To the apparent surprise of Americans who believe conservative podcasters, Canada is a sovereign nation.
| Cheddar-Stuffed Mushrooms 6 large portobello mushrooms, or 1 to 1½ pounds baby mushrooms ¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided ¼ cup (60 mL) chopped roasted salted cashews (or nuts of your choice) 5 or 6 green onions 1 clove garlic (or more if desired), minced 2 tbsp (30 mL) flour 1 cup (250 mL) milk 1 cup shredded cheddar, or cheese of your choice 2 tbsp (30 mL) soy sauce 2 tbsp (30 mL) cooking oil Salt and pepper to taste Heat oven to 425°F or 220°C. Line a baking sheet with foil.* Remove the stems from the mushroom caps and chop. Set aside. Melt half the butter, mix with the chopped nuts. Set aside. Thinly slice the green onions, keeping the white and green parts separated. Set aside the green parts. Melt the remaining butter in a large frying pan over medium heat. Add the whites of the green onions and cook for 4 minutes, or until wilted. Stir in the garlic and chopped mushroom stems. Add salt and pepper to taste. Continue cooking 8-10 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and most of their juice has dried. Sprinkle the flour over the pan (if you have one of those miniature sifters, it's perfect for this), stirring rapidly to prevent lumps. While still quickly stirring, add the milk one splash at a time. You can add it more freely as the mixture thins out. After all the milk is added, cook until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Then remove from heat, and immediately stir in the cheese and the green parts of the green onions. Mix the oil and soy sauce. Brush them all over the mushroom caps. Then lay the caps concave side up on the baking sheet. Fill them with the cheese sauce, adding enough to almost come to their rims. Put some of the chopped nuts and butter on top of each. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until mushrooms are cooked and the cheese is golden at the edges. Serve warm. *You don't need to line the pan with foil. But come cleanup time, you'll be glad you did.
Adapted from Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario
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Right after election night, I said that I hoped Trump's dumber policies would inconvenience enough people who have sufficient money to influence him, thus bringing at least a little sanity back into national politics. And already, we are seeing little ripples of dismay in various top-floor offices. I would be bitterly amused if I had a lot of money to throw away on rising prices.
Liquor store employees in Canada have been removing American alcohol from the shelves as shoppers carefully avoid it. It turns out that people get irked when threatened with annexation and whapped with tariffs. Canadians may not be able to vote in US elections, but they can definitely vote with their money.
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| A friend sent me this picture from a store in Montreal. |
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| The Globe and Mail |
All of this to say, today we are getting out that magazine I took home from Ottawa's airport, and making a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.
.png "CHEDDAR-STUFFED MUSHROOMS WITH WILD RICE CRUNCH
Much like popcorn, wild rice can be popped, though perhaps not quite as dramatically. Exposed to dry heat in a skillet, they pop and split, modestly exposing their white interiors, and toast to a deliciously nutty flavour. Give them a whirl in a spice grinder, toss them with melted butter and chopped pecans and you have a seriously tasty topping to an already more-ish stuffed mushroom, a terrific side to simply prepared steak or chops.
¼ cup (6o mL) wild rice
¼ cup (60 mL) chopped pecans
¼ cup (60 mL) butter, divided
Salt and freshly ground pepper
6 large portobello mushrooms
8 oz (250 g) mixed mushrooms, roughly chopped
1 leek, white and light green part only, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 tbsp (30 mL) flour
1 cup (250 mL) milk
2 tsp (10 mL) miso
1 cup (250 mL) coarsely grated old cheddar
3 green onions, chopped
2 tbsp (30 mL) Japanese soy sauce
2 tbsp (30 mL) neutral-flavour oil such as grapeseed or safflower
⅓ cup (80 mL) coarsely grated Parmesan
1. Heat a skillet with a tight-fitting lid over medium heat; add rice, cover and, shaking pan from time to time, pop and toast rice, about 2 minutes. (The amount of moisture in rice will determine how much the rice opens. The grains should be distinctly split and smell nutty.) Cool to room temperature and grind to a powder in a spice grinder. Turn out into a small bowl; add pecans. Melt 2 tbsp (30 mL) butter and pour over rice mixture. Stir to combine, season with salt and pepper and set aside.
2. Remove stems from portobello mushrooms; roughly chop and add stems to chopped mixed mushrooms.
3. Preheat oven to 425°F (220°C).
4 Melt remaining 2 tbsp (30 mL) butter in a large skillet over medium. Add leek and cook for 4 minutes, stirring, until wilted. Stir in garlic and mixed mushrooms, season with salt and pepper; cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until mushrooms are tender and pan is dry. Sprinkle flour over and stir to combine. Add milk and miso; continue to stir until smooth and thickened, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in cheese and green onions.
5. Combine soy and oil; brush it over both sides of portobello caps and arrange, hollow-side up, on a baking sheet. Divide cheese mixture between caps, then add Parmesan, then the wild rice mixture. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until portobellos are tender and cheese is golden at edges. Let stand for 10 minutes before serving.
Serves 6") |
| Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario |
Or at least, we are trying to make a recipe from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. As we have learned, a lot of the recipes from their beautifully-photographed magazine seem like they were only tested in commercial kitchens. I suspect the LCBO's recipe developers didn't always think about the realities of cooking in a house that does not have a full complement of restaurant equipment.
