smitten kitchen » Mushrooms

mushroom and farro soup

deb — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:00:23 +0000

Barely two weeks ago, I used the following phrases to describe soup: “vegetables boiled to death,” “assaulted with too much cream,” “whatever healthy things in there cannot be tasted,” and even “what must have been a practical joke” about an especially awful one I’d ordered recently. I admitted that I found soup boring, and my relationship to it has been on especially unstable terms this year after repeated disappointments.

We then proceeded to eat soup for dinner for the next 14 days. What happened? It turns out that baked potato soup is a gateway drug, in that when we finished it, we wanted more soup. Different soup. We swore we could stop any time we wanted, but three batches of soup later, we realize we might have underestimated the power of good soup, the kind that is filling but also freeing of the nightly “What’s for dinner?” because, it’s already made and only needs to be reheated. I’ll admit that the fear of The Swimsuit when we go on vacation in a few weeks may have also egged on this habit, but it was the soup — come on, you know you wanna! — that really kept us engaged.

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garlic butter roasted mushrooms

deb — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:34:51 +0000

A repeat offender in the lede-burier category, let me begin with what matters: this is absolutely my new favorite quick and obsessively delicious way to prepare mushrooms.

And now, a story. Once upon a time, I was a vegetarian who loved going to steakhouses. A friends birthday would approach and out of kindness to me, they’d start talking about gathering friends at a restaurant that had vegetarian options and I’d beg them to go to a steakhouse instead. “It’s your birthday! I know you want a steak! You deserve a big fat juicy slab of steak,” I’d try to coerce. Why was I such a weirdo? Because good steakhouses have even better sides, and no matter how much the waiter sneered when I ordered them without a $50 centerpiece, I knew I’d be getting some flawlessly poached asparagus hollandaise and roasted potatoes like you wouldn’t believe. And mushrooms; I had broiled, buttery and garlicky mushroom caps at Sparks over a decade ago that I haven’t forgotten about since.

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mushroom lasagna

deb — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 18:00:23 +0000

One of the most frequent requests I get is for is to organize a category of recipes that freezes well, or can be packed up and brought to new parents with bigger (er, tinier) things on their agenda than stirring pots. And you’d think I’d be an expert on this, having been in their shoes just one year ago but I never bothered. New York City is not a place where you have to stock your freezer to get a good meal in; we can get literally anything delivered to our door in under an hour, even food that is both healthy and better than I make at home. (Well, almost.) Plus, almost anything that sits in my freezer for more than two weeks smells… freezery. It was hard to summon enthusiasm to store anything worthwhile inside it.

But there are few dishes more freezer-friendly than a lasagna, and I love a good one. Unfortunately, it took me a while to find what I considered “good”. Most of the lasagnas I’ve had fall in the American-style ricotta/tomato sauce/mozzarella/ground meat style and I never took to them, finding them both heavy and yet, still dry. So it surprised nobody more than me that I found my lasagna nirvana in the tomato-free béchamel-ed variety, which managed to be light and almost delicate. White sauces are not the kind of thing people associate with a lightweight meal, especially over pasta, but paired with salad this was surprisingly refreshing meal without making us feel like we’d need to bust out the fat pants. Well, most of us, that is.

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mushroom crêpe cake

deb — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:04:07 +0000

I spent my very first Mother’s Day weekend nearly baby-free and in the kitchen. I know, how did that happen? You see, Jacob sojourned at his grandparents’ and I was very sad and missed him terribly and then I drank wine without worrying about the repercussions, got 10 hours (!) of uninterrupted (!) sleep (!) and discovered that I can really cook a lot of things without a cute to the point of distraction baby in the next room and I was a little less sad. And then we hosted brunch for both of our families. The end.

Oh, you want to hear more about brunch, don’t you? Well, there were drop biscuits. Patted-out scones. A crazy braided sweet bread that I promise to tell you about soon. Buttered whole wheat toast triangles and cheesy scrambled eggs. Fruit salad. Mimosas and Bloody Marys. So much bacon, my apartment still smelled like a smokehouse the next day. And crêpes, stacked and filled with creamy mushrooms and cheese.

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warm mushroom salad with hazelnuts

deb — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:23:24 +0000

So, this is a tale of two salads. No wait, three. Okay, this is the tale of three salads. The first one crossed our table at brunch with my mother and the little pilot two weeks ago (you might remember that our last brunch together resulting in us obsessing over monkey bread; who knew brunch could be such a source of inspiration?) at one of my favorite local restaurants: warm mushroom, softly cooked, chestnuts cooked in brown butter, bacon lardons and a port reduction. We haven’t stopped talking about it since.

