These big, fresh Portobellos were on sale in the supermarket yesterday. I thought about it, and realized I had all the ingredients for stuffed mushrooms in the house. Then I knew what I had to do.
Mushrooms Stuffed with Cheese and Nuts serves 4
Ingredients:
4 large Portobello mushrooms
Stuffing:
3 Tblsp. coarsely grated cheese
3 Tblsp. dry bread crumbs
2 Tblsp. milk
3 shallot cloves, peeled and chopped
Butter or olive oil for frying
4 Tblsp. pine nuts or other nut of choice
salt and pepper
1. Remove the stems from the mushrooms. If the stems are sturdy and hard to pull out, don’t risk breaking the mushrooms up: take a knife and cut the stems away. Or you might wind up with a mushroom in pieces, like I did with one of them.
2. Cut a circle inside the mushroom cap, leaving an uncut rim around the inside. With a spoon or a melon baller, gently scoop out as much flesh as you can without piercing the cap or destroying the edges. Now you have a mushroom bowl that will take the filling but not fall apart.
Reserve the stems for another use.
3. Melt 2 tsp. butter (or use olive oil) in a frying pan that the mushrooms will fit into. Fry them gently, cut side down, for about 4 minutes, over low heat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
4. Turn the mushrooms over and sprinkle a little more salt and pepper inside the caps. Continue frying for another 4 or 5 minutes, just long enough for the mushrooms to look golden and mostly cooked.
5. Remove the mushrooms to a baking pan.
6. In the same frying pan, saute the chopped shallots till golden.
7. Moisten the dried bread crumbs with the milk. Mix this with the rest of the stuffing ingredients and add the sauteed shallots. Mix well.
8. Stuff the mushrooms. Mound up as much stuffing as you can into each. Now preheat the grill.
9. Grill the mushrooms for 3-5 minutes. Sprinkle with chives and serve hot. If your mushrooms are really big, they will look like mini quiches with a mushroom base instead of pastry.
This dish serves 4 as an appetizer, or 2 as a light dinner that needs only a cup of soup and a little salad to follow.
*
I found that with the stems and the chopped broken mushroom, there were 4 cups of very good mushroom flesh left over.
One cup, I used for stuffing a chicken. This was bread crumbs soaked in chicken soup; a big fresh sage leaf; 1/2 tsp. thyme; 1/2 Tbsp. paprkika; salt & pepper.
The other two cups of chopped mushroom, I mixed into a turkey stew, with some parsley, and just let it go till it was done.
On a week night, I might have made a mushroom soup using all 4 cups of leftover pieces, but as I was cooking meat dishes for Shabbat, that’s what I did.
Shabbat Shalom!
