Poor Richard’s Almanac

Silence Dogood here. Our friend Ben and I are mad about mushrooms. Here at Hawk’s Haven, we often eat mushrooms five days a week. We love all kinds of mushrooms—buttons, shiitakes, criminis, baby bellas and portobellas, oysters, you name it—and feel blessed that we can find so many kinds in our local grocery stores. But our favorite way to buy mushrooms is at our local farmers’ market, where they’re piled high in bins and boxes rather than imprisoned in plastic wrap. (Seeing mushrooms squashed in plastic wrap always reminds us of that great scene in “The Full Monty” where the Dave character is trying to lose weight by encasing his ample gut in plastic wrap. Somehow, it’s just not right.)  

We find that mushrooms and sweet onions (such as Walla Walla, Candy and Vidalia types) are a perfect pairing, and we seldom eat one without the other. We’ll saute diced onions and sliced mushrooms in butter, then fold them into an omelette with shredded Swiss cheese. (Of course, the eggs are just collected that morning, still warm from the nest. Thanks, chickens!) Add half a grapefruit or a thick slice of ripe melon and some dense multigrain bread or crusty baguette with butter and marmalade or jam, and life is good! Another favorite breakfast dish where we often add mushrooms is our Hawk’s Haven Huevos Rancheros (see my earlier post, “Fiesta time! It’s Cinco de Mayo!” for the recipe).

We don’t usually eat mushrooms for lunch, unless we’re having pizza, since neither of us can bear the dusty, musty, catch-in-your-throat texture of raw mushrooms in a salad (eeeewww, what are people thinking?!). But once suppertime rolls around, ahhhh. It’s mushroom time again! Mushrooms add depth to our curries, stir-fries, and spaghetti sauces. One of our favorite sides is grilled mushrooms, slices of sweet onion, and red sweet peppers, brushed with olive oil and topped with salt (of course) and a little basil or oregano. We especially love stuffing the mushroom caps with pesto before grilling them. We have a LeCreuset grilling pan, so we can grill the veggies in the oven as well as outside, making this a year-round treat. Served over rice or mounded next to a fluffy baked potato, this simple dish is our idea of heaven!

Another great, easy way to feature mushrooms in a starring role is to sautee a mess of mushrooms (I like to combine as many as four kinds in this dish to add some subtle complexity to the flavor) and sweet onions in butter, then add a generous splash or two (or three) of Madeira or Marsala wine and reduce the sauce over low heat until it’s about the consistency of maple syrup. If I feel like upping the ante, I’ll sometimes add a dollop of bourbon as well, which gives the finished sauce a truly rich and complex flavor. (Even though the alcohol itself evaporates during cooking, removing any possible intoxicating effects, I wouldn’t serve this one to kids.) It is so easy, and it’s luscious over rice or pasta. We love my Red, White and Gold Pasta Sauce, a kid-friendly recipe featuring mushrooms, sweet onions, red and yellow or orange bell peppers, sour cream, and shredded white Cheddar, too. Yum!!! To complete my trio of quick-n-easy sauces, there is Mushroom-Cashew Stroganoff. I’ll give you the recipe for that in a sec.

But first, let’s talk about storing mushrooms. We usually try to buy a week’s worth at a time, and we want to keep that beautiful, just-picked texture. So when we get them home, I pour them out onto paper towels, wrap them in the towels, and then store them, towels and all, in the vegetable crisper in paper bags. Unless it’s hot and humid out, I find that they’ll also keep well in their paper towels and bags in the mudroom. If you buy yours in those plastic-wrapped containers, unless you’re planning to use them right away, I’d suggest taking them out of the plastic and paper-bagging them, or at least removing the plastic wrap from the container so they can breathe. If you buy pre-sliced, though, you should keep them in their plastic wrap to keep the slices from drying out. (Unless, of course, you’d like to spread them out on a dehydrator sheet and dry them to use later in soups and sauces. Easy!) Whatever you do, don’t wash your mushrooms until just before you use them. Anybody out there have great mushroom-storage tips to share? I for one would love to hear them!

Now, about that recipe. A version of this was a favorite dish at the cafeteria in one of the companies where our friend Ben worked. I’ve tweaked it a bit, and now it’s one of the most asked-for dishes I cook. It’s so rich and satisfying, and so easy to put together, you can see why! Serve it over fettucine with a salad (Caesar salad is especially good with this) and a glass of wine, and you have a practically instant meal. (Note that, as with most of my recipes, quantities are approximate; you can add more mushrooms and/or onion to taste.)

        Mushroom-Cashew Stroganoff

1 large sweet onion (Vidalia or Walla Walla type), diced

2 cartons button mushrooms, sliced

small carton sour cream (2 cups; you can use regular or light)

tamari soy sauce (we prefer the deeper, mellower taste of tamari to the sometimes tinny flavor of regular soy sauce)

1 cup roasted, salted cashews, or more to taste

extra-virgin olive oil

Heat a pot of water to boiling for the pasta. In a heavy sauce pan or Dutch oven, saute the onion and mushrooms in olive oil until the onions have clarified and the mushrooms are cooked. Reduce heat and stir in sour cream. (I suggest starting with one cup and adding more until you reach the perfect, creamy consistency.) Add at least a half-cup of tamari—your goal is a rich brown roast-beef-gravy color. Add fettucine to boiling water. Continue stirring the sauce, adding more sour cream as needed, to create a rich, thick topping. Add cashews to sauce just before serving and stir well to mix.

That’s all there is to it! You can make as much or as little as you want, depending on how many people you’re feeding and how much they can eat.

Ever wanted to grow your own mushrooms? We finally got a chance to try it last year when a friend, who’s good friends with some gourmet mushroom growers, got some of their bags of spent mushroom straw and shared a couple of bags with us. They were long, tubelike plastic bags filled with densely packed straw that had been moistened and inoculated with the mushroom mycelium. The growers had cut slits in the sides of the bags so the mushrooms could develop. Even though these bags had already produced their main harvest, they still yielded some delicious mushrooms for us. Best of all, when they stopped producing, we could simply compost the straw! This year, logs inoculated with button and shiitake mushroom “spawn” are on my birthday list. If any of you have grown your own, please do tell all!

                     ‘Til next time,

                                Silence