Tag: mushroom

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

111. Wild Rice and Toasted Almond Pilaf p.262

The recipe

I messed this dish up quite badly, so badly I’m not sure it’s fair to count it. The main ingredient is 2 cups of wild rice, without further specification. I’m not a big rice eater, and I’d never cooked wild rice before. I went to the health food store and got two cups of the stuff in the bin labeled wild rice (riz sauvage). What I got was a mixture of rices, including wild. The wild rice grains are the long dark ones in the picture above, and the recipe should have been made entirely of those grains.

The rice is added to a pot of onions sautéed in olive oil, and left to toast for a few minutes. You then add chicken stock and water and simmer it for 1 – 1 1/4 hours. When the rice is ready you stir in some sliced almonds toasted with butter, as well as some salt and pepper. The flavours were pretty good here, nice standard pilaf fare. I like pilaf a lot, and make it often. I usually add mushrooms and diced red pepper, but the pilaf base was solid and tasty. The real problem was the rice. I followed the wild rice instructions with my non-wild rice mixutre and when I checked it after 45 minutes it had turned to gooey gummy mush. It was rice pilaf pudding. That’s to be expected given that I blatantly ignored the instructions, but I’ve decided to include the recipe as an honest mistake rather than a re-do. There are potentially many products labeled wild rice out there, and The Book didn’t help me to clarify the issue. It looks like Teena at the other gourmet project also used a wild rice mix (although she knew what she was doing and cooked it for less time) so I’m not alone in this.

If I’d cooked things properly it would have been a fairly tasty side. It quite subtly flavoured as it was, and the wild rice has a much more pronounced flavour than the other types. I worry that the flavour of the wild rice might have overwhelmed the dish, but I’m not really in a position to make that judgment. My version was mushy and bad, but that’s probably not the recipe’s fault.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

92. Baked Eggs and Mushrooms in Ham Cups p.634

The recipe

The eggs are really pretty, taste great, and come in manageable individual sized portions. It’s not really practical to do fried eggs for a crowd, you end up spending all your time at the stove, and the toast gets cold. The solution is often scrambled, or poached eggs. Scrambled are nice, but a bit boring, and I really like having a yolk to dip into. Poached are great, and as my poaching skills improve I appreciate it more and more. I’m always worried about getting the eggs out of the pan, nicely drained, and onto the plate without breaking at least one of them though.

This type of dish is a nice option for a big brunch. Slices of ham are fitted into muffin cups, and filled with a mixture of sautéed mushrooms and shallots, fresh tarragon, and crème fraîche. Each cup is topped with an egg, and then popped in the oven at 400 degrees until the whites are set. They’re excellent little self-contained dishes that are easy to serve, and most of the work can be done ahead. They’re easy to make, the presentation is impressive, and quite charming.

I was a big fan of the flavours at work here. The ham crisped up and showed off its bacony side, which paired well with the classic mushroom tarragon combination. The crème fraîche added a bit of richness and luxury, and the egg was a none to subtle reminder that this was a breakfast dish.

Despite my enthusiasm, the recipe had some technical problems. When buying the ham for this recipe it’s important to get slices without any holes, otherwise the filling will leak out. I decided that thicker slices should stay together better, but I failed to consider that they’re less malleable. I had trouble getting them into the egg cups, and ended up cracking some of them. In the end, a lot of the filling did run out of them. This isn’t really the recipe’s fault, after all it did warn me. But your ham should be neither too thick nor too thin, and the more uniform it is the better.

The real problem with the recipe came in the baking of the eggs. I put them in the oven for the recommended 15 minutes, but the whites weren’t even close to being set. It took an extra 10 minutes for them to set up. Unfortunately the yolks were fully set by that point, which was a real letdown. It’s possible that the broiler element came on at some point during the eggs’ cooking and applied too much direct heat from the top. Since you don’t really care if the eggs steam a bit, you could probably cover the muffin tin in the oven.

I’m not sure where I went wrong with the eggs, Teena at the other gourmet project made these recently. She didn’t seem to like them nearly as much as I did, but the eggs in her photo look like they have set whites and runny yolks. I may have messed up somewhere along the line.

