These “Unstuffed Mushrooms” come to us by way of Jenna over at Food with Kid Appeal, a longtime favorite when it comes to family-friendly cooking. I’m keeping words to a bare minimum here, because you really need to go read the words there- it’s a post I’d like to shout out loud from the rooftops.
This post comes to you by way of Mushroom Channel Featured Contributor Rachael of La Fuji Mama.
For breakfast most mornings I make hot oatmeal or miso soup for the girls and I. But a couple of days ago I woke up in the mood for a change. As I was peering inside the refrigerator, hoping for inspiration to hit, Bug ambled up behind me and took her own peak into the refrigerator. She spotted some Portobello mushrooms that I had picked up at the supermarket the day before and became really excited. So I pulled them out and looked at them for a moment, handing her one to examine.
As she turned the mushroom over in her hands, stroking the soft gills inside, and then putting the mushroom to her nose to smell, I thought about what I could do with the rest of them for breakfast. Then a package of pancetta caught my eye and inspiration struck: Portobello Mushroom, Egg, & Pancetta Breakfast “Pizzas.”
I removed the stems and then used a spoon to gently scrape out the gills. Then I brushed them with a bit of olive oil and put them in the oven to roast. While they were roasting I chopped the pancetta into small cubes, fried it until it was nice and crispy, scrambled some eggs, and then folded the fried pancetta into the scrambled eggs. Just as I was finishing scrambling the eggs, the mushrooms finished roasting. I pulled them out of the oven and gently blotted off the extra moisture. Then I topped each mushroom with scrambled eggs and sprinkled the eggs with a healthy dose of finely grated Gruyère cheese.
The juicy roasted Portobellos made wonderful “crusts” and tasted delicious paired with the fluffy scrambled eggs, salty pancetta, and the slightly earthy flavor of the Gruyère cheese. The girls each happily devoured half of a “pizza” and I ate a whole one and was pleasantly full.
The pizzas were quick and easy to make, only taking a total of about 20 minutes, and made for a nice change to our usual breakfast routine. You could always substitute your favorite cheese instead of using Gruyère, or use bacon rather than pancetta. I like to hand pick my mushrooms out of baskets of mushrooms that supermarkets often have, rather than buy pre-packaged Portobellos. This allows me to examine them and make sure that they are fresh. When you are picking your mushrooms, avoid any that look limp, dried out, or slippery (which indicates that they are past their prime). The mushroom should be firm and plump with a nice earthy smell.
Makes 4 “pizzas” (4 — 6 servings)
4 Portobello mushrooms
3 tablespoons olive oil
8 large eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper, or to taste
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
4 — 5 ounces pancetta, cut into small cubes (you can substitute bacon)
4 ounces finely grated Gruyère cheese (you can substitute your favorite cheese)
1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Use a kitchen towel to lightly brush off any remaining dirt on the mushrooms. Remove the stem and then use a spoon to gently scrape out the gills inside the mushroom. Brush the mushrooms lightly with olive oil and place them in a baking dish cap sides up. Roast the mushrooms for 15 minutes (or 20 if your mushrooms are larger and thicker).
3. While the mushrooms are roasting, fry the pancetta in a large skillet over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until crispy. Drain the pancetta on paper towels and set aside.
4. About 5 minutes before the mushrooms are done roasting, whisk the eggs, salt, and pepper in a mixing bowl just until the whites and yolks are blended. Put the butter in a large heavy nonstick pan over medium heat. When the butter is melted, swirl the pan to cover the bottom and sides. Reserve 2 tablespoons of the beaten egg mixture, and then pour the rest of the egg mixture into the pan and turn the heat down to medium low. Star slowly scraping the eggs from the bottom of the pan. They will very gradually coagulate into soft curds over several minutes. When they have thickened to your taste, remove the pan from the heat and fold in the reserved 2 tablespoons of egg mixture (to stop the cooking and cream the eggs). Taste and season if needed. Fold the fried pancetta into the just-scrambled eggs.
5. To assemble the breakfast “pizzas”: When the mushrooms have finished roasting, remove them from the oven and blot away any excess juices. Spoon 1/4 of the scrambled eggs on top of each mushroom. Top the eggs with 1/4 (1 ounces) of the finely shredded gruyère cheese and serve the pizzas immediately.
We bring this beautiful Wordless Wednesday offering to you as a voice from the past (cue the movie music). Monday, to be exact. Typically, we scan a full week for our WW offering. This week, this post from The Bitten Word popped up in our reader and it was love at first site.
Grilled Steak and Arugula Salad with Shiitake Mushrooms and White Beans.
Proceed with the delicious silence.
This week’s featured contributor is Mardi from Eat Live Travel Write. Having done a lot of all four of her blog’s namesakes, her mission is passing a sense of wellness-minded adventure onto her students.
