Truffles................................

For Valentine's Day this year, hubby and I decided that a romantic dinner would be our best bet. I really wanted truffles (the mushroom not the chocolate) but when I saw that one truffle from Italy cost 100 dollars, I changed my mind. Finally, I found black truffles from Washington for only about 10 dollars a truffle.
This seemed much more reasonable.
Hubby and I made pasta with my pasta machine and topped it with truffle butter. This is a tip we got from Sosio's in the market. The man who works there told us to grate the truffles in the butter. This way a little goes a long way. That is what we did. Then we tossed our pasta with chives, truffle butter, lots of parmesan and some truffle shavings.
The taste reminded me of a creamy mushroom soup that I used to make.
I have used truffle salt in many dishes and tasted truffle oil but this was something else. Perfection!
To go with that, we made root vegetables with apple juice and wine. The vegetables were fun to chop up; we used parsnips, rutabagas, yams, carrots and turnips.The dish was O.K., nothing to blog home about.

Here are some pics from last night..

Truffle in rice (apparently a good way to store them)