Remember, the three-step technique for “swapability” is to chop, cook and combine mushrooms into recipes to add an extra serving of veggies to the plate so your meal is tasty and healthy.

Treat yourself tonight by making this lightened-up simple, flavorful and filling pizza.

Recipe for Mushroom Flatbread (serves two)

• 6 ounces white button mushrooms
• 6 ounces cremini mushrooms
• freshly ground black pepper
• 4 ounces 93% lean ground beef
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• 1 cup part-skim ricotta cheese
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
• 2 – 12 inch light whole wheat wraps
• 1 cup shredded reduced-fat Monterey Jack or Cheddar cheese

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400˚F.
2. Chop mushrooms into ¼-inch pieces.
3. Heat a medium skillet over medium-high heat. Add meat and cook, breaking meat into very small bits. Drain. Season with freshly ground black pepper. Remove from pan and reserve.
4. Add olive oil to skillet. Add mushrooms and sauté for 3 to 5 minutes. Drain. Add beef back to pan and combine with mushrooms.
5. In a small bowl, combine ricotta cheese, oregano, and basil. Spread the cheese mixture on two 12-inch light whole wheat wraps, dividing evenly. Layer equal amounts of the beef and mushroom mixture on top of the cheese mixture. Sprinkle with the grated cheese.
6. Place the pizza directly on the oven rack. Bake for 8-10 minutes or until crust is golden brown and cheese is melted.

** Tips: ½ cup cottage cheese blended with 1 tablespoon of milk in blender or food processor is a suitable substitute for ricotta cheese. Use fresh herbs like oregano and basil instead of Parmesan cheese and also use reduced fat cheese for a lighter version with less cholesterol, fat and saturated fat. **

And if this “swapability” technique intrigues you and you’re looking for other ingenious ways to eat healthier, then we have two exciting Twitter parties coming up that you’ll want to join. Both are in celebration of National Nutrition Month and should deliver lots of fun tips! Mark these dates on your calendar:

• March 8, all day: Center for Nutrition Policy & Promotion (CNPP) Twitter Day. Join the conversation to engage with different communities and organizations in helping to promote the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, using the hashtag #MyPlateYourPlate on Twitter.
• March 12, 8 p.m. – 9 p.m. EST: Feed Your Family Well Twitter Party. Use the hashtag #Mushrooms on Twitter to join the conversation about how to serve your family more nutritious meals that they’ll love to eat. Beloved blogger Resourceful Mommy will lead the conversation and author of MyPlate for Moms, How to Feed Yourself & Your Family Better, Elizabeth Ward, will be dishing out expert advice. You’ll even have the chance to win awesome prizes valued up to $150! 

We look forward to chatting with you there!

Shiitake and Egg Breakfast Pizza courtesy of Chef Todd Humphries, Kitchen Door, Napa

We’re fresh from the studio, following our annual foodservice photo shoot of marvelous mushroom dishes from some of our favorite chefs.

To prepare for the shoot, we perused menus from top restaurants and college campuses across the country and selected the best mushroom entrees. After all that hard work tracking down awesome recipes, we got to have a little fun at the photo shoot.

Mushroom Bulgogi Tacos courtesy of Chef Robery Mayberry, University of Texas, Austin

A lot more goes on behind the scenes than you would think (a testament to our talented photogs, prop stylists and chefs)! From the slicing and dicing to the cooking and assembly, these plates had more prepping and primping than we do, all to ensure that our mushrooms looked porto-bellisimo! (you know, Italian-mushroom speak for “lovely.”)

It was like Goldilocks and the many mushrooms—we had to make sure that the size, shape, colors and props were just right. What can we say, all part of a day’s work here at the Channel. Though, staying focused is a challenge when the workplace is filled with one delicious aroma after another. While each dish was in front of the lens, our on-site chefs manned the kitchen cooking up the next shot. With this crowd of mushroom fans, it’s hard to believe any of these dishes made it from the stove to the set. Test out the recipes for yourselves!

These perfect pizettes come to you from Mardi of Eat. Live. Travel. Write.

I’ve been a little overwhelmed with produce from our organic box lately and with Canadian Thanksgiving just gone, our fridge has been inundated with leftovers. What to do?  Make a seasonal pizzete, of course, starring portabella mushrooms!

These are fine with or without turkey so you can make them according to what your guests prefer. Two would make a great meal on its own with a green salad or you could serve a single one as a starter.  However you serve them they are tasty and pretty and speak to fall flavours so beautifully!