My first experiences with mushrooms when I was a child growing up in Australia were with what we called “champignons” (so exotic!) which were in fact, just canned button mushrooms in brine. I was a fairly adventurous eater, but in terms of ‘shrooms, these were the only ones I would eat for a very long time. I know there are kids who find mushrooms “gross”, so when I decided to introduce them to the 9 year-old boys in my cooking club, Les Petits Chefs, I knew I would need a cunning plan…
We have cooked our way through Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution cookbook this term and had a grand old time experimenting with “real food” versions of foods they only know from restaurants or boxes. Many of these recipes included mushrooms and whilst one of the boys loved them and would eat them raw, the others would taste the dishes containing mushrooms during the club but tell me that they picked the mushrooms out of the dishes when they ate them at home. I racked my brains to think of a way to showcase mushrooms for little palates and finally gave in to their pleas for pizza, knowing that not only would I be teaching them a valuable lesson (i.e. that the best pizzas are the ones you can make yourself with fresh ingredients) but also giving the mushrooms their best chance for kid-size appreciation!
We used pita bread, due to time constraints, but you could also have some adventures in pizza dough baking if you had the time. For the pizza sauce base, we made a simple tomato sauce, using San Marzano tomatoes cooked up with a little garlic and some fresh basil. The boys had a blast squishing the sauce onto the pita halves:
I selected some “funky” mushrooms that I thought would appeal to the boys: Shiitake, King Oyster, Oyster and Cremini:
And we got to work chopping them up:
We fried the mushroom pieces in a little olive oil and set them aside as we prepared the rest of the toppings – pepperoni, bacon and sweet orange and yellow peppers (as per the boys’request!).
And we set to work loading on our toppings:
I am impressed how many of the pizzas featured mushrooms, even when it was on the pizza with the topping of their choice! Their willingness to try new things made me very proud!
I always allow the boys to test our the various ingredients as we cook and when one little boy asked if he could try the mushrooms to see which ones he wanted to put on his pizza, of course I said yes. Two seconds later, he asked for more and then more again. I asked him what he thought and his response?
“OMG I LOVE mushrooms! Where have they been all my life?”
Les Petits Chefs “Where have you been all my life?” Funky Funghi Pizzas
Ingredients
Serves 2
Method
Pre-heat oven broiler to high.
Using a bread knife carefully cut through the middle splitting the pita to form two rounds.
(Optional) Toast pita rounds (under the broiler) cut side down for a minute or two. The bottom should start to feel a bit crispy but not burnt.
Spread the sauce over each pita, cut side up. Squish the larger chunks of tomato down with the back of a spoon so the sauce spreads to the edge of the pita bread.
Spread toppings evenly over pita breads and top with cheese and basil.
Place under pre-heated broiler until cheese starts to bubble. Remove pizzas from heat and top with a drizzle of olive oil and freshly ground black pepper. Cut into quarters with a pizza cutter and enjoy!
Today’s bite of beauty is a simple omelet of cow’s milk brie and plenty of mushrooms from Heather Eats Almond Butter. Bonus round? This photo shares a post with another mushroom enhanced recipe- stroganoff! Popular week for that creamy, umami-laden dish…
This week’s Featured Contributor hails from a beautiful site with a fresh focus. Healthy. Delicious. offers straightforward fare that packs in rich flavors without a lot of extra work. The result? Beautiful food, manageable ingredients and meals that live up to the header as both healthy and delicious.
One night, my husband and I were watching Bizarre Foods when – in a rare occurrence for that show – we both turned to each other and said “we need to make that!” In the episode we had on, Andrew traveled to Russia and had been served a very unusual version of stroganoff where beef and caramelized onions were cooked together with sherry and sour cream was served on the side.
While stroganoff hadn’t been something we would have made before – I typically found it to be too heavy and too bland; he had only ever had the hamburger helper variety – this version quickly became one of our favorite meals and our default for when we didn’t know what else to cook. It was cheap, easy comfort food. But as with most comfort food, there was a problem: the recipe relied almost exclusively on meat and carbs, offering very little in the way of nutritional value.
So one night, I decided to take this one step closer to a traditional stroganoff and up the nutritional ante by adding mushrooms. To our surprise, the dish tasted exactly the same as it always had, the mushrooms were almost indiscernible. As we made the dish again and again, we continued to increase the mushrooms and decrease the beef until we came to this final all-mushroom version that – in addition to being far lower in calories and higher in vitamins than the original – is actually even more mouth-watering than the original.
Where most stroganoffs are rich messes of overcooked meat in goopy sauce, this mushroom version is light and fresh with bright, floral notes from the sherry and a little bit of spice. A dollop of sour cream added to each diner’s plate adds a touch of creaminess without thickening the sauce too much.
Note: In order to prevent the dish from being too one-note, I like to use two different types of mushrooms – one cut into large chunks and the other sliced thinly. If you prefer to use only one type of mushroom, you can provide some textural interest to the dish by keeping 2/3 of them larger and slicing the rest. Using all sliced mushrooms will result into a mushy stew.
