Archives for the 'mushroom' Category
Totally naked, baby, totally nude
Let me clarify my position on potatoes…I adore them! However, I do not love mashed potatoes. I know, I know, you’re shaking your head right now and muttering “what is not to love?”. I can understand that, I get that salt, butter, and cream are an admirable and compelling addition to the common potato. But, when it comes to the potato I’ve been born again baby…I was lost but now I’m found! I like to start with a potato that is totally naked, totally nude. This truth has been revealed to me in stages over the past year.
First there was our trip to London where I ate the classic “Sunday Roast” and discovered a potato, peeled, and cooked whole, but not soggy. Instead it was almost flaky on the outside and waxy in the middle. The taste of the potato was complete potatoey perfection from both the flavor and texture. I’d never had anything like it and it was superb. Then upon my return I tried to replicate this potato and I just couldn’t get it right, the outer layer was always soggy. Then one day I was watching Nigella and she was preparing a potato dish. Her pan choice wasn’t a deep pan or pot but rather a shallow sauce-pan with only the barest minimum of water necessary to get the job done. Then she cooked the potatoes until they were almost done, drained them, and returned them to the heat to “fluff”…and fluff they did. Excellent! I finally had a method to work with.
Lucky for me not all local potatoes were lost in our late summer flood. There were the luscious purple potatoes from Jordandal Farm and then the perfect french fingerling’s and yukons from Vermont Valley. I’ve come to love potatoes cooked with this method and while I’m sure at some point I’ll end up mashing a potato again, I know it won’t be one of these perfect local gems. They are best with coarse, kosher salt and maybe a very slight puddle of butter or meat drippings to skate it through on the way to my mouth.
Last night I served the potatoes alongside braised beef, shallots, and sauteed mushrooms…each bite was a delight. For breakfast this morning I ate the leftover potatoes, heated gently, sprinkled with some seasoning, and topped with a dollop of garlic yogurt (left over from falafel night) and chopped parsley. I wanted more.
Braised beef with naked potatoes, and shitake mushrooms
For the braised beef:
Beef roast, chuck is best
1 cup red wine
1 cup water
handful of peel shallots
2 garlic cloves, peeled and halved
1 carrot, peeled and chunked
salt, pepper, thyme
For the potato and mushrooms:
8 to 10 small potatoes
Shitake mushrooms
butter
Preheat oven to 325°F.
Brown the roast on both sides in a dutch oven. Add everything else, pop a lid on the pan and put it in the oven. Let it cook for 2.5 to 3 hours depending upon the size of the roast.
Then:
Peel your potatoes and place them in a shallow saucepan with about ½ inch of water and a good pinch of salt. Cook these on medium until they are almost done. When you knife them they should be tender but not fall off the knife blade. Drain the pan of water and return it, covered, to the burner on medium low. Remember to give them a shake every so often to keep them from sticking
Remove the roast and shallots from the pan and cover tightly to keep warm. Put the pan on a burner and reduce the remaining beef juices to a nice consistency…adding beef stock, water, or wine if necessary.
Sauté the mushrooms in the butter until tender.
Slice the beef about ¼ inch thick. Serve in a shallow bowl. First add the beef juice, then the beef, the shallots, the mushrooms, and finally the potatoes.
Mushroom galette
Yesterday as I drove the boys to school I noticed a thin scrim of ice on the pond across the road, and the hills and the fields were frosted white. Today, at the season’s last Westside Community Market, I picked up some gorgeous shitakes, cranberries, romanesco, and keepsake apples. Although I’ll miss the friendly faces of my community market I’m fortunate to have the Northside Winter Market and the DCFM Winter Market. GH warns me that snow showers are in the forecast for next week so I’m sure I’ll be grateful for the indoor warmth.
This mushrooms galette is a simple dinner but it does require some chopping and sauteing. Since I was chilled, and the hot apple cider and brandy hadn’t totally warmed me up, it was an activity that suited me just fine. I included a layer of those heavenly purple potatoes, a light layer of caramelized onions, a substantial layer of rosebud goat cheese followed by an equally robust layer of shitakes, and finally just a scattering of bell pepper and garlic all wrapped up in my standard galette crust (sans the sugar).
I served a composed salad of raw chioggia beet, romanesco, daikon, and dried cranberries each tossed in a dijon vinaigrette. It was tart, bitter, sweet, and toothsome…very enjoyable. I love the earthy flavor of beets and according to Wikipedia that flavor is caused by an organic compound in beets called geosmin, which literally translates to “earth smell”. Apparently we humans are very sensitive to geosmin…were able to smell it at concentrations as slight as 5 parts per trillion. I think this might explain why you either love beets or hate them.
