Portobello Mushrooms Stuffed with Spinach and Goat Cheese

I've made stuffed portobellos before but had never marinated the mushrooms first. This added a lot of flavor to the stuffing, which seemed sort of bland to me. I pretty much followed the recipe--minus Marsala and thyme sprigs. When confronted with the realization that I didn't have a garlic press, I minced the garlic instead. I did a quick web search to weigh my options, concluding that it wouldn't really make a big difference. Do you know what the flavor difference is between pressing and mincing garlic? An Alton Brown-esque answer would be appreciated.


Here's the 'shrooms' first soak. Loving both balsamic vinegar and soy sauce, I thought the smell of the marinade was wonderful. However, an innocent bystander described the aroma as "strong." Hmm, to each his own.









After a few hours of flipping back and forth in the marinade, they looked like this.





The filling was a bit bland for my taste. Ok, full disclosure, I under-salted...again. Since the final result wasn't so beautiful, I'll let you picture it yourself. Hopefully your mental picture will look better than the photo I took which resembled something more like a pile of white, brown, and green mush. Think: mushroom, balsamic, chèvre, spinach...do you have a lovely picture in your mind now? Good, now maybe you could make this recipe look better. I've never been one for presentation!

Mmmm....mac and cheese

The recent long weekend inspired a hankering for a warm casserole. After consulting someone who would be benefiting from this endeavor--and keeping me calm in the process--mac and cheese was the warm, gooey dish upon which I set to work. I've made baked macaroni and cheese once before, with light and crunchy Panko bread crumbs on top. I looked at a bunch of recipes on epicurious.com, but didn't end up following any one of them very closely. We created the cheese sauce with butter, onions, garlic, flour, milk, cheddar, Gruyere, and nutmeg. It didn't seem cheesy or thick enough in the end, so we just grated in the rest of the cheese. The cheese sauce was poured over shells and gemelli pasta, a pound of peas, and a pound of chicken breast cooked ahead of time with cumin and curry powder. I made a feeble attempt at my own bread crumbs...next time I'll just skip it or use Panko again. (Read: Bakery sandwich bread torn into pieces, baked in a 350 oven, crumbled on top, then realized they were totally unseasoned, hmph.)

Pre-baking with some extra cheese added at the last minute:
Here's a picture that shows the whole heterogeneous mixture (and a little bit of salad) post-oven: It was good enough to have second helpings, and to eat for lunch the next two days. But next time, I might follow a recipe for the cheese sauce to make it a little creamier and thicker. Do you have a favorite baked mac & cheese recipe?

An addiction

I have a confession to make.

I can't stop eating these.
I bought a "travel size" bag of Haribo "Goldbaren" at the airport in Germany, didn't crack it open until last week, and have been slowly subsisting on it since.

I had gummy bears for dinner last night. I swear it was an accident! Before I knew it was 8:30 and I wasn't hungry. Why not? I ate a few gummies after yoga (there goes that!) at 7.

Who wants to do an intervention? Do you still call it that if I'm completely aware of my problem?

Kids like sushi

Did you know that kids like sushi?

Growing up in a family of food-lovers, with a niece who counts liver and onions and garlic among her faves, I'm not shocked when I meet a kid who eats more than chicken nuggets and french fries. So I wasn't too surprised when I heard my 10-year old students talking about how much they love sushi. I've never attempted to make sushi, in any way, shape or form, but last week I made "fruit sushi" with my after-school cooking club (which is to say "non-cooking" club, because we have no stove or oven!).

First, we sliced strawberries, bananas and mango. Luckily, slicing fruit doesn't require anything more than a plastic knife, so I could relax a little knowing that my students would leave school with all 10 digits. We tried to slice long, narrow pieces, better to be rolled.

I didn't have any short-grain sushi rice, nor could I find it at my standard grocery store, so I used brown jasmine rice. It was not remotely sticky when it was finished, so I added some honey, but that didn't help much. Another omission was the bamboo mats that you're supposed to use to roll the seaweed over the filling. We just used wax paper, and it seemed fine to us! But I'm getting out of order here.

We spread rice on our sheets of Nori, leaving space at the top. Then we put a stripe of peanut butter or honey across the rice and layered some fruit across the stripe. The kids used a lot more fruit than me, and had some difficulty rolling and cutting later.Having only made one roll each, we really didn't perfect our rolling method, but using the wax paper proved helpful. We found that dipping our knife in water helped cut through the Nori when we were slicing the rolls.
It was pretty tasty, but the construction part was far more enjoyable than the eating part.

Trying things I already know I dislike

In case I haven't made this clear, I'm not a big fan of cauliflower. In fact, I'm such a hater of this Brassica oleracea species that I named my blog after it. (Obviously not in an admirable way: "cauliflower" + "socks" = unappetizing). But don't go thinkin' I'm some kind of picky-eater just because I cringe at the thought of those albino florets. I have a true admiration for a lot of other cruciferous vegetables: kale, broccoli, and brussels sprouts, to name a few. However, for as long as I can remember, cauliflower has been on my terse "Do Not Eat" list. I've been known to say that cauliflower tastes like sweaty socks. "Ick!" you're thinking. That's generally the reaction I get from my dining companions, too. So, I apologize to anyone who's had their appetite disrupted by my big mouth, but it's the truth! Socks! Ick!

Years ago, my dear sister told me I must be some kind of "super-taster" for feeling so strongly about a vegetable that is considered quite tasteless by many people. I don't think I quite deserve the honorable title, though it is true that I have never met anybody who feels as strongly about cauliflower as I do. I hear most cauliflower-averse folks don't care for its lack of flavor. Then there's me who, inexplicably, think it tastes like sweaty socks.

I ate some cauliflower last week. I was at a gathering of my book club, and our gracious host had made, among other delicious edibles, cauliflower casserole. I ate some. It tasted like cheese. And cauliflower, of the just-finished a 5-mile run variety. I didn't have seconds, but with a bunch of cheese, that stuff's not so bad. And though I did admit to all present that I don't like cauliflower, I didn't get into the whole "socks" bit!