Dearest Readers,
This past weekend saw my continued and awkward attempt at being social. Friday was a musical starring a friend at a regional theater. Went as a group to show support and the friend did a great job in the lead role. Saturday night is the reason for this post.
I am a close friend with a former coworker and over the course of the last couple of years I have also become friends with her husband as well. They are irreverent, inappropriate and several other words beginning with prefixes carrying or implying the meaning "not".
Along the course of my friendship with them, I began to get invites to their running dinner parties known as "Eat Me". They bring together his friends, hers and their mutual friends and of course everyone in attendance is required to bring a dish. It's not that simple though. Each eat me is themed. Sometimes it's food on a stick or frozen dinners, but this time was a mini eat me which meant appetizers.
The one pit fall to themed dinners with a varied group is the potential for mass chaos when everyone shows up with the same dish or some such similar nonsense. Anytime I go to a party or group dinner, I typically do an appetizer as I tend to enjoy that aspect of cooking the most. I feel really comfortable exploring the studio space cooking manually ingested pre-meal morsels.
The repertoire is pretty extensive at this point, and I decided (finally) on stuffed mushroom caps. They usually go over pretty well, and I know that if anyone in this group didn't like mushrooms or worse claimed to be "allergic" to them, I would be well within bounds to mock them for the rest of the evening. So I had that in my back pocket just in case things got dull.
To start with, the mushroom hunting at the store left me slightly shell shocked as the selection was not great, but I finally found fungi worthy of my kitchen along with the rest of the ingredients I was lacking and headed back to my palatial imitation apartment (aka The Chamber of Doom).
The best part of making stuffed mushroom caps for me, other than the ingestion of them, is the satisfying snap of the stem from the cap. Great tactile sensation, a fantastic almost hollow sound, and the look of a cleanly separated cap from the stem leaves me with a small sense of satisfaction. Not sure why this is, but it does leave me with a feeling of multi-sensory satisfaction.
I like a fairly simple stuffing for the caps. Finely diced mushroom stems (make sure to remove the end bit from where it was cut for packaging), finely chopped garlic, make sure you kick plenty of diced shallot ass as well, you're gonna want plenty of bacon, salt and pepper should make an appearance along with a variety of spices to your liking. When in doubt, go with the simple "Italian Seasoning" option. Of course olive oil some butter and plain bread crumbs.
I won't go through a play by play of the actual cooking process. But know this, dearest reader, only good things happen when the Holy Trinity of the Kitchen (bacon, shallot and garlic) are sauteed in a pan. See for yourself:
Once I got this mess all mixed together, stuffed the caps and then set them in the oven to think about what they did, I was quite pleased with the final product. As always, they were a hit at Eat Me, and there were none left to be had. I didn't even have to reach in my back pocket for my merciless mocking card. But, ohhh dearest reader, I so want to always play that card.
So I followed up the Saturday dinner with a cookout at my brother's place on Sunday. Again, your humblest of servants is going out of his way to attempt sociability regardless of how bad I am at it. But at least I can make a bad ass stuffed mushroom. As always.
BKoM
This past weekend saw my continued and awkward attempt at being social. Friday was a musical starring a friend at a regional theater. Went as a group to show support and the friend did a great job in the lead role. Saturday night is the reason for this post.
I am a close friend with a former coworker and over the course of the last couple of years I have also become friends with her husband as well. They are irreverent, inappropriate and several other words beginning with prefixes carrying or implying the meaning "not".
Along the course of my friendship with them, I began to get invites to their running dinner parties known as "Eat Me". They bring together his friends, hers and their mutual friends and of course everyone in attendance is required to bring a dish. It's not that simple though. Each eat me is themed. Sometimes it's food on a stick or frozen dinners, but this time was a mini eat me which meant appetizers.
The one pit fall to themed dinners with a varied group is the potential for mass chaos when everyone shows up with the same dish or some such similar nonsense. Anytime I go to a party or group dinner, I typically do an appetizer as I tend to enjoy that aspect of cooking the most. I feel really comfortable exploring the studio space cooking manually ingested pre-meal morsels.
The repertoire is pretty extensive at this point, and I decided (finally) on stuffed mushroom caps. They usually go over pretty well, and I know that if anyone in this group didn't like mushrooms or worse claimed to be "allergic" to them, I would be well within bounds to mock them for the rest of the evening. So I had that in my back pocket just in case things got dull.
To start with, the mushroom hunting at the store left me slightly shell shocked as the selection was not great, but I finally found fungi worthy of my kitchen along with the rest of the ingredients I was lacking and headed back to my palatial imitation apartment (aka The Chamber of Doom).
The best part of making stuffed mushroom caps for me, other than the ingestion of them, is the satisfying snap of the stem from the cap. Great tactile sensation, a fantastic almost hollow sound, and the look of a cleanly separated cap from the stem leaves me with a small sense of satisfaction. Not sure why this is, but it does leave me with a feeling of multi-sensory satisfaction.
Now there are several schools of thought on the mushroom treatment, wash or don't wash. I am a believer in washing in this dish as I let them air dry for some time afterwards. The counter argument is that the gills will retain the water and make the stuffing too wet. I call bullshit on this as mushroom gills will not hold enough water to liquefy the breadcrumb mixture. Plus the point is moot anyway as for this dish I take a small spoon and remove most of the gills anyway. Plus, by scraping out the gills you have more room for the stuffing AND they look nicer in presentation. In your face bad kitchen scientists and wannabe kitchen aesthetes!
I won't go through a play by play of the actual cooking process. But know this, dearest reader, only good things happen when the Holy Trinity of the Kitchen (bacon, shallot and garlic) are sauteed in a pan. See for yourself:
BKoM
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