Sunday: Six Mushroom Soup

"Only six mushrooms? Isn't that going to be kind of bland?"

Sunday: Six (Types of) Mushroom Soup

"Wow, you made six different soups?"

Sunday: Mushroom Soup: Fuck You Edition

Anyway, enough being silly. Mushroom soup.  Here is the line up:

• Worcestershire sauce
• Herbs: sage, thyme, rosemary, bay
• Anchovies
• Beef broth
• Sherry (just a simple fino)
• Ounce of dried chanterelles
• Half ounce of dried morels
• Ounce of dried porcini
• Garlic
• Half pound of crimini
• Half pound of button
• Three nice sized shiitake (I tend not to like these, so that's why so few)
• A big yellow onion
• Salt/pepper
• Cream (unpictured)

Step one: reconstitute the dried mushrooms.  I put them in a sauce pan, covered them with water, and set it to boil.  At the same time, I sliced the onion and added some oil to get them to wilt and caramelize a bit.  My main goal was to make sure that nothing overwhelmed the mushroom flavor, so I wanted the onions to sweeten, with the same idea for the garlic.  For that, I wrapped it in some foil with a bit of oil, and then put it in the oven to roast.

Step two: when the onions were soft and slightly browning (about 45 minutes later), I moved on, and added three anchovies:

Step three: slice all the remaining mushrooms, and add them in.

Step four: look at that beautiful garlic:

 Well, maybe you don't actually need five cloves in the soup.

Step five: add worcestershire sauce and garlic to the pot, and then strain the mushroom broth in.  Since dried mushrooms can occasionally still be woody even after boiling for an hour, I chopped them a but to make sure there weren't any giant pieces.  I added these in, along with all the remaining ingredients (except cream).  The herbs were maybe a half teaspoon of each, and the sherry just a few quick glugs to add some depth of flavor. I let it stew for a bit, corrected the salt and pepper, and then added some cream.

I'm pretty sure this is before I added cream.

I wasn't completely sure about the cream, as my original plan was to plate this French Onion Soup style, with a large crouton and some cheese.  Julie thought this wasn't the best idea, and that I should go with a more customary cream of mushroom soup.  I added just enough cream to add some smoothness to the soup, but not so much that it became something thick.  This was probably best, although I'm still not sure if it would have been worthwhile to pass some of it through the stick blender.

The end result:

I still had the bread, so I toasted it a bit, and rubbed it with garlic.  A few slices of the very tasty gruyere, and some Westphalian ham to complete everything.  These matched well with the soup, as they all have rich earthy flavors, but are different enough to add some variety.

Sidenote:  As I was picking up the last of the dried mushrooms today at Foodland, I heard someone else order Westphalian ham.  I've been looking for this for years now, ever since I read about it in The Epicurean.  I'd largely assumed that this was something that wasn't available anymore, so to find it so easily was nice.  It has a distinct flavor, with the closest match being something like speck.

After spending an hour working on this post, I'm somewhat tempted to go get another bowl of this.  It's not extraordinarily filling, so I think I will have to pair it with other things for the rest of the week.

Wednesday: Three Ingredients

That's surprisingly all it takes to make a super delicious main course. Let's go to the monkey plate:

The three ingredients for the saltimbocca:

• Chicken, pounded until "fuck it, even enough."  I used boneless skinless thighs, as they have a much better flavor/price ratio than breasts.
• Fresh sage, hiding in the elephant section on the far side of the picture.  I used two leaves per thigh piece.
• Prosciutto.  I used a slice per thigh.

I might as well cover the other ingredients in the back that I used for the spaghetti:

• About that much grated parmesan and romano. Three tablespoons maybe? I don't know. I grated until I was tired of it.
• A Maui onion, sliced rather thinly, and then broken apart when I cooked them.
• Blob of garlic paste from the tube, as I need to use that up.
• Butter.
• Not pictured: vermouth.

Simple enough recipe.  Pound out the chicken, push the sage onto it, add a slice of prosciutto, roll it up so it looks like this:

I dusted a bit with some flour in the hope that it would help it brown, and added pepper.  I didn't do any salt, since the prosciutto is pretty salty anyway.  Pan fry in some butter and olive oil.  If I had them, I probably would have used toothpicks to hold them closed.  Mine stayed together reasonably well, with two rolled nicely, two mostly rolled, and two that kind of came completely undone.

The pasta wasn't hard either.  Boil the spaghetti, cook the chicken, remove the chicken from the pan, drain the spaghetti, drain out most of the fat in the chicken pan, deglaze with vermouth, add onion and garlic paste, stir until the onions are soft, add pasta, stir, add cheese, plate.

Willy nilly top with pan fried asparagus and a bit more pepper.

The chicken was delicious.  Three ingredients come together to make something incredibly flavorful.  The pasta was a bit sheepier than I wanted, suggesting I had a bit too much romano.  This isn't really a problem, and I had no trouble finishing all of it.  This was probably a bit too much asparagus, but I want to eat my bunch in the three meals I'm getting out of this chicken.

I also got a loaf of bread at the bakery this evening, and put it into the oven to warm up.  Unfortunately, I didn't remember it until half way through the meal.  Oops.

