Seasonal Change (Mushroom Edition)

The seasons are turning, Summer is definitely over and Autumn is making it’s presence felt. Squash and pumpkins are available – it is definitely decorative gourd season – and slowly root vegetables are edging out the salad vegetables from the shelf space in the supermarket. I made my first pot of soup of the season last weekend and I’m once again thinking about getting back into baking my own bread. It’s also the time of year, especially if you’re me, when thoughts turn to…mushrooms.

I live in the north of Scotland, a beautiful part of the world, and we get a lot of light in Summer. In Winter though, we do not, and like most Scottish people I need to top up my Vitamin D in winter. (Official NHS advice there, if you don’t work outside, you probably aren’t getting enough.) Over the years I’ve learned to listen to my body and the first sign for me that we’ve crossed the rubicon of light versus dark, is when I start craving mushrooms. I enjoy mushrooms all year round but when I start catching myself adding extra mushrooms to recipes and the more exotic kinds start to look awfully tempting. I’m generally a chestnut and portobello girl, my favoured dried mushroom is porcini and I tend to keep an emergency tin of straw mushrooms in the cupboard for stir-fries. But outside of this time of year, I struggle to get excited for Oyster or Shitaki mushrooms, and only in Autumn do I find myself perusing mushroom forager blogs and looking longingly at illustrations of Chicken in the Woods and the like.

My first indication that the seasons are turning from Summer to Autumn, before the temperature has permanently dropped, even before damp has become the most common description of the weather, is generally that I start adding mushrooms to everything. I tend not to notice as its happening, perhaps I’ll have made a mushroom risotto and added a normal amount of mushrooms to a stir-fry or an omelette, but something generally happens to make me realise, we’re in mushroom eating season. Perhaps I’ll catch myself ordering a mushroom pizza – our local craft beer pub does excellent wood-fired pizzas, but the mushroom pizza is a LOT of mushrooms and ordering that is usually an obvious cue. This year though, it was the point where, while making a mushroom sauce for my pasta dish, I looked at the rest of the tub thought ‘those won’t last’ and instead of adding a couple of extra mushrooms, used the whole rest of the tub. I doubled the pasta while I was at it, but it was by any objective measure an excess of mushrooms, and yet it felt only a sufficient amount of mushrooms.

As someone who generally has opinions about chefs who vegetarianise a meal by replacing meat with mushrooms on a 1:1 ratio this is obviously a really blatant hint. (I like a mushroom burger, but putting a portobello mushroom between the halves of a burger bun with a bit of lettuce and some cheese does not a burger make.) So here I am with a lovely veggie cottage pie – loaded up with, amount other things, some very nice portobello mushrooms – baking gently in the oven and several different meals planned to use up the ‘wild mushroom’ selection I bought on special yesterday. (I’ve got a polenta dish and a nice noodle soup dish planned for starters.) I have a bit of a hit and miss relationship with Chinese mushrooms – my dried mushroom of choice is definitely porcini rather than shitaki, which I alway find a little disappointing – however, I’ve recently been introduced to the joys of ‘black fungus’, not the kind you don’t want to get in your lungs I hasten to add, but the other name for cloud ear mushrooms. The unlikely location for my introduction was the Hug and Pint on Great Western Road, who do a cracking Asian small plates menu, where I had a dish that also involved bean curd skin – tastier than it sounds – and salted black beans. Apparently in their fresh incarnation they’re as smelly as a ripe blue cheese, but reconstituted from dried they’re pretty mellow and not noticeably odorous!

While I was writing this I was reminded of the excellent book on fungi that I read early this Summer – I was travelling across France for work, it seemed an appropriate choice – Entangled Life by Melvin Sheldrake. It’s a fascinating book about the hidden myco-world beneath our feet, and looks at many of the uses that humans have put fungi and their fruiting bodies to over the millennia – from edible mushrooms and truffles, through recycling/neutralising pollution and chemicals, to medicine and altered states of being. Of course as a vegetarian I was disappointed that he didn’t really touch on the less common uses for fungi – mycoprotein is an increasingly prevalent part of the meat substitute market, one I normally encounter in the form of quorn. I’d hoped it might go into a bit more detail than I’d gleaned from casual googling – it’s a strain of fungus that is cheap to grow, nutritious and palatable to humans! – but I suspect that that was more a product of Sheldrake being of the ‘but why not just eat mushrooms’ school of thought which is fair enough. A good read nonetheless.

Cooking the Book – May Edition

Although the weather definitely started to improve last month, it was still weather that called for some hot and filling bulk-cooking adventures.