Ingredients

Serves 3 main course, 6 starters

Sweet Potato Mash “Sauce” Ingredients:

• 2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and parboiled
• mashed with:
• ¼ cup heavy cream
• 2 tablespoons butter

Pizza Ingredients

• 6 portabella mushroom caps (stems removed, cleaned if necessary)
• 6 heaping tablespoons cranberry sauce
• about ½ cup shredded cooked turkey or rotisserie chicken
• about ½ cup shredded cheese such at Emmenthal
• Chopped flat-leaf parsley for serving

Directions

1.     Grill the portabella caps in a heavy grilling pan (or if you’re lucky enough for the weather to still be warm enough to grill, you could totally do these on the barbecue).

2.     Spread the sweet potato mash over the portabella caps.

3.     Top with the cranberry sauce, turkey (if you are using it) and cheese.

4.     Place under a pre-heated broiler (high) for a couple of minutes until the cheese starts to bubble and turn golden.  Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve!

I can’t think of a better use for fall produce or Thanksgiving leftovers than these pizzas. After all that indulgence over our Thanksgiving, these were a perfect light meal on their own.  Do try them, they’re easy and pretty!

That is one beautiful pizza from Rebecca at Ezra Poundcake. I think this is on my  menu tonight, only I’d like to try cooking it on the grill. Silently salivate on that for your Wordless Wednesday.

This pizza perfect post comes directly from Kate, the brains behind Savour-Fare. Kate’s creations have been featured on Food52, Tastepotting, Foodgawker, Foodista and The Pioneer Woman’s Tasty Kitchen.

When it comes to pizza toppings, mushrooms are pretty classic.  The combination of a rich tomato sauce, gooey mozzarella cheese and mild brown mushrooms is the stuff of high school date nights, family dinners at the Jersey shore, and Friday night phone calls by frazzled parents to the local delivery joint.  But while familiar can be good, it can also be a little boring.  You might look at the combination of mushrooms and pizza and yawn, thinking you’ve seen it all before.

But you would be wrong.

There’s a reason that mushroom pizza is a classic.  Nothing quite replicates the intense savoriness of a sautéed mushroom, which gives the pizza an instant flavor boost.  For this dish, I prefer the rich flavor of shiitakes, which are easy to find in my neck of the woods, to a milder button mushroom, but you can also do this with portobellos, cremini or any full flavored mushroom. Pair the mushrooms with a brush of good quality olive oil, a few slices of a rich blue cheese to enhance the mushrooms’ natural umami, and a pop of something sweet, and you’ve got yourself an elegant and unexpected hors d’oeuvre, or an easy weeknight dinner that’s a break from your ordinary routine.

The beauty of this recipe is that it can be made in almost  no time at all, apart from the actual dough.  You can buy prepared pizza dough at many markets these days, or make your own (my favorite recipe for pizza dough can be found here).  Form your dough into the desired shape (I always like oval, since it fits so much better into my oven, and it slices up nicely as an appetizer) and preheat your oven to HOT.    Slice up the mushrooms, sauté them quickly with some garlic and olive oil, then top your pizza dough with your mushrooms, slices of cheese and fruit.  After 10 minutes in a blistering oven, your mushroom pizza comes out bubbly, brown and bursting with flavor.

A classic in the making.

Recipe

Mushroom Pizza with Cambozola Cheese and Cherries

8 ounces  raw pizza dough

8 ounces shiitake mushrooms

4 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Salt and Pepper

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp fresh thyme

6 ounces Cambozola cheese

1/3 cup sweet dark cherries (they are in season)

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees.

Pit your cherries and slice them in half.  Set aside.

Shape the pizza dough into one or more oblong shapes and set on a cookie sheet.  Don’t bake it yet.

Remove the stems from your mushrooms (you can skip this step if you’re using Portobello mushrooms, but the stems on shiitake mushrooms are woody and should be discarded).  Slice the mushroom caps.

Heat 2 Tablespoons of the olive oil in a skillet.  Add the mushrooms, garlic and a generous pinch of salt and sauté over medium high heat until the mushrooms are soft and browned.

Brush your pizza dough with the remaining olive oil. Top with mushrooms, sprinkle with thyme, add cherries and arrange sliced cambozola cheese over the top.

Bake in a preheated oven for 8-10 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and bubbling and the crust has baked to a golden brown.  Slice and enjoy.

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

• One small (7 – 8-inch) pocket-style pita bread
• 4-6 tablespoons simple tomato sauce (drained, canned whole tomatoes roughly chopped and cooked down to ketchup-consistency with 2 cloves minced garlic and a handful of roughly chopped fresh basil)
• 2 cups finely sliced mushrooms – any fresh variety (shiitake, cremini, oyster, king oyster), fried in olive oil and drained on a paper towel.
• 2 tablespoons diced orange peppers
• 2 tablespoons diced yellow peppers
• 3 rashers bacon, finely diced and fried
• Finely sliced pepperoni
• 4 oz mozzarella cheese, grated
• 2 tablespoons fresh basil, finely sliced
• Olive oil and cracked black pepper to finish

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!