mushrooms – The Kitchen Illiterate

Winter Vegetable Stew with Rosemary Biscuits

My kitchen has been a bit quiet lately. I’ve been feeling a little down, and often when that happens, I start to rely on those culinary staples that are simple, and basic, and designed to make sadness feel a little lighter: minestrone, pizza, big pots of lentils. Macaroni and cheese is right around the corner, I can feel it.

This root vegetable stew is just right for sad, grey winter days. It’s warming and hearty, and fluffy biscuits are the very definition of comfort food. Plus, it’s easy, and allows for plenty of time to sit on the couch watching re-runs of your favorite television shows while it burbles away on the stove.
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Mushroom and Cipollini Onion Pasta

For Christmas, my partner’s sister gave me a copy of the Bi-Rite Market’s Eat Good Food: A Grocer’s Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food. Bi-Rite Market is a former convenience store turned gourmet grocery in the heart of the Mission, in San Francisco. I’ve been hearing great things about this place since before we moved to the Bay Area, but we hadn’t taken the time to check it out…until I got this book. This is a beautifully produced book about food: not just cooking it, but sourcing it and growing it and buying it and, well, loving it. The book is broken down into chapters roughly by grocery department (butcher, produce, bakery), and while the author highlights lots of excellent local producers (I love living in the Bay!), he also talks about how to find excellent goods if you live outside of this glorious little foodshed.

After one day of flipping through the book, I knew I had to go check it out, so on our final day off before heading back to work, Sean and I jumped on BART and headed into the Mission for lunch and general food perusal. I am a complete sucker for lovely little markets. Grocery shopping is actually one of my favorite things to do. So this place was kind of like heaven to me, even though it was awfully cramped and crowded. The shelves are stuffed full of lovely goodies like locally produced olive oil, fresh baked bread, crisp cellophane packages of delicate cookies and candies, round tubs of housemade salads, tins of Spanish sardines and bottles of unusual sauces and ketchups. The produce is gorgeous (I couldn’t stay away from the blood oranges), the meats are all thick and deep red and beautiful…the whole place had me swooning.
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Moroccan Lamb Stew

I spent the last five days with my family in San Diego, not for any special occasion, but because I live in California again, and I could. We had a full weekend, including a wonderful dinner at Bankers Hill Bar and Grill, a trip to the farmers’ market, a soccer game, some shoe shopping, and a visit to a very overwhelming pumpkin patch. We cooked a lot of great meals and drank some fantastic wine and had excellent conversation and lots of laughs. But the best part? I got to spend my week immersed in life with my totally awesome two-and-a-half-year-old niece, Eliana.
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Chanterelle and Nameko Mushroom Pasta

Last weekend, as we are wont to do, we spent some time wandering around the Ferry Plaza Marketplace. Yes, I’m sure you’re all aware by now how much I love that place. But as much as I love it, I tend to feel a little on guard, a little wallet protective, you might say. There are many glories there, to be sure, and they are not cheap. There are always a million things I want to try, and an equal number of reasons I deny myself, but last weekend, I was feeling in a less denying mood. I had a beautiful lentil salad at from Cowgirl Creamery AND a mushroom empanada from El Porteno. I went ahead and ordered a carafe of rose at the wine shop, instead of just a glass. And while I was off swooning over alfajores, Sean surprised me by picking up a few cartons of mushrooms from Far West Fungi.
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Grilled Portobello Mushrooms with Corn and Tomato Salad

The grilled portobello mushroom is ubiquitous. It’s a standard vegetarian burger substitute on many menus. I recently read a food magazine (Bon Appetit, perhaps?) in which an author begged to an end to the ever present portobello. I myself have had many grilled portobellos, and I’ve never found them too compelling. I hardly ever want to order such a thing in a restaurant, and if I’m at a barbecue, well, give me a burger. But for some reason this week, the idea for this portobello and corn salad dinner popped into my head and wouldn’t let go. I wanted the seemingly most overplayed thing you can put on a grill.
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Mushroom, Chicken, and Spring Pea Penne

Sometimes, when I’m walking home from work in the evening, or sitting on BART heading into San Francisco, or wandering through the Rockridge Market Hall drooling over fresh pasta, I’m overcome by joy that I get to live here, that this is, really and truly, my new home. Two weekends ago Mr. X and I took a trip into the city to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, and I couldn’t stop grinning, despite the crowds and noise and madness. I felt like I was in my own personal version of heaven, surrounded by piles of glorious spring onions and purple carrots and flawless mushrooms of all kinds. I could spend hours wandering through that place, but luckily for Mr. X, I was content to cut the shopping short and sit down to enjoy a glass of cava once I found my new culinary magical ingredient: Umami paste.
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Creamy Mushroom and Chicken Pasta

I think for a minute there I started to go into hibernation. The grey and the cold and the snow, well, let’s just say it makes me feel awfully unmotivated. The lure of True Blood and Cougar Town, and of simple dinners consisting of nothing but rice and roasted vegetables, has sadly left this space bereft of anything new. And with holiday travel, and holiday planning, I guess writing has been pushed to the back of my mind. I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t leave you too hungry.

The thing is, too, that I’m starting to feel I’ve outgrown this space. More than a few people have mentioned to me that I’m not exactly a kitchen illiterate anymore. It’s been hard to find a way to write about what I’m doing in the kitchen these days in a way that fits in here. So I’ve been hard at work (ok, when I manage to get off the couch) creating a new site for my new food blogging project. I’ll definitely share it all when it’s ready, but never fear, I’ll still be sharing recipes one the internets, even if it’s not right here.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this delicious pasta dish I’ve been kind of obsessing over lately. I kept my distance from the rich, creamy pastas for most of the last year, but when it started to get really cold again, I was craving heavy cream something serious. And when I came up with this sauce, it was all over. This is really something special.
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Mushroom and Broccoli Lentils

This might not look all that exciting, but assure you, it was. It was very exciting. And do you know what makes a big bowl of lentils exciting? Well, I’ll tell you: It’s Worcestershire sauce and aged farmhouse cheddar. These two simple ingredients make a big bowl of lentils positively mind-blowing. When I cooked up this little dinner I didn’t think much of it. I certainly didn’t think it would be worth sharing here. This was a simple weeknight dinner, to be consumed while catching up with my DVR or reading some dorky librarian’s magazine. But then I tasted it and knew it deserved so much better than that.
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Laura’s Mike’s Mess

My first year of college I wasn’t quite ready to leave the comforting embrace of my small hippie college town. Unfortunately, I found it a little bit tricky to find a job in that town. I graduated during the last serious plunge in the employment rate, in 2001, and it was not a good time to be a newly graduated Lit major, I can tell you that. I ended up working in various coffee shops and restaurants before I finally landed that first desk job, and while I was certainly extremely poor and had to defer payment of my student loans for too, too long, I wouldn’t exchange the experience for anything. I met great people, I had a lot of fun, learned to carry multiple cups of coffee at once, and I discovered what remains to this day my favorite breakfast: The Mike’s Mess from Zachary’s, in Santa Cruz, California. This year, I decided I need to try to make it myself.
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Beef Stroganoff

I always thought of beef stroganoff as airline food, or cafeteria food. Something gloppy and lukewarm served in large buffet trays by people in uniforms. But a few years ago my dear friend Crystal requested that I make beef stroganoff for her birthday dinner, and I realized just how wrong I’d been. When done right, beef stroganoff is rich and tangy and elegant and it really makes me want to cook meat more often. Lately I’ve been craving it something fierce, so last night I decided to make it again. And I was practically swooning into my bowl, it was so delicious. If you, too, would like to swoon over dinner, give this a try.
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