These eggs looked and tasted great, and were really easy to make. Mine didn’t work out as well as they could have, but they were still delicious. Tarragon is a prominent flavour here, and not one you often find in breakfast dishes. For me that was a welcome surprise, I’m always happy to eat more tarragon. It doesn’t really jump to mind when you think of flavours to pair with coffee and orange juice though. I think these eggs work best as part of a less breakfasty brunch. I served them with baguette and a green salad, which worked really well. I’m excited to try these again, if I can find a way to maintain my ham’s structural containment and sort the eggs out, I think this dish could be a real winner.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

76. Cilantro Walnut Filling p.420

The Recipe

This is the filling for Twenty-First Century Beef Wellington. The filling for Beef Wellington in the 19th and 20th centuries was a duxelles and paté de foie. It’s a very French preparation which was renamed and popularized by the British. This twenty-first century version has a lot more in common with Argentina than the old world. I tasted it and my first thought was chimichurri. It’s a preparation of blanched spinach, cilantro, parsley, chopped walnuts, garlic, honey, bread crumbs, egg whites, cumin, corriander, salt, and pepper. The whole thing goes into the food processor and pulsed until smooth.

As a filling for a dish called Beef Wellington it was fairly weird. As a sauce for roast beef tenderloin is wasn’t bad. I can’t get over the preconception of what goes into Beef Wellington. I understand and appreciate the need to play around with traditional dishes, to update them, to take a fresh look at what makes them good, and to help the dishes to evolve with our tastes. Maybe in the twenty-second century I’ll be ready for this filling, but to my palate Beef Wellington without mushrooms in some capacity just can’t be Beef Wellington.

I think I would have preferred to leave the walnuts and cumin out of this filling. Without them it would have been a nice pesto, and might have worked better in the dish. Replacing the walnuts with pine nuts (another pesto classic) would work well too. The walnuts were toasted, and chopped fine in the food processor. This gave them kind of a mealy texture that didn’t really break down into a paste, and didn’t retain much crunch. I also wasn’t crazy about the flavour of the walnuts with the cilantro. The cumin was a distracting touch, that I didn’t think was particularly necessary.

I think a variation on this filling served over a grilled steak would work quite well. It doesn’t stand a chance as a replacement for duxelles in my heart. I give them credit for trying to cut the calorie count of the Beef Wellington, but this isn’t an adequate substitute. I’ll give it a three mushroom rating as a pesto, but as a filling for Beef Wellington it wouldn’t merit more than a two.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

73. Sherried Mushroom Empanaditas p.38

The recipe is a combination of this one for full sized Sherried Mushroom Empanadas, and yesterday’s tuna empanaditas. Of course the full sized empanada makes way too much filling, so you’d need to cut it down.

I made these for the same party as the tuna empanaditas. They use the same puff pastry wrapping, and have the same baking directions. The filling however is quite different, and I thought it worked much better than the tuna. The filling is made of sautéed onion, mushroom, and red bell pepper with sherry, prosciutto, parsley, and bread crumbs. The flavour combination worked really well, I though the sweetness of the sherry might be a bit strange but it melded nicely with the other flavours, particularly the mushrooms and prosciutto.

The main advantage this filling had over the tuna was moisture. You can see in the photo that I drastically overcooked them, and there were a few that got completely dehydrated inside. The larger ones managed to remain creamy, with a crisp exterior making for a very nice contrast.

The recipe calls for Serrano ham, which is very much like prosciutto, but a bit tougher in texture, more flavorful, and a bit less fatty. I couldn’t find any for this dish, or any of the other times I’ve looked. It must be available in Montreal, because it’s on the menu at tapas bars, but I don’t know what their source is. The recipe gives prosciutto as an acceptable substitute though.

I was in Spain a few years ago, and fell in love with Serrano ham. The bocadillo de jamon was my preferred lunch, or tapas treat. I had 40 Euros worth of it taken away from my be American customs officials on my way home. The injustice still rankles me. I was only connecting through Newark, my ham and I never left the airport, but they still took it away from me. I would have had to sneak it past Canadian customs to get it home, but losing it to them was a risk I was willing to take. Now whenever I go through the post 9/11 security theatre lines at an American airport I shake my head at the futility of taking my shoes off, and damn them for taking away my precious jamon.

