Golden Chanterelle Stroganoff

If you haven't yet signed up for one of Chef Eric Tucker's cooking classes at Millennium, perhaps this will tempt you - Chanterelle Stroganoff.  He said it was ok for me to reproduce this recipe, so here you go!

This is one of my favorite recipes - I have experimented with a few variations which I will mention below. 

Chanterelle "Stroganoff" by Chef Eric Tucker

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 yellow onion, sliced into thin crescents
• 2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
• 2 Tb olive oil
• 1# cleaned chanterelles, sliced thin
• 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1 Tb tomato paste
• 2 c vegetable or mushroom stock
• 1 Tb nutritional yeast (or more, to taste)
• 1 c cashew cream (make yourself with pre-soaked cashews, drain, blend with cold water, dash of salt and squeeze of lemon til you get a cream)
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• salt & pepper, to taste
• minced fresh dill
• lemon zest
• cooked papardelle (super easy to make yourself!)

DIRECTIONS:

1. In a large skillet, sautee the onion in the olive oil over medium, stirring often until onion is medium caramelized.
2. Add garlic & mushrooms, continue to sautee, stirring often until the mushrooms are dry.
3. Add thyme & paprika, sautee 30 seconds, then deglaze with red wine.
4. Add tomato paste, stock & nutritional yeast and simmer 5 minutes.
5. Add cashew cream, simmer until thick.
6. Taste & adjust seasoning.  
7. Toss the cooked papardelle with some olive oil.  
8. Place a portion of sauce over noodles, sprinkle with dill & lemon zest.

Variations:  I have made this with morels and other mushrooms - it comes out pretty delicious.  I have also substituted dry sherry for red wine for deglazing.  

Make your own pasta  - it's really not hard, and papardelle are wide strips that you want to cut by hand anyway.  Rustic homemade noodles are divine!

Mushrooming - November 21

After some showers on Friday, I was excited to head out to some newly discovered moist spots for more chanterelles with my trusty mushroom hunting protegee, Scott.  We skipped "the usual" spot and went to the spot we discovered a couple weeks ago and explored more adjacent areas.  We even went in for a walk on some trails closed to mountain bikes because we were on foot - and Scott had never been on these trails because he was always in this area on a mountain bike.  Scott noticed that "there are a ot of cobwebs across this trail!"

Of course, that's a GOOD sign - and I kept scanning the ground. After the second or third time he said that, I stopped him and said "Well, we could go back or - we could pick those mushrooms."  Wouldn't you know it - after picking several pounds of chanterelles, we nearly stepped on some growing ON the trail.  We crawled into the underbrush and picked more mushrooms, returning home victorious with 5# of beautiful golden chanterelles.

 

 Giant banana slug

 

Corcorra!

 

Little white funguses that look like mung bean sprouts everywhere:

 

Pretty - large - shrooms growing under bay trees:

 

Yup! It's a chanterelle!

Growing right on the trail!

 

More beautiful fungi -

 

Persimmons - 2009!

Today I went to my friend's house and helped harvest unripe persimmons.  We cleared probably less than 50% of the tree - there are still a lot on the tree.  It seems like more than last year - perhaps because we picked so many last year that the tree was very happy about it!  I brought home two big blue tubs weighing about 75# each. 

This year, instead of laying the persimmons out in a single layer on the floor and tables of my project room - I decided to utilize the solar dehydrator.  The weather is cool enough and the right setup would keep the ants out - Dobson, of course, helped.

Now, I just have to wait and start figuring out what to do with the ripened persimmons!

RESTAURANT: Wood Tavern

After a ride in the Berkeley Hills for sunset and a few drinks at The Graduate, I marched across the street with three friends for dinner at Wood Tavern, the restaurant of a darling young chef named Max DiMare. Wood Tavern focuses on rustic, hearty fare in the flexible and varied nexus of local-sustainable-California.

I first met Max right when he moved out to California - I worked with his Uncle Bill as a freelance consultant, and we'd go dine at Max's restaurant whenever Bill would be in town. Max is funny, smart and an all around great guy as well as a fantastic chef. He also loves spicy food and I remember going for dinner at a divey Vietnamese joint on Polk with him and his uncle several years ago - Max had been experimenting with habanero salsas and was pouring on fiery yellow salsa and sweat was rolling off his scalp, but he was loving it!

Fortunately, Max knows his limits are different from the rest of us mortals, but certainly if you want spice, Chef Max is the one who can kick it up and challenge your taste buds.

You might not think that a dinner at Wood Tavern would be the first choice for a vegan. Max assured me that he could make me delicious vegan food and my meat eating friends would all be happy to not be eating Thai food yet once again...

I love the interior of Wood Tavern - it's just warm, inviting brick and wood, with sparkling lights and glass. Together, the four of us slayed two orders of frites, bread and olive oil and a wonderful green salad with a blood orange vinaigrette. My friends had a couple orders of the crispy pork belly and an order of cold cuts (salame or venison or something).

The pasta dish Max whipped up for me was delicious - shells with shiitake mushrooms and asparagus was just fantastic - it had a delicious sweet-savory broth for seasoning and was far and beyond any vegan dish I have been served at other "meat" restaurants (Salt House hates vegetarians who like to eat dinner with their meat eating friends, btw).

For dessert, I had the most amazing strawberry sorbet, and two of my friends dared to have the affogato at 11pm! - a concoction of espresso, chocolate and ice cream that would keep anyone up for several more hours!

A delicious, satisfying and not ridiculously expensive meal for 4 people (including wine) was around $100 including tip. Yums!

Dear Vegan Blogosphere...

EAT LOCAL! Yes, I know I'm "different" and this isn't one of my usual topics because I just assume that most vegans are paying attention to the same things that the greenies are tracking - you know, carbon footprint, eating locally and such.

Sadly, it is not true. I am reading a lot of vegan blog posts lately - esp starting around Valentine's Day - that rely on produce from far, far away. Seriously folks - we do NOT eat strawberries in March in North America. They aren't in season. OK, there are a few in my garden but by the time they ripen, the slugs have already had their way with them and that's fine - just hope they are propagating the seeds for me.

Did you folks ever notice that I don't post recipes with bananas? For one thing, they just don't taste as good here in Northern California as they do in places like Mexico (or even New Orleans) where they can be picked from a tree. I just don't bother buying them because I know what tree-ripened bananas taste like and eating bananas that were picked hard and green and ripened with their own esters (or "rotted") is not the same thing at all. The farthest away I'll buy produce is from Mexico -- and that's a rare thing for me.

Now, I'm not one to issue "challenges" to blog readers but I'm starting to feel like I need to throw down the gauntlet with vegan bloggers.

Here are some resources for eating locally - and yes, this means you don't get to eat all kinds of ridiculous fruit all winter long that is not in season unless you froze or preserved it yourself. If you want to save the planet by cutting out consumption of animals - think about how you are damaging the planet by buying crap from thousands of miles away.

• 10 Reasons to Eat Local Food
• Eat Local Challenge
• Kale for Sale has lots of "eat local" info, esp eating locally during the winter
• Stay Local! (more good reasons for buying local produce & food)

PS: One more thing, vegan bloggers, if I see ANOTHER recipe for applesauce, I will scream! Seriously - there's like a ZERO difficulty level to peeling, cutting up apples and cooking them down. That's about as difficult as boiling water.

PPS: I am NOT ever writing a cookbook. Seriously. Never.