Mushroom Stroganoff
Melt the olive oil and butter together in a heavy pot set over medium heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until they become very soft and begin to turn golden – about 10 minutes. Add the mushrooms, 1/4 cup sherry, sage, salt, peppercorns, and pepper. Whisk in the cornstarch. Bring to a simmer and cook for 10 to 15 minutes or until the mushrooms soften and the liquid has cooked off. Turn the heat to high and add the remaining sherry and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, allowing it reduce into a thick sauce.
Serve over top of noodles with a dollop of sour cream.
Serves 4.
Breakfast: Portabella Eggs Benedict with Roasted Tomatoes and Pesto, brought to you by Healthy-ish
Lunch: Wild Mushroom and Cornbread Panzanella Salad, brought to you by Cookin’ Canuck
Dinner: Chicken Tetrazzini, brought to you by Poco-Cocoa
Erika Kerekes is a dot-com product manager by day and a relentless home cook and food blogger by night. She started writing In Erika’s Kitchen in 2008 because she was tired of hearing her mother ask “When are you going to write a cookbook already?” A native New Yorker, she now lives in southern California and marvels every day about the fact that food grows on trees in her backyard.
There are nights when only comfort food will do. In my house, these nights typically follow days like this:
Comfort food means different things to different people, but for me it’s got to be hot, creamy, salty, and on the table fast. That’s why mushrooms often figure into my comfort dishes – they’re hearty, satisfying, and quick to prepare. We buy two-pound containers of Baby Bellas at our local Costco, and on a comfort food night, they’re the first ingredient I reach for.
This mushroom beef gravy is a cross between a stroganoff and creamed chipped beef, which, inexplicably, is what I was craving that night. It took just a few minutes to prepare; I served it over biscuits, but it would be equally good served over thick slices of toasted country bread if time is really tight.
Mushroom beef gravy
Separate the stems from the caps of the Baby Bella mushrooms. Slice the caps. Put the stems into a food processor and chop finely.
In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, brown the ground beef, breaking it up with a wooden spoon. Add the onion and the chopped mushroom stems and cook about 5 minutes, until the onions are soft. Pour in the sherry and stir until most of the liquid has boiled off.
Sprinkle the flour over the mushroom mixture and stir for a minute or two until it is well incorporated. Add the milk and broth, bring the mixture back to a boil, and turn the heat down. Simmer the mushroom gravy about 5 minutes more, or until the gravy has thickened and is creamy. If it’s too dry, add a little more broth or milk.
Season with salt and pepper to taste – if the broth was salty, you’ll probably want very little additional salt, and in any case you’ll want a good dose of pepper. Serve over warm biscuits or thick slices of toasted country bread.
The City of Hope is a very important organization to all of us at the Mushroom Channel but particularly within the broader Mushroom Council. You may remember the fundraiser in October last year and, sneak preview, we have some good ideas in the works to go even bigger this year (with your help if you’ll lend it).
When we saw this video, we figured it was worth posting here. Our involvement with City of Hope has been related mainly to breast cancer research which deserves our attention far beyond just October, the month formally devoted to raising awareness. Think pink and have a great weekend!
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is the first recipe from Paula of the Italian cooking blog Bell’Alimento. Incidentally, this is a beautiful site to bookmark if you do not have pasta sauce coursing through your veins and could use a little help preparing gorgeous Italian meals like this one.
Fettucine Profumate… Is Italian for Aromatic or Perfumed Fettucine. And I can’t think of a better description than aromatic. You’ll be smelling this one long before it’s on the table. It’s an incredibly creamy, flavorful and filling dish that’s chock full of mushroom flavor! You’ll only need a small bowl of this! You’ll want more but a small bowl will do the trick *wink wink*
I love the baby bellas or crimini in this dish but feel free to substitute button mushrooms if that’s what you have on hand. The hardest part of making this dish is the mincing and chopping. Once you’ve done that it’s smooth sailing. You can use any type of broth that you like, I used chicken broth here. Also, if you don’t have any truffle oil on hand you can easily swap it out for a good quality extra virgin olive oil. I just like upping the mushroom ante!
Baci!
What you’ll need:
What to do:
Gently wipe your mushrooms clean with a paper towel. Into a large sauté pan heat butter and truffle oil over medium heat. When melted add the mushrooms, carrot, celery, onion, garlic and parsley. Stir to combine. Allow to cook until onions begin to turn translucent and vegetables begin to soften, just a few minutes, stirring as necessary. Season lightly with salt. Remove pan from heat and pour the grappa in. Mix well and carefully return to heat and cook until grappa has evaporated. Add broth lower heat slightly and allow to cook for approx 10 minutes, stirring as necessary. Add the corn starch {which has been dissolved in water} and mix together until it thickens. When thickened, add cream, Parmigiano and season lightly with pepper. Reduce heat to lowest setting and allow to simmer for approx 5 minutes.
WHILE sauce is nearing the final stages cook your pasta in generously seasoned water until al dente. Drain well and add to the sauce pan. Toss well to combine. Transfer to serving bowl, garnish with additional Parmigiano if desired and serve immediately.
Buon Appetito!
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