So, when I was looking for a salad to make for our accidental dinner party last weekend that did not hinge entirely on out-of-season always-going-bad-too-fast never-tasting-as-good-as-they-should salad greens and spied on a warm mushroom salad in the always-amazing Sunday Suppers at Lucques, I had a good feeling about it.

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mushroom marsala pasta with artichokes

deb — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:16:51 +0000

People, I’m about at the end of my ordered-in dinner rope. It’s not that — as the front page of this site might suggest — I haven’t cooked anything since the baby arrived, it’s just that I’ve largely cooked things that could be assembled during naptimes, and most of Alex and my conversations about meals go, “What should we do for dinner?” “I made mushroom toasts and a bowl of butterscotch sauce today!” “Right, so what should we order?” And so on with the pho, cracker-thin pizza and hummusiot dinner deliveries. For three months. At 93 days, even shakshuka broiled with haloumi gets tiresome.

Now, I don’t expect any violins, especially from folks without the East Village’s globe of food delivery options at their fingertips, but I am sure you all understand what it means to desperately crave a homecooked meal. And I don’t mean a 5-hour braise or hand-sheeted pasta (though, ahem, I wouldn’t push either away); even a simple sautéed chicken, which I managed to eek out a few weeks ago, stands out as one of the best things we’ve eaten in a month.

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creamed mushrooms on chive butter toast

deb — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 15:39:57 +0000

My husband’s people — that would be The Russians, if you’ve been following along at home — really like their caviar. It’s rare that a signature spread of zakuski doesn’t include at least one form of gem-colored eggs by the thousands, usually served with sour cream and small crepes. Me, I’m a troglodyte; I’m unable to appreciate such fine things in life, and generally breeze right past the caviar to spear a potato with my fork.

But it doesn’t mean I don’t like a little fancy something-something now and then; I just want it to suggest caviar but not actually being it (or, ahem, costing it). So when Melissa Clark called this mushroom preparation giving them “the caviar treatment” in an article eons ago, I was both excited, because I do love me some mushrooms, and dubious — dubious enough that it took me over two years to make it. And that, my friends, was a terrible waste of time.

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spanakopita triangles + then some

deb — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:43:24 +0000

Apparently, making marshmallows at home isn’t as “normal” as I would have thought, but then again, I am the last person one should be using a yardstick of kitchen normality, or not as long as I am pickling grapes or making wedding cakes with a mini-oven and a single, eensy counter.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that my brand of crazy will match yours, however. I mean, someone actually asked if was going to make my own phyllo next. Are they mad? I hate working with phyllo. Who invented this stuff? It’s fragile and fussy and requires a ludicrous amount of manual labor, and then it leaves papery flakes of pastry everywhere, but mostly on this abdomen shelf I’m growing (sorry, kid. One day you’ll be more than just a crumb catcher! Just not today.)

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mushroom bourguignon

deb — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:48:36 +0000

When it is as cruelly cold out as it has been this week, beef bourguignon is one of my favorite things. If there is anything better than a symphony of onions, carrots, red wine, broth and a scoop of tomato paste simmered for hours, I haven’t met it. I don’t want to meet it. I already know my favorite.

Julia Child’s recipe was always my mother’s go-to dish for company and back in the day, the smell of it braising in the oven was enough to get me to reconsider my vegetarianism. I cheated more than once, ladling the braise broth over egg noodles, and never felt that I wasn’t missing a thing. In fact, I always argued that most of the things people thought they liked about meat they actually liked about the sauces and braises and spices they were cooked in, which is why I have been dreaming up a vegetable based bourguignon for ages.

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mushroom and barley pie

deb — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:52:59 +0000

“So it’s a pie?”
“Well, it’s pie-like. I mean, it has a bottom crust and a top crust and it is filled with stuff. So yeah, pie.”
“With farro?”
“No, we have had barley sitting in the pantry for like a year so we’re going to eat that first.”
“Awesome.”
“And it has mushrooms and ricotta in it!”
“And bacon?”
“Ew, no. It’s a vegetarian Thanksgiving entree.”
“Can we have bacon on the side?”

Anyway, perhaps if you don’t live in my apartment, you would be really excited to make this. I mean, I know I was. And lest you think Alex doesn’t like mushrooms and barley and vegetarian dishes, it is entirely not the case. But I have to admit, this is a wonderful dish (he’s eaten the leftovers, twice!) but it needs… something.

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