After a successful food safari out on the Skagit Flats on Saturday (including a truly amazing brunch at the Rhody – I mean, seriously, potato pancakes with sausages, poached eggs and hollandaise sauce!?! Not to mention those little cranberry walnut things – yum) we came home prepared for a cozy November evening inside.

We brought home bread and strawberry jam from the Breadfarm (we bought fresh macaroons, too, but somehow they never made it home), fresh leeks, celeriac, broccoli, shelling beans and chioggia beets from Dunbar Gardens, and a nice bag of groceries from Slough Food: multicolored eggs from Osprey Hill Farm, farro from the Methow Valley, guanciale (cured pork jowl) from Salumi, Humboldt Fog and Petit Basque cheeses, and a bag of fresh chanterelles. Dinner almost cooked itself!

We started off with bread and cheese. We hadn’t had Petit Basque for ages, and I had forgotten how much I love its mild, nutty flavor. And Humboldt Fog is always amazing, especially if you can stand to let it warm up a bit and get runny around the edges. And a Bow Hill baguette to go with it? Beautiful.

Then, for dinner, I roasted a chicken (I had plans for the leftover meat – first chicken pot pie of the season!) and made a risotto. I cut up the guanciale into small dice – far more difficult than I had expected, that stuff is tough – and sauteed it with a sliced leek. Then I added all the chanterelles and let it all cook down, then put in the rice, a glass of Tamarack Cellars chardonnay, and plenty of chicken-leek stock. The guanciale gave the risotto a fascinating barnyardy pork edge, which I decided I liked.

We finished off with a couple of our homemade caramels and a glass of red wine. We live in a good place.