I love mushrooms for their flavor, texture, and meatiness. It's almost odd to say so, but mushrooms do have a texture and deep flavor that reminds me of meat. One of my favorite comfort foods is a bowl of mushroom soup. For me it's just as satisfying as a bowl of chili. Like little sponges, mushrooms easily take on the flavors of other ingredients that they cook with. Sautéing them in garlic or onions makes them especially wonderfully robust. This soup uses cremini mushrooms, the brown button type, and dried porcini mushrooms, which have an intense almost nutty flavor. This soup has a lot of good going for it.
Not surprisingly, there are hundreds of varieties of mushrooms, but surprisingly the ones that we buy in grocery stores are almost all the same. White button, cremini, and portobello are all forms of the common mushroom. All our supermarket mushrooms are cultivated, grown on inoculated logs in mushroom farms. The most popular, button mushrooms, are white as a result of mutation. But the common mushroom is typically brown, such as cremini, or baby bella as they are marketed. When they are large and mature, they are sold as portobello mushrooms. All of these mushrooms are great in the kitchen, but each one has its best use. Portobellos, for example are exceptional when grilled and can be eaten like a burger. Cremini, with their full flavor yet tender size, are perfect for soups.
Winter
Winter
Avocado Pomegranate Salad with Miso Dressing
Happy New Year! It's hard after the holidays not to want to take a break from all the indulgence and make sweeping resolutions. My diet resolutions this year are simply to eat more soups and salads. Sure, I'd love to eat healthy, exercise more and lose weight but I'm trying to be realistic.
When it comes to soup, there is no problem. I probably eat soup for dinner once a week. While I grew up eating salad every night, it's just not all that popular around my dinner table. I have a couple of ideas to shake things up. I am going to try to develop more interesting salad combinations and recipes. I am going to get creative with salad dressings and I am also going to try eating more salad for lunch.
This is a salad I served on New Year's Eve. It is very festive looking, don't you think? The salad is light and healthy, but has a good variety of flavors and textures. The Napa cabbage adds color and crunch, the pomegranate adds color but also sweetness, which is balanced by the saltiness of the miso dressing.
What is a Cherimoya? Perhaps the Greatest Fruit on the Planet.
The cherimoya (pronounced chair-uh-MOY-yuh) is the king of fruit. This is no surprise given that this ancient Incan fruit was originally reserved for royalty.
From external appearances, the cherimoya isn't exactly captivating. It looks more like something out of The Flintstones rather than an exquisite fruit. Don't let its pre-historic appearance put you off. Slice open a cherimoya and you will discover a fragrant, ivory, custard-like flesh, hence its common name "custard apple."
When selecting cherimoyas, look for green skin with a gold hue. Some fruits may be tinged with brown, which is ok; however, avoid fruits that are black or shriveled. Allow cherimoyas to ripen at room temperature. A ripe cherimoya, like a ripe avocado, should yield to gentle pressure, and will have a browner skin. (Note: In the first photo, the green cherimoya in the forefront needs a couple more days to ripen, while the browner cherimoya in the back is ready to eat.)
Midwinter Midweek Mahogany Mushrooms
Except for an ill-fated attempt to grow mushrooms in a box last winter and the occasional mini-fungi that pop up in the garden mulch, we do not grow mushrooms here on the farm. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’ve neglected writing much about this most meaty of vegetables.
But yesterday I was paging through Fast, Fresh & Green, looking for appropriate recipes for two classes I’ll be teaching at Stonewall Kitchens in Maine in May, and I stumbled upon these Mahogany Mushrooms. Oh, I’d forgotten how much I love cooking mushrooms like this. Chunky, fast, hot, browned, glazed–yum. Wan, undercooked, undercolored mushrooms are not my thing. If you follow this technique, that fate will not befall you.
Just to check, I made a batch this morning and Farmer and I ate them for lunch with some scrambled eggs. He gave the mushrooms ten licks (his rating system—it has to do with how much he licks his chops after sampling a dish).
A Mushroom Soup That's Perfect for Chilly Days
In general, shiitakes come in two forms: the slender stemmed variety and the ones which are fatter, with thicker stems and caps. Mitsuwa and SF Supermarket sell the fatter variety, which have a meater flavor.
With so many on hand, they can be used liberally in pastas and soups, grilled, and sautéed with garlic and shallots.
But how to store the ones not eaten those first couple of days?
Everyone knows that mushrooms should only be stored in the refrigerator in paper bags because kept in plastic they quickly go bad. Use a brown paper bag--not a white one, which is coated with wax so the moisture stays inside the bag--in combination with paper towels. The moisture that normally accumulates on the outside of the mushroom is absorbed by the layers of paper.
Kept in the refrigerator another week or two, the brown paper bag-paper towel combination acts as a dehydrator pefectly drying the mushrooms. This technique only works successfully with shiitakes.
If by chance any of the dried shiitakes develop mold, discard and keep the good ones. In my experience, more than 95% will dehydrate without harm.
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