This recipe suffered from the same baking issues as yesterday’s tuna, but I think a bit more monitoring could solve that problem. The flavour combinations were really good, creamy mushrooms, a bit of crunch from the peppers, salty chewy prosciutto, the smooth sweet flavours of the sherry, and even a little freshness from the parsley. The overcooking was a serious problem, so I can’t give it full marks, but there are a lot of things going for this recipe.

Categories
Poultry The Book

64. Coq au Vin p.368

No recipe for this one.

Coq au Vin is such a classic it’s practically drowning in preconception and expectation. This recipe doesn’t throw any wild experiments or out of the play book ingredients in, but it tries to simplify the process a bit too much. The biggest twist in this recipe is that it calls for white instead of red wine. It also doesn’t call for much of it. Most recipes seem to call for about a bottle of wine, this one asks for only 1 1/2 cups. The traditional method usually involves soaking the chicken in wine with a bouquet garni overnight, or for a couple of days. Sometimes the giblets are used to flavour the sauce as well. This version skips all that and just browns the chicken in bacon fat, then braises it in a wine and stock mixture with a bouquet garni, bacon, and onions. Sautéed mushrooms with cognac are stirred in near the end, and then the sauce is thickened with a beurre manié.

The result is pretty good, but the extra little touches in the more traditional versions do make a difference. I prefer the taste of red to white wine, and I definitely missed it here. The Book suggests using white because the final dish will look nicer, but even there I disagree. Yes, the purple tinge red wine gives the chicken is a bit weird, but this white wine version was an unrelieved beige. I can’t necessarily say that it looked any better. As a concession to ease of finding ingredients the recipe calls for a standard supermarket chicken. The traditional version is made with a stewing hen, which is an egg laying hen that’s grown too old to keep around the farm. These birds are tough, but loaded with flavour, i.e. the perfect subject for a long slow tenderizing braise. I bought a good quality chicken, but there’s no way it can compare in flavour. Admittedly tracking down a real stewing hen would be a major pain, and if the recipe had called for one I probably would have complained about that instead.

Coq au Vin in an international success because the flavours in the dish work so well together, chicken, wine, bacon, mushroom, onions, and the oh so French bouquet garni (celery, thyme, parsley, bay leaf). This version didn’t do everything that could be done with those flavours, but it only took 2 hours to prepare. If you’ve got the time or the inclination seek out a battle hardened old chicken, and the forethought to give the bird a wine bath the day before you’ll be rewarded with a better dish than this one. However, this version is easy enough to do as a Tuesday night supper, and tasty enough to serve at your next dinner party.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

60. Prosciutto- and Parmesan-Stuffed Mushrooms p.27

No recipe, too bad.

These were an excellent appetizer. I brought them to a dinner party and they disappeared just like that. They’re mushroom caps stuffed with the cooked down mushroom stems, garlic, onion, bread crumbs, prosciutto, Parmesan, a useless dash of parsley, and an egg to hold it together. After the caps are filled they’re sprinkled with a bit more cheese, and drizzled with olive oil. Then they go into a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes.

The mushrooms just cook through, and the filling melts into the gills making the whole things creamy and delicious. The prosciutto and Parmesan add wonderful flavours of their own, as well as a good bit of salt which helps release the essence of the mushrooms. In theory the parsley is there to add some colour to the filling, but I didn’t find it very appealing. There is a lot of liquid in mushrooms, and the bread crumbs were there to soak it up. The 1/4 cup crumbs for 24 mushrooms the recipe recommends was a little on the low side. They could have stood to be dried out a bit.

This recipe worked really well, it was easy to do most of the prep at home, and then finish off the final assembly and baking at a friends place. I love appetizers that can be easily transported, either finished, or mostly finished. Almost inevitably you will be asked to bring things to a party more often than you’ll host a party of your own, so ease of transport is a key criterion in looking for a good hors d’oeuvre.

The filling would work equally well in little vol-au-vent, but stuffing the caps really emphasizes the mushroom flavour, and makes them more fun to eat. The balance of flavours was spot on here, the mushrooms were front and centre, with the prosciutto and Parmesan acting as capable supporting players. This recipe is a mycophobe’s worst nightmare, but a good trick to have up your sleeve if you’re asked to bring a little something to the party.