On a minor cross-cultural cooking note, I'm surprised the recipe writers used volume instead of weight* for the metric measurements of ingredients like shredded cheese and flour. I thought that people in Canada (and everywhere else that isn't the US) had kitchen scales.
We begin the recipe by making puffed wild rice. It was surprisingly hard to find plain wild rice at the store. There were plenty of rice mixes that contained it, but only one store in town could sell us a bag of standalone wild rice.
My puffed wild rice tasted burnt. I threw it out and tried again, watching the pan a lot more carefully. But I got more burnt (yet puffy) wild rice. At this point, I figured that I needed a better tutorial than a few recipe sentences. But when I looked online, everyone's Instagram-worthy pictures showed rice that was just as burnt as mine was. Maybe everyone has been burning their wild rice and trying to convince themselves that it has a "deliciously nutty flavor" as the recipe headnote claims.
Since my burnt rice looked just like everyone else's, I gamely put it into the spice grinder. After it was as pulverized as it would get, it had a lot of unnerving translucent crystals that looked like Plexiglas sawdust.
With a skeptical yet open mind, I tried some of our allegedly completed "wild rice crunch." It was like eating gravelly dirt. This stuff threatened to sand off my teeth. At this point, I went off-recipe and tried putting it in hot water to soften it-- you know, what people normally do with rice. I thought I could put a dab of the resulting paste into the bottom of each mushroom for that, um, earthy flavor. But the rice was just as gritty as ever. Since I don't like ending every meal with a visit to the dentist, I threw it out.
Setting aside the failed wild rice, it was time to go nuts.
We're supposed to use pecans, but this isn't the most economical time of the year to purchase them. Instead, I helped myself to a quarter-cup of cashews from the household snack stash. I could have chopped them with a knife, but we already had the spice grinder out from our recent wild rice misadventures.
I mixed the nuts with the melted butter as directed. If the wild rice hadn't been so terrible after getting burnt and pulverized, it would have been here also. But even though the paste looks terrible, but it tasted really good. I could already tell it would be an amazing topping for what was to come.
The next part of the recipe involved the white parts of our green onions and a lot of butter. I don't usually cook green onions, so this felt a bit odd. But it smelled really good. We should have been using a leek, but those were very expensive and only sold in large bunches. I didn't want to commit to two pounds of leeks for the sake of one mushroom recipe.
We are next directed to add the chopped mushroom stems. I like that the recipe uses the whole mushroom instead of telling us to snap off the stems and then discard them.
I usually don't cook mushrooms until dry, but I followed the directions and kept stirring the frying pan until all of the juices had bubbled away. The mushroom reduction in the pan was fantastically good, but I don't know if it was worth it.
The next part of the recipe is easy if you can make a competent white sauce (which, admittedly, is tricky to get right on the first five attempts). After we have made gravy of the pan, it was time to add the cheese. The ingredients list calls for "old cheddar," but I chose to use up the various scraps of cheese lurking in the refrigerator. Besides, "five-cheese sauce" sounds so much better than "cheddar sauce."
One taste of the cheese sauce and I forgave the recipe writers for the burnt wild rice.
And so, it was finally time to assemble everything! The recipe calls for large portobello mushrooms, but full-sized ones were extremely costly compared to the little ones. I know nothing about fungiculture, but the price difference suggests that mushrooms are difficult to grow to a large size. So, I figured we would have dainty little stuffed mushrooms instead of big ones. And they looked so cute before we baked them.
I know that this magazine is meant for autumn recipes, but realistically we can only serve these on Halloween. They look like we should call them "zombie pustules."
Things didn't look any better after coming out of the oven.
Before I get too disappointed about their appearance, I should note that the magazine's army of photoshoot professionals couldn't make their mushrooms look any less oozy. Their picture is a lot prettier than what happened in our kitchen, but I think this is an inherently untidy recipe.
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| Food and Drink Autumn 2016, Liquor Control Board of Ontario |
Even though our mushrooms looked like I had dropped them onto the floor before serving, I figured there was no way mushrooms and cheese could possibly taste bad. On a related note, I wonder if there's a visual equivalent of an "acquired taste." You know, how you think something looks ugly until spend several years forcefully convincing yourself that you like it.
These were as delicious as they weren't pretty. I know the recipe calls for pecans on top, but I thought the cashews were a lot better. That salty hit on top of the cheese made the mushrooms taste like really good bar food, without having to pay $20 for a beer in some place where the music is as loud as a high school dance.
And so, once again, a recipe from this magazine didn't go where the directions told us to, but took us somewhere delicious. These mushrooms don't make up for the horror show that currently passes for national politics. But on the (very small) bright side, our northern neighbors who gave us the recipe aren't pretending any of this is normal.
*In the purest, most pedantic sense, it is true that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. However, unless someone has decided to whip up some stuffed mushrooms while in a vomit comet or somewhere far away from Earth's surface, mass and weight are functionally interchangeable in the kitchen. Anyone wishing to waggle their irate index finger at me is advised to direct their corrective urges at the manufacturers of kitchen scales that switch between pounds (a unit of weight) and kilograms (a unit of mass) at the press of a button.↪