First up we had beetroot risotto with feta cheese and mint. Beetroot is a vegetable that I’m trying to rehabilitate into my diet. It’s a vegetable that I associate with summer salads and quiet resentment. I was the opposite of a fussy eater as a child – I loved food and would happily eat pretty much whatever was put in front of me. Which is not to say that I necessarily liked the food in question, it just had to be really vile – looking at you over-cooked Brussels sprouts) for me to turn my nose up at it. Beetroot was always a bit of a minefield, for a start it’s a bit of a marmite substance in my extended family with opinions divided drastically. And then there’s the vinegar issue, as depending on if its been kept in vinegar or not it tastes completely different. Small un-fussy me would eat a couple of pieces for politeness – often baffled by why it tasted so much better/worse than the previous time I’d had it – and otherwise avoid it. It was always served cold. Once I was old enough to form true opinions on food it was consigned to the scrap heap of ‘food that Wendy will eat but would rather not’ along with cabbage, cauliflower, marmalade and chops.

Having successfully re-habilitated cauliflower into my diet over the last couple of years, I felt the need for a new challenge and beetroot seemed a suitable target. (I replaced cabbage with kale in my diet at 9 when my parents started growing their own and now that kale is widely available in the shops, I see no reason to go back.) I did make my own borsht a few years ago and it was…fine. I ate it, but I never bothered to make it again. But digging through my cookbook last month I came across a beetroot risotto recipe that look straightforward and gave it a bash. It came out a truly gorgeous red/pink colour. The recipe suggested using pretty much an entire packet of feta cheese, which seemed to me – having only recently been converted to the joys of feta cheese – to be a little excessive, so I went easy on the feta. But no, it needs the extra feta, which someone how balances the distinctive, slightly cloying beetroot taste. It’s a perfect match of flavours, delicious and filling to eat, really quite pretty to look at. A delightful discovery.

My second dish is a little bit of a cheat. As what I ended up making was more inspired by the recipe than actually following the recipe. It was supposed to be quinoa, raisins, walnuts and parsley, but I had some bulgur wheat left in the cupboard so I used that instead. The recipe said that you could swap pinenuts in for walnuts and as I had one and not the other in the cupboard I did that. And then my raisins were a bit dried up looking and needed a bit longer soaked in some fruit juice to revive them so I left them out. I definitely didn’t have any parsley but I did have some left-over cooked broccoli from a pasta dish I’d made earlier in the week so I added that in to bulk it up and add the required green element to the dish. It certainly wasn’t what I intended to make but it was rather tasty.

Rounding off the Challenge

So, despite the fact that I did in fact continue the challenge, completed said challenge and took photos along the way, I never did write up the posts. Or anything else for here for that matter. So much for starting a good habit.

And well, for a while there life got a bit frantic, and then it had been too long and then well it got frantic again. However, life is not frantic right now. Life is quite mellow at the moment, I’ve a new job, in a new town and cooking has gone back to being a fun process rather than stress relief disguised as nutrition. I am resolved, I’m getting back into this, no backing out, I’ve told my flatmates – mockery will be forthcoming if I continue taking photos of my food and doing nothing with them.

Therefore, in order to move forward, I need to finish off the loose ends from the previous challenge.

Friday, Day 4 (and 6!)- Ramen

Leeks, mushrooms, cooked chicken, packet of ramen noodles.

Veggies softened and chicken heated/Noodles bubbling gleefully.

Finished portion of Ramen, this unexpectedly made tons of food so I actually had enough left over to reconstitute on Sunday when I came home late from the station and needed something quick and hot and filling to eat.

Saturday, Day 5 – Thai Green Tofu Curry
On the Saturday I made Thai Curry and forgot to photograph it, but I made it again later in the month and remembered to bring the camera that time.

noodles, tofu, green beans, broccoli, pak choi, coconut milk and curry paste

Tofu sizzling in the paste/pak choi steaming away while the rest of the veg simmers below

Et voila, the finished curry.

Monday, Day 7 – Risotto
Alright, so on Monday I wasn’t actually in the house for dinner so didn’t actually make anything, but to round off the challenge, here’s another process I photographed.

Mushrooms, red pepper, pancetta, arborio rice and stock cubes. Normally there would actually be a glass of red wine in the stock for this, but as I was doing it in the spirit of the challenge and we didn’t have any in the house, there’s no red wine in this risotto.

wine or no wine in the stock, the important thing is to just keep stirring! / that and crispy pancetta

I don’t remember what I actually ate on the Monday, but it’s a fairly safe bet I’d rather have eaten this.