Dgourmac's Blog

You’ve heard me rave a few times recently about a marvelous, simple mushroom consommé from the cookbook Unplugged Kitchen, by Viana Laplace.  Well, I made it again tonight, and it is so straightforward and gratifying, I thought I should provide a few more details.

I almost always use 3-4 mushroom varieties.  Quantities can easily be adjusted.  This version used about 3/4 of a package (5-6 oz.) of Cremini mushrooms, about 4 oz. of Shitakes (stems removed), and two medium sized Portobello caps.  These were sliced (not too thinly), tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, spread on roasting trays, and roasted at 425 º F. until lightly browned.  In the meantime I took a handful of the best dried Italian porcini and soaked them in 12 oz. of warm water for 1/2 hour.

When the mushrooms were ready, I placed the cooked ones in a small soup pot.  The porcini were drained, with the liquid reserved, then chopped and added to the pot with their liquid.  I added another 3-4 cups of spring water to the pot, brought it to a boil, and then simmered — uncovered — for an hour and a half, until the liquid was reasonably concentrated.  You can just feel the rich flavor in the photo below.

I strained out the mushrooms and saved them in a dish for later use in the salad, enhanced with a little lemon juice, olive oil and salt.  I poured the broth through a fine strainer into a Pyrex 2-cup measuring bowl and saved it until ready for dinner.  It is quickly reheated (microwave or small saucepan, as you prefer), then poured into porcelain espresso cups and served.

All of this, of course, was motivated by my wine selection for the evening.  It was a bottle of Linne Calodo 2011 Nemesis, just released last Fall.  It’s a stunning blend of Syrah, Mourvedre, and Grenache, and it just calls out for the richness of this dish.

This all went with a superb salad that Barbara put together,  a fine ending for a day which included plowing another 10″ of snow and ice from the driveway, and having our wood-burning stove and flue pipes cleaned for the rest of the winter.  Oh, yes, and I graded a few papers and Barbara did some quilting along the way.

Barbara made a very good and healthy soup using primarily red lentils, other vegetables, and lots of fresh ginger.  I learned it was in process when I saw the prep work all done on the counter (except for the lentils, which were still in a jar):

I have no pics of the finished product, which looked as bright as it tasted, but here is the recipe, if you are interested.

But the real story that day was a revelation I had while sitting at the kitchen counter, nibbling before supper while the soup was simmering.  One of the wines I was drinking that week was a 2012 Benaza Godello from Spain, suggested by my friends at Social Wines.  I had tried a couple of glasses on two different days earlier in the week, but I was unimpressed each time.  That afternoon, Barbara had cut the edges off a loaf of Tuscan pane which she then converted into cubes, and with sprinkles of salt and garlic powder, she toasted them in the oven — and voilà!  Croutons.

There was a little too much good bread along the edges of her crusts to throw them out, so I put the crusts on the counter, opened a container of Spanish-style assorted olives, and poured some top-notch olive oil in a bowl for bread-dipping, while I sipped on the Godello.  Mirabile dicta.  The wine was transformed into a delightful libation, apparently just by combining it with these unassuming food elements.  So once again, the lesson is that wine and foods together are often the best way to consume either one.

I found a nice, fresh, clean-looking head of escarole in the market a few days ago, so while Barbara was off at a quilting workshop on Saturday, I decided to create a new, healthful soup with some of my favorite ingredients:

• one head of escarole, washed and cut into 1/2 inch strips
• half an onion, finely diced
• half a package of dried Controne beans from Campania
• 1/4 cup of raw Vialone Nano short grain rice
• one quart of homemade vegetable stock

The forecast for the day was for snow “showers”.  The reality was quite different.  It was snowing heavily as I puttered around the kitchen and gazed at the thick flakes outside the kitchen window.  It was even more dramatic out in the meadow.  Time for a hearty soup.

Returning to the cutting board and the stove top, I pre-cooked the beans in my new crockery casserole for about 2 hours, then salted and cooled them, finally removing them to another bowl.  Starting on the soup, I sautéed the onion in the casserole pot in 3 Tbs. of olive oil.  When the pieces were light brown, I added the escarole and cooked until it was just tender.  Next, added the rice and the beans, got them coated in oil, and finally added all the vegetable stock and salted to taste.

I let it all simmer for about 30 minutes partly-covered.  While that was happening, I was getting hungry, so I noshed on leftovers from the past few days, checking the soup along the way.  It certainly looked good in the pot.

Now, as the soup was getting close to done, I found another diversion.  Did you ever put mushrooms loose in a paper bag in the refrigerator,  then forget about them for a week or two?  Well, while pulling out of that refrigerator ingredients for the soup, I came across that paper bag with four lovely small Shitakes in it.  Lovely, but now quite dried .  So before I did any of the previous steps, I covered the Shitakes in warm water, weighed them down to keep submerged, and was able to retrieve them two hours later, reconstituted and ready to cook.  Saving the warm water broth they were soaked in, I dried the mushrooms with paper towel, and sautéed them in olive oil for later use.  I actually added the soaking water to the soup pot along with the stock, to make up the full recipe of a quart and a half, or 6 cups of liquid.

Interestingly, I saved these for the next day and added them to the soup in my bowl, with excellent results.  But for this meal, I ladled the soup into a pasta bowl and added some homemade croutons, toasted in the oven earlier in the week from a Tuscan pane we like.  My choice of wine surprised me.  I had two whites open, one from the Loire (le Fief du Breil) and one from Campania (Coda di Volpe).  I enjoyed the Muscadet more with it.