Mar 25 2010
Bundled
I’d been flicking through a long-discarded-by-the-bed Waitrose Recipe Booklet recently, and then a day or two later, saw some really lovely portabello mushrooms on sale.
I’ll confess, however, that I made a mistake regarding the spinach. There had been some in the fridge, we’d eaten it, I’d forgotten. So our mushroom bundles featured mixed baby leaf salad, cos one green leaf is a lot like another, right? On a similar vein, the called-for thyme looked mysteriously like parsley in ours. Who could tell?
These looked just a-mazing going into the oven, and the filling smelled pretty good too.
However, they did not survive the baking well :o(
They tasted fine- no, they tasted fantastic- but this wouldn’t be a dish you’d be serving to someone you wanted to impressed with your food styling. Possibly we didn’t tie the parcels tightly enough, so that when things began to melt and blanch the overall height changed too much. Possibly the use of household string meant the bundles sat at a slight angle, where a fine thread would have allowed them to rest flat. Who knows.
In any case it didn’t matter at all as it was just D and Me and a big pile of buttery, parmesany linguine, and divine cheesey mushroom goodness on top. Well worth the slight fiddle of making I’d say!
….um, and you didn’t barbecue them either, but who’s checking? Mushrooms *do* shrink incredibly; I think you would have to be pretty vicious in trussing them up, and even then I’m not convinced they would hang together… this may be a recipe which has been conceived but not road-tested. However, it does sound tasty.
I might give it a whirl, but the only place I can get the right mushrooms would be ASDA (I was there this morning and bought some chorizo, as it isn’t to be had anywhere round here and V&C didn’t have any either, yesterday. Where do you get yours?)
gosh yes I knew there was another deviation, although at least that one was recipe-sanctioned.
We get chorizo in Lidl or believe-it-or-not, the co-op (scotmid) up the hill. It may not be the finest ever version but it certainly does the trick.
the waitrose pics look like cooked mushrooms but they could have been cooked-then-trussed for the photo.
Of course, having read the recipe, you *do* cook the mushrooms before you truss…. you did, didn’t you??
Clearly you have a more exotic Scotmid than we do (or maybe ours isn’t Scotmid, but some other variety of Coop)
or maybe you don’t? “Turn the mushroom caps in the butter” may just be coating technique… me thinks a wee fry-to-shrink mightn’t go wrong.
Time to start towards getting the tea together…. (leftover Chorizo and morcilla stew plus peas n mash: had better get peeling)
we didn’t cook them more than a little- perhaps a good cook would’ve done the trick. i can’t imagine bbqing them for that length of time would guarantee cooked-through so perhaps it’s needed there.