Tag Archive | stuffed mushrooms

This Gentle Day

Jul25
Grateful this morning for another bean harvest, mostly Beurre du Rocquencourt wax beans, but the first few rattlesnake pole beans are also coming on. I’ll blanch and freeze the wax beans. I can tell I’ll get a ton more this summer. The rattlesnake beans I chopped up and sautéed to go in another virtuous lunch.
This time I did use an egg for the batter, with a little cream, then rolled the squash blossoms in a flour-corn meal-cornstarch dredge; after stuffing them with a simple block of Havarti. I scrambled the leftover egg mixture and garnished the salad with some of it, fed the rest to Wren on top of her dinner kibble. I don’t think the cornmeal is working out for the delicate blossoms. Next time it will be a pure tempura batter.

And then I had a pretty healthy dinner, too. My personal shopper brought me smoked blue cheese crumbles the other day. I can’t be picky when I’m not shopping for myself, and am grateful that there’s someone who will do his best to get me what I want and take creative chances when the store is out of my specific requests. “Smoked is always a good thing,” he said. I wasn’t sure I agreed: I’m not a fan of fake smoke flavoring, but Amy told me how to tell if the cheese was actually smoked: It will look browned on the outside. I was pleased to see a brown rind on the crumbles, and it tasted delicious.

Amy says: “Mayo, sour cream, lemon juice, finely diced onion, that blue cheese—the best blue cheese dressing ever.” But I had a different plan for some of it tonight. We made mushroom toast last night to go with our zoom cocktails, and I had some extra shiitakes. I mashed up some soft butter, smoked blue cheese, Italian breadcrumbs, and one finely chopped date, stuffed the caps, sprinkled with more breadcrumbs, and baked at 400℉ for 15 minutes. Delicious! I’m grateful for this gentle day, with plenty of time tending the garden, a light cool cloud cover, simple gourmet meals, a long meditation, and kind, mindful observation of my thoughts and actions. Self-nourishing is an act of kindness for others. “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?!” ~ RuPaul

Fantastic Fungi

Nov21
Stuffed mushrooms for dinner tonight: so simple, so delicious.

I’m grateful for delicious mushrooms, and for having broadened my taste for them over years of living here, and knowing mushroom gatherers, and having gathered my own a few times. I’m grateful for a magical, memorable experience one time up on Black Mesa with the Willetts when we gathered abundant chanterelles. These are basic white mushrooms stuffed with a simple blend of soft butter, chopped fresh parsley, shallots, garlic, and panko breadcrumbs, seasoned with salt and pepper, drizzled with olive oil, and baked at 425ºF for about fifteen minutes. I ate the whole bowl.

I’m grateful not only for mushrooms to eat, but for Fantastic Fungi of all kinds, in many ways the glue that holds our world together; and grateful for this marvelous movie, and how it’s opened the eyes and minds of a lot more people to the importance of fungi.

Ice Canyon a year ago.
Today, after the rockfall at the back earlier this week.