Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

I love mushrooms and would like to use them more. I bought these portobellos because they were beautiful, but with no plan in mind. Viana La Place and Evan Kleiman can usually be counted on to have a good idea for vegetables. This is their recipe from Cucina Fresca.

Grilled Stuffed Mushrooms

Large brown mushrooms or portobellos

Fresh thyme leaves

6-8 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped

1/4 cup olive oil

Clean mushrooms with a damp towel--don't immerse. Trim off woody stems. Cut slits in the thickest part of the flesh so they will cook evenly. Brush with olive oil.

Mix chopped thyme leaves, garlic, and generous salt in a small bowl. Stuff this mixture into the gills and slits of the mushrooms.

Broil or grill for 5 minutes, more or less, depending on their size, until the mushrooms soften slightly.

Deer Sausage and Mushroom Gravy

My friend Dave gave us some venison that his cousin shot and took to a processor. Item #1 was this entertainingly packaged sausage.

It looks like something you would buy from under the table at a flea market, but it is very tasty. It's seasoned like standard American breakfast sausage -- black pepper, sage, salt, red chile flakes -- and is well balanced in a way that highlights the dark, sweet deer flavor.

Item #2, unfortunately -- and Dave warned me about this -- is a packet of square patties with some kind of seasoning added such that they taste very much like fast food chicken sandwiches. They are quite alarming. The meat is too finely ground and the seasonings oddly chemical. They taste nothing like deer. They are nearly inedible.

I put some of the sausage to good use for a recent dinner. I made two sausage patties and browned them and set them aside -- they were probably medium rare at that point, but they cooked a little more in the sauce at the end.


I then used the same pan with a little extra olive oil to saute onions, garlic, shitake mushrooms, and cremini mushrooms. Then I added vermouth or maybe leftover Riesling and scraped up the pan goop left over from the sausage. There was a lot of it -- very effective. I added chicken broth, fresh sage, and thyme, and let the whole thing simmer a bit.

I thickened it slightly with cornstarch, which made for a nice glossy brown sauce.

At the end I added a bunch of parsley and reheated the sausage patties in the sauce. I served it over polenta/grits...I think I called it polenta that night.

Mushroom-Swiss Tart

This was very good as impromptu dinners go. On Friday I really, really felt like cooking, but we had a strange assortment of things in the fridge -- no meat, lots of mushrooms -- and I was sick of frittatas and pasta dishes. Enter the mushroom tart.

The filling consisted of:

• an onion and a container of mushrooms, sauteed in olive oil and simmered with a little sherry
• three eggs
• parsley
• Amish Swiss cheese, cubed
• salt and pepper
  

For the crust, I used the recipe mentioned in this post. Here it is with my slight changes:

***
Super-Serious Crust

• 7 T unsalted butter, cold
  
• a pinch of salt, or more, depending on whether the recipe is savory or sweet
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (I used White Lily. This is a very good use for Southern flours.)
• 2 egg yolks
• 3-4 tbs cold water

Mix the flour and salt. Cut in the butter quickly with a fork and/or fingers. Add yolks and water and mix briefly to form a dough. Roll into a ball and chill for at least 1/2 hour. Roll out quickly on a floured board with a floured rolling pin. Fold into quarters to lift into tart pan, then unfold and shape as desired.

In this case there was a lot of dough, so I folded it way over to make a messy top crust for the tart.

***

One of the reasons the crust was so good was that I used butter from Happy Cow Creamery in Pelzer, SC. I've always wanted to buy their butter, but it comes in huge 2-pounds blocks with no measurement markings on the wrapper. Since Annie Postic told me I could freeze it, and since I got a kitchen scale for my birthday, I can now weigh the butter to measure it and keep it in the freezer so it won't go bad.



And such butter it is. It's got so much flavor -- on bread you need only the thinnest smear. I love it.

We had thin slices of the tart with a salad topped with a sort of diced red pepper vinaigrette/relish.

Leek, Potato, and Mushroom Tart

Hey, I made a good pie crust! Like, the real way: cutting the butter in with a fork and a cool, fast hand, then chilling the dough, then rolling it out, then folding it up so I could move it and unfolding it in the pan.

This is a new thing for me. I hadn't tried the real thing in several years, partially because I thought I didn't care that much about pie crust and partially because the whole procedure seemed fussy. But I think that was just me being defensive about my poor pie crust skilllz.

