a love of food and old movies, as strange as that sounds. Mind you, I don’t feel like I have oodles in common with every celebrity or anything. Nora Ephron just seemed like the sort of celebrity and author one could have dinner with sans weirdness.

I can’t, however, bring myself to watch You’ve Got Mail or Julie & Julia yet. Too afraid I might cry like a silly little goose. Julie & Julia makes me cry, anyway; it’s the love story between the Childs that does it, particularly when you know Paul Child had to spend his last years in a nursing home due to illness.  So, I decided to go with While You Were Sleeping and my made-up recipe for lemon-pesto stelline. What’s stelline? Stelline is pasta cut into tiny star shapes, more like risotto than spaghetti. I can totally imagine one of Nora’s “imaginary conversations” about the deliciousness of this pasta and the easy-going charm of Bill Pullman and Sandra Bullock.

Lemon-Pesto Stelline  with Toasted Pine Nuts (serves two generously)

1/2 box of stelline pasta, cooked and drained

1/4 stick of butter

Juice of one whole lemon

Generous spoonful of pesto

Vast quantities of Feta Cheese

Heaps of Pine Nuts

Small quantity of reserved pasta water–1/4 cup or less

Instructions: Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan. Cook the stelline in a pot with water and a bit of sea salt, until al dente. Reserve a small amount of the starchy pasta water, then drain the pasta stars and return them to the original pot. Toss the pasta with the butter, lemon juice, pesto, and a splash of pasta water. Add in as much feta cheese as you’d like and stir over the still-warm burner to melt the cheese. You can also add more pesto, if you’re terribly fond of pesto. Then add the pine nuts and serve with chilled white wine. The pasta should be the right mix of lemony-tangy-cheesy-soft-nutty-crunchy textures and flavors. Very easy to make, especially if you leave the pesto-prep to professionals.

While You Were Sleeping is a lovely little film from early in Sandra Bullock’s career. She plays a tollbooth attendant named Lucy who has lost both her parents and has a sweet-natured crush on a regular commuter played by the heavily-eyebrowed Peter Gallagher.* When he’s mugged at the train station on Christmas, she saves his life and, through a series of old-fashioned movie misunderstandings, his family comes to believe they are engaged. As Lucy becomes closer to his family, she begins to fall for the younger brother of the Gallagher character, played by Bill Pullman. Bullock & Pullman have classic chemistry, reminiscent of films I love from the 1940s. In fact, the movie reminds me of 1941′s Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck & Denis Morgan. While You Were Sleeping is one of those movies that lets you enjoy the setting, the characters, and plot in a measured way. There’s plenty of time for secondary characters and scenes of Chicago over the holidays. Sometimes, I think they don’t make movies like this anymore, but I saw The Exotic Marigold Hotel recently, so there’s still hope for romantic comedies without cynicism, thank goodness. I just wish more of them starred Bullock & Pullman.

Here’s the beginning of While You Were Sleeping:

 *In addition to his excellent eyebrows, Mr. Gallagher is also a swell blues singer. I have his album 7 Days in Memphis. Yes, I still say “album” like an old fogey. He covers several great Solomon Burke songs.