I may also have gotten brownies at the bakery that I may or may not be eating for dessert.

Late Night Baking: Oatmeal Peanut Butter Snack Squares

I need to not start things at 11PM if I want to be able to eat it before bedtime.  Anyway, this is the base recipe, changed as follows:

Ingredient rollcall:

• 1/2c brown sugar (elephant section)
• 3/4c crunchy peanut butter (1c measuring cup)
• 1tbs vanilla extract (shot glass)
• 1c flour (1c dry measuring cup)
• 1c oats (monkey section)
• 1tsp baking soda (walrus section)
• 1/4tsp salt (also walrus section)
• 1/2c milk (2c measuring cup)
• 1/3c+ chocolate chips (alligator section. This was probably closer to 1/2. I just used the leftover chips I hadn't eaten yet)

Beat peanut butter and brown sugar together until creamy.

Add vanilla and mix.

Add all the dry ingredients, and then mix until you get something like that.  It won't look right, but that's ok.

Add the milk and mix it in until everything sticks together.

Fold in the chocolate chips.

Squish it down into the pan that isn't actually 8x8, but you never remember that fact, so you use it anyway.  This is going to magically result in bars that are twice as thick as those in the original recipe picture, which suggests that this pan is actually closer to 6x6.

Bake for ~25 minutes at 350. Then, let it sit for a half hour as the smell of peanut butter fills your apartment and taunts you.

It wasn't quite as good as I was hoping, although it does have a good flavor.  Had the pan been the right size, it would have cooked a bit more evenly, and I suspect that would have helped. It also would be good with the last bit of the clusterfluff, so I think that will be for tomorrow.

Oatmeal chocolate chip muffins!

After being told that such a thing as "Clusterfluff" ice cream exists, I had to go out and attempt to find this at Safeway (it was delicious, but it's very rich, so you can't really eat much in a sitting).  Since I was there, I figured that it wouldn't hurt to get the ingredients I needed for the chocolate chip oatmeal muffins that I'd been thinking about making. This way, I could make them tonight and be able to eat one for breakfast tomorrow before getting a real set of groceries.

I had a really nice mise framed up using the monkey plate, but my phone decided that I wasn't really serious about those pictures, and they didn't get recorded.  :(  That means we have to go with a boring list of ingredients instead (I'm copying the recipe because I never trust links to live forever. Plus, I can specify any changes made):

• 1c flour (this was in my measuring cup)
• 1c oats (already in a mixing bowl)
• 1tsp baking soda (in the alligator segment of the monkey plate, along with)
• 1/4tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/3c brown sugar (in the elephant segment)
• 1 egg (in it's cracking bowl)
• 1/2 stick butter (1/4c) softened (walrus segment)
• 1.5tsp vanilla extract (in a shot glass in the alligator segment)
• 1c chocolate chips (monkey segment)

Preheat oven to 350.  Pour half the milk over the oats, and leave for 5-10 minutes to soak and hydrate (I totally had a picture of this too, but the phone ate that as well.)

Add the sugar to the egg, and mix until smooth.

Add the butter and vanilla, and mix that together as well.

Add the rest of the dry ingredients, leaving only the milk and chips out. Mix-y mix-y mix-y.

OMG THE MILK! Probably not a surprise, was it? Guess what? Mix carefully, because until that milk is incorporated enough to not be a puddle, it's going to splash all over.

Fold in the chocolate chips. The original recipe calls for muffin liners, but I didn't pick any up, so I just smeared my muffin tin with butter.  If you have liners, or can reasonably make the trip, it's probably worthwhile to get them.

Divide up into the muffin tin. Watch out for greedy monkeys, as they may be spying on you, looking to see how they can get those chocolate chips back. If you have turbinado sugar, the original recipe suggest sprinking some on top. I don't, so I didn't. Bake for 15-18 minutes (or, 22ish minutes if your oven is kind of sucky) until a skewer comes out clean.

Pop one out, and cover it in butter:

Keep in mind that since these muffins have be absolute minimum leavening in them, they're not going to puff up a lot.  It probably would have been a good idea to let them cool a bit before removing from the pan, because the bases kind of squish down.

The other 11. If you look closely, you'll see that a few chocolate chips are missing, and the muffin at 1 o'clock has had a bit of a structural problem. The melty chocolate chips don't really have much affinity either way between sticking and not, so this is where muffin liners would have helped a lot.

I'm not sure where to rank these on the scale of healthy-not. The oatmeal makes me think that they're healthy, and if I'd used the whole wheat flour specified in the original recipe, that'd be double true.  They're also not really full of sugar, so that makes it sound like they're really just some deliciously toasted oatmeal. Of course, then there's the chocolate chips. Remember how I mentioned above that the low level of leavening makes the bottoms collapse if you eat them hot? If you compress the bread part of these muffins, what do you think happens? Yep, you get a bottom crust, and then a disk of molten chocolate that has crushed all the puffy bread, then the muffin top that's fluffy again. That's delicious, but it certainly makes it seem like these have to be more on the side of unhealthy.

Either way, they're full of delicious, and I think that they will do nicely as breakfast this week.