Impromptu cooking

[redbird]

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.]

Comments

[pameladean]

Thank you for a very pleasant half-hour thinking about what should be added to make the dish more saucy. My first thought was a cream or cream and cheese sauce, but with the vinegar and soy sauce that might be tricky. Then I thought, well, Chinese influence, put in some sherry or rice wine and bind it with cornstarch, that would probably be okay with dill and certainly is fine with all the other seasonings.

You'll probably come up with something completely different, but thanks for the fun!

P.

[redbird]

If I went in a cream sauce direction, I'd be happy to lose the vinegar. I've taken to using it when I want to add a bit of liquid (to carry herbs and/or spices, usually) and don't want to just add water. The only things I'm sure I'd keep are the dill and ginger.

Ideally I'd come up with something adrian_turtle can eat, which rules out both the cream and the sherry or wine. Maybe a bit of broth?

[alatefeline]

Good thinking!

Sounds tasty. Do you like peppers? Sauteed bell peppers might help it all pull together and add color, without adding a lot of extra steps.

[redbird]

My default approach would have been to saute the mushrooms with bell pepper and onion and serve them over rice; I suspect that combination would work over pasta too. I had one scallion left, from a bunch that had gotten a bit old, and slicing just the white and pale green parts of one scallion is faster than cutting up an onion, or half an onion.

When I'm making that, I usually mix up a sauce from ginger paste, the black bean sauce or oyster sauce paste that comes in jars, vinegar, and anything else that seems appealing at the time. (At this point my refrigerator contains both the paste that is labeled black bean sauce but needs diluting, and "black bean paste" that we bought to make a sauce for the Thanksgiving turkey.) If there's too little liquid in the pan, I add a little water.

I used the scallion because I had one left, which was getting old, and slicing just the white and pale green parts of one scallion is faster than cutting up an onion, or half an onion.

[alatefeline]

It sounds like you have a good sense of what does and doens't work for you in the kitchen, which I admire.

[snippy]

Broth and boiled potatoes mashed together (I use a stick blender) make a good bland sauce base that is not cream nor wine. It's starchy enough to hold together, it takes other flavors well, and it's easy.