Impromptu cooking

I was almost out of sugar and low on apple cider, so decided I should go to the nearest store even though it was very cold out (11F/-11C, with enough snow on the ground that the ground-level temperature was probably colder than that).

Christo's is an odd combination of convenience store, greengrocer, and Greek specialty food shop. The produce is well above the bodega/convenience store/depanneur standard, so I bought mushrooms, Cara Cara oranges, and a few Macintosh apples.

cattitude is out, so I made an impromptu mushroom dish for lunch. I sliced several mushrooms (the standard white mushroom of commerce), sauteed them in olive oil for a few minutes until they were all brown on both sides, then added a bit of sliced scallion and turned the heat down. Meanwhile, I was boiling water for pasta.

So, rotini with sliced mushrooms for a relatively easy (and accidentally vegan) lunch. The seasonings were dill, ginger, dried minced garlic, soy sauce, and cider vinegar; I added pepper but not salt at the table. I sprinkled the dill and ginger onto the mushrooms as soon as they went into the pan; I added the garlic, soy, and vinegar after turning the heat down.

It's not a brilliant invention: it was definitely mushrooms on pasta, not pasta with a mushroom sauce, but it was definitely lunch, and I will probably do this again. (More often I make rice, but pasta seemed quicker.) I may experiment with something to hold the meal together a bit more. We have pesto in the refrigerator, but that felt like altogether the wrong direction for this, and I wasn't in the mood for tomato sauce out of a jar.

[This post is mostly for my reference, so I'm more likely to remember and cook this again.]