On Saturday I went to the Duncan Farmers Market with $20 and came home with this:
That’s $10 worth of fresh, locally-grown veggies and $10 worth of wild chanterelle mushrooms. Yes, a bit of a splurge at a dollar per ounce for the mushrooms, but when you get an entire tree of brussels sprouts for $2.50, you can be spendy in other categories! (The brussels sprouts have already gone into this pasta with bacon and feta and will undoubtedly be skillet roasted as well.)
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Last weekend I made two chicken, leek and mushroom pies: one for me and Nate, and one to give to some good friends who just recently had a sweet baby boy (I also made them some Perfect Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies). They appreciated it very much, but so did I – because, while I obviously love to cook and bake, what I really love is sharing what I’ve made with people and seeing them enjoy it (or in this case, hearing about it). It’s pretty fulfilling to create something that makes other people happy, be it a piece of art, some words on a page, or a slice of chicken pie and a peanut butter cookie.
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One of the truly great taste combinations is mushrooms and cheese, so it is a no-brainer to put them together on a pizza. What is not a no-brainer is making mushroom pesto to put on the pizza instead of tomato sauce. That is brilliant. Another brilliant thing is to roast the mushrooms in the oven before making them into pesto. How have I never roasted mushrooms before? The smells coming out of the oven while they were roasting were just incredible….
I was craving something rich, creamy, and savoury the other evening, and this hit the spot. I’m quite sure that this is not “authentic” beef stroganoff, but then I’m not really sure what is – as far as I can tell, there’s no “traditional” recipe: it’s just beef and mushrooms in a sour cream sauce over noodles, and the variations are pretty endless. I’ve never had it made for me by anyone else, so I have nothing to compare to, but this tasted pretty darn good. I looked at a few recipes online for inspiration, and this is what I came up with 🙂 I used flank steak, but I’m sure any kind of steak would be fine – probably ground beef would work too! Shiitake mushrooms would be a great addition to this dish….
Yesterday we unexpectedly received rather a large amount of snow (we measured 21 centimeters at one point!), and in usual snowy Victoria fashion, the roads were terrible, life slowed to a halt, and neither Nate nor myself went to work. Instead, we spent the day on the couch watching season one of Mad Men, and I did some baking. Seeing as I had all day, I made a quiche, which I find inevitably ends up taking about three times as long as I think it will. I also tried to modify my usual fantastic, go-to banana bread recipe to be sugar-free, but it turned out to be not-so-fantastic sans sugar 🙁 Someday I’ll perfect the recipe and share it, but in the meantime, here’s my quiche recipe.
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