Of late, I've been alarmed by the premade frozen pie crusts we sometimes buy -- who knows what's in those? And my simple oil crusts have been tough and nasty. So when I decided to make a roasted vegetable tart thing the other night, I knew I had to make a real crust.

The egg yolks were the trick. I used this recipe for the crust. For the filling I sort of followed the recipe except that I used fewer potatoes, left them in bigger chunks, and added a whole bunch of quartered cremini mushrooms. I also added the two egg whites left over from making the crust. And I used a deep springform pan, so the vegetables had plenty of space.

The whole thing was wonderful. It wasn't eggy or creamy at all. At that high temperature, each vegetable roasted up perfectly, with internal juiciness but lots of browned surface. It was a little oniony -- these were unpredictable local leeks, and they were not as mild as I would have liked. Otherwise, though: perfect.

Kale, Mushrooms, and Bacon over Polenta Taragna

Last night I made this, which is easily one of the best things I've eaten this year -- much more than the sum of its parts. The lemon zest pulls the dish together in surprising ways.

Some minor modifications: I used much less thyme, because our thyme plant is dry and stunted. I used two cloves of garlic, not one. I poured off all but one tablespoon of the bacon grease before adding the olive oil. And I used polenta taragna, which is a combination of ground buckwheat and corn, instead of regular polenta. I finished the polenta with a small bit of half and half -- cheese seemed too rich.

Best of all, this dinner helped me get over the disaster earlier this week in which I roasted some buttercup squash and made a beautiful soup, only to find that it tasted like feet. It was irremediable. The squash had some sort of moldy rot, invisible to the eye, that had completely saturated the soup with strong funk. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.

Kale has redeemed me. I love greens with all my heart.

Creamed Mushrooms with Chives

I found the perfect recipe for all those mushrooms. It was from the big yellow Gourmet cookbook, the one I talked you out of asking Grandma for. Very few things I've made from that book have been as good as I think they should be. It's got design flaws -- the recipe titles are printed in pale yellow on white paper, so they're really hard to read -- and is huge but not authoritative; it's just a bunch of recipes, not a reference book. But tonight's recipe was pretty wonderful, so it's partially redeemed.

Here's my version of Creamed Mushrooms with Chives, adapted for two people and the stuff I had on hand:

- 1 pound cremini mushrooms, thickly sliced
- 2 tablespoons butter

Saute over medium-high heat for 10 or 15 minutes, until most of the liquid subsides. Add:

- 1 small onion, or half a regular onion

Saute another 5 minutes or so. Add and simmer for 10 minutes or until it thickens slightly:

- 1/3 cup half and half (I never have cream on hand but we always have half and half for coffee)
- 1/3 cup chicken stock
- 1 or 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Add salt and pepper. At the end, stir in:

-1 tablespoon chopped fresh chives

I served it on your whole wheat biscuits. Because the oven is broken I baked them in the toaster oven, which seemed to work fine.

It tasted like essence of mushrooms and was not too creamy. And oh, I ate such a big pile of sauteed spinach.

Beef stew and pie stewing

On Sunday I made my first pot roast. I browned the meat, then sauteed some small whole onions and chopped carrots, then deglazed the pan with a can of High Life and transferred everything to the crockpot. There I added some stock, fresh thyme, a bay leaf, salt and pepper, and sliced mushrooms. I let it cook on high (which in a crockpot is not very high) for about four hours. We had it with egg noodles. I ate it for lunch the next day, too.

Tonight, at long last, I will eat spinach. I almost squealed when I saw it back in the grocery store this week. I plan to saute massive amounts of it with a tiny bit of garlic and a small dried red chile, then sprinkle it with balsamic vinegar. I have lots of mushrooms, too (they were 2-for-1), so I think I'm going to make some kind of mushroom-y light cream sauce and put it on wheat toast.

Right now I'm worrying about Friday, when my office has its annual Thanksgiving party to which everyone must bring food. I signed up to bring pies. However, I have band practice the night before. Am I going to stay up until 4 in the morning making pies after practice? I don't even know what kind to make...surely someone will bring sweet potato and pecan; I adore lemon meringue but don't know how it will survive a day at the office; my Mom's French chocolate tart might not be Thanksgiving-y enough. I suppose this could all be easily remedied by a trip to the grocery store bakery, but yuck!