Anniversary Risotto

By: Matt Frazier

On Monday, Erin and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary!

I’d love to tell you that the reason there was no blog post yesterday is because we snuck off for a spontaneous mid-week getaway to a bed and breakfast to pamper ourselves and celebrate.  The reality is that there was a server issue that kept the blog down for most of the day, and still it doesn’t seem to be working quite right.  Almost as romantic.

Monday wasn’t really the ideal day for an anniversary.  We both had long days at school/work, and neither of us would get home until seven o’clock.  As I was driving home, I tried to think of something to make for dinner that would be just a little bit special.

On both our honeymoon and our first anniversary, Erin and I shared a bottle of our favorite wine, Brunello di Montalcino, and we had kind of hoped to make it a tradition.  But with Erin being pregnant, that wasn’t going to happen this year.  Not because I couldn’t bear to drink it without Erin, but because Brunello is way too damn expensive to open and not finish!

So no Brunello this year.  And no Champagne either.  Unless…

Champagne risotto!  I remembered a Giada de Laurentiis recipe I had used for New Years once.  Perfect!  Easy and a little bit special.  The alcohol would cook off since it goes into the pan early.  Since Erin wouldn’t be drinking any Champagne, I couldn’t justify opening a full bottle, so I pulled out the little commemorative bottle I got at the Wineglass Marathon!  (Enjoy the photo with the autumn trees reflected in the glass…that’s as artistic as this mathematician gets.)

So I whipped up the Champagne risotto — well, New York sparkling wine risotto — with asparagus.  (And realized that risotto would seem a lot more special if I didn’t cook it all the time.)

While I was doing that, Erin made us a little salad.

Top it all off with some strawberry sorbetto and some Q.T., and I’d say we made the best of the little time we had together on our second anniversary.

Wedding anniversaries don’t have much to do with running and fitness.  But it is neat for me to look back at how far we’ve come in just two years.  At the time we got married, neither Erin nor I was doing any kind of physical activity.  I had run the Shamrock marathon in March, but when my foot was hurting in the days after the race I discovered a small stress fracture.  I took a few weeks off, and just like that, a few weeks became seven months.

But in late December of that year, about two months after the wedding, Erin and I started running together.  Nothing hard, just some nice runs around the neighborhood.  As New Year’s approached, we thought we’d try to keep it going by resolving to train for a half marathon.  Together.

In April we ran the Charlottesville half marathon, after doing every single training run together.  And from there, we both trained harder and more consistently than we ever had, in order to get in shape for the Baltimore marathon.  Three months after that, we ran the Disney marathon.  Then Erin got a roadbike, we went vegetarian, I started blogging about it all, and finally I ran Wineglass and qualified for Boston.

Moral: you can change a lot in two years, especially when you have the right person there to change along with you.  And this isn’t even counting the baby that’s on the way!

Alright, I’m publishing this before the site crashes again.  Thanks for all the great comments on the Vega Sport giveaway, and don’t forget to enter before Friday if you still haven’t!