This dinner was a big hit and GH thinks the leftover galette will make a tasty lunch come Monday. This post is part of Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blog Event…hosted this week by Kalyn herself. I get the honor to host WHB for the week of November 12 - 18. Check out the rules and schedule and join us.
Here’s the recipe…click on the title to get a printer-friendly version.
Crust
1 cup all purpose flour
¼ cup coarse ground cornmeal
½ teaspoon salt
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, diced
3 to 4 ounces milk with a teaspoon or so of yogurt mixed in
Put the flour, cornmeal, and salt in the work bowl of a food processor fitted with its blade. Process a second or two to combine. Add the diced, cold butter and pulse 3 or 4 times or until worked in coarsely. Add the milk/yogurt combo and pulse as you do it…only adding as much liquid as is necessary to get the dough to ball up. Remove the dough, wrap in saran, chill.
1 pound of fresh shitake mushrooms
1 small or medium onion
1 small bell pepper
2 cloves garlic
2 medium, waxy type, potatoes
Firm goat cheese
Peel the potatoes, place them in a pan with ½” of salted water. Bring the water to a boil and reduce the heat to simmer. Cover the pan and steam them for 15 minutes. Remove them from the pan and set them aside to cool.
Peal and chop the onion into slices. Sauté the onions on medium low heat until they brown and caramelize. remove from the pan and set aside.
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
If your mushrooms need to be wiped off do so. Cut the stems off (I stash these in the freezer in my stock cache) and slice the mushrooms into strips. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in the sauté pan on medium-low and add the mushrooms. Salt them and allow them to cook down for 5 – 10 minutes, stirring as necessary. Remove from the pan and set aside.
Cut the top of the bell pepper off and slice it into thin rounds. Remove any trace of white pith on the slices. Sauté these with salt on medium high…ad some olive oil if necessary. Remove from pan once they soften some. Set aside.
Bash the garlic and peel it. Slice it into thin slices. Sauté as above on low heat for a few minutes. Remove from pan.
Slice the cooled potatoes into 1/4” thick slices. I placed mine on wax paper to make it easier to work with them later.
Slice the goat cheese as you did the potatoes.
Remove the dough from the refrigerator and roll it out into a circle…about 15 – 18 inches in diameter. Transfer this to a baking sheet covered with parchment.
Arrange the potatoes in a circle on the center of the dough. Leave a 3 inch border around the potatoes…this is the dough that you will fold up to form the top crust. Layer on the onions, then the cheese, then the mushrooms, peppers and finally the garlic. Fold the edges of the dough up. Slide it into the oven and bake until the crust is golden brown…about 15 minutes or so.
Remove from the oven, slide it onto a cooling rack and let it cool for 10 minutes. Slice and serve.
Harvest feast…not so much
The harvest feast didn’t turn out as expected…but then what does. The outside temperature was hovering around 90, the farmer was harvesting soy beans in the field next to our house creating a dust storm in the gusting winds. You know, satan’s armpit, harvest from hell kind of weather. I cranked up the AC and hoped to take a nap before dinner but even that didn’t work out. What I really wanted was Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry’s Black and Blue Burger with their incredible fries slathered with some english garlic sauce (aka garlic mayo) and all washed down with a cold pint (or two) of Goose Island IPA. But nooooo, dammit, were having our harvest feast even if it is hotter than hell out there.
So I roasted the squash for the soup, sauteed sage, onions, garlic, and pork cheek, scraped squash flesh from the skin, simmered, pureed, and ended up with a pretty tasteless soup…and that never happens to me. Really, my soups are always good. I think, perhaps the squash was lacking flavor.
The gnocchi…well I was so worried about making them too heavy that I succeeded in making them way too insubstantial and they fell apart. I ended up with maybe 8 complete whole ones and they were light, tasty and good…but by that time I was feeling pretty demoralized…I have a history of defeat at the hands of seemingly simple dumplings and frankly I know I should be able to whip their ass…but they smell my fear.
The hen of the woods mushroom was the star of the meal though. It was the best mushroom I’ve ever eaten. Big clean flavor, great texture, sort of sweet but not really…a full flavor unlike any I’ve ever had. I think maybe this is what is meant my umami. Oh, and it needed hardly any attention, no coddling, I just ripped it into pieces and then sauteed in a hot pan. I want more.
The portobello mushroom with gorgonzola and balsamic reduction was excellent. What a mouthful of flavors…sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and again with the umami. My reduction was too thick and sticky, but it did it’s job and tasted amazing. The steaks apparently turned out well, I didn’t partake because by that time I was drinking a glass of wine and eating a cupcake…the hell with a harvest feast, and who was the silly twit that came up with that idea? Oh, right….nevermind.
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