Broiled Stuffed Mushrooms

This recipe is from the original New York Times Cookbook.  Craig Claiborne should have been declared a national treasure.  I still make so many recipes from this book.

Broiled Stuffed Mushrooms

12 hors d’oeuvres

12 large mushrooms                                                    2 T. sherry

3 T. butter                                                                   salt and pepper to taste

1 small onion, chopped                                               marjoram, rosemary or oregano

1 cup fine soft bread crumbs

½ cup chopped cooked chicken

Ham or shrimp or ½ cup chopped nuts

or cooked bacon

1. Preheat broiler.  Remove and chop mushroom stems
2. In a skillet, heat 1 T. of the butter, add the onion and chopped mushroom  stems and cook about 2 minutes.  Add bread crumbs, meat or nuts, and enough sherry to moisten the mixture and seasonings.
3. Place the mushroom caps on a baking sheet and brush with the remaining butter, melted.  Broil, cap side down,  about 2 minutes.  Invert and stuff.  Brush with melted butter and broil 3 minutes longer. 

Yesterday I made them with  bacon, and used my own dried oregano as the spice.  You will notice that the ingredients are all common items from the pantry,  When the big mushrooms are on sale, this is about as cheap as an hors d'oeuvre can get.  It is not high cal either, compared to some.  

Always  tastes good.  Not so filling that guests don't want their dinner.  

Viva New York Times Cookbook.  Try the chili con carne.  One of the best.  The roast pork with  thyme is another all time winner.  My favorite frittata is also in the old edition.  When the revised book came out, they booted some of the recipes, including my frittata, but I cut out all the recipes that were excluded that were faves.  The muffin recipe always delivered great (small) muffins with little fat and sugar.  What has become of the humble muffin is a prime exhibit for why we are all fatter than formerly.  

Try the mushrooms;  you'll like them.  I had  really dry bread crumbs and used some extra sherry.  

Onward, 

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Beef Stroganoff

In days of yore, suburban housewives whipped up Beef Stroganoff for company and hamburger Stroganoff for family.

This is a quick, easy dish that has fallen out of favor, although there were 584,000 entries in Google. Maybe it's the beef or maybe it's the sour cream or maybe it's because everyone just eats cheese pizza now.

Actually, Beef Stroganoff is something that kids like, so keep that in mind. Because I never see recipes for the dish or see it listed on restaurant menus, it tends to fly below my radar. This week I remembered I had promised myself I would make it soon. The Thanksgiving turkey was history; the time was ripe.

I had two small (8 oz. each) "petite sirloins" in the freezer; I had onions and sour cream and beef broth. Oooops--needed mushrooms, which Significant Other picked up at Trader Joe's.

Got out the New York Times cookbook recipe, and discovered it didn't even call for mushrooms. Mierda! I would incorporate them anyhow. The times called for filet, but who serves that on Tuesday night? I mean, really.

The cookbook also said to saute the onion with the beef and then discard the onion! Discard the onion? How stupid is that? The onion stayed where it was. I sauteed the beef and onion on high heat and poured the sauce over it. Cooked up a few noodles. This was good.

Why did it ever go out of style? There were only 3 tablespoons of sour cream and we ate it two nights in a row, so that's less than 1 tablespoon of sour cream per serving and four ounces of beef. We aren't talking diet busters here. Well, out of style is out of style.

I wandered into the Web and found some truly disgusting recipes, recipes calling for Campbell's mushroom soup and catsup and green peppers and . . . yuck. Not Beef Stroganoff. So maybe after the food police finished with it (non-fat sour cream anyone?) the flavor of the dish took a nosedive.

I don't know. The mushrooms were tiny and delicious. The thin sliced onion added a lot. I will have to dig my old hamburger Stroganoff recipe out.

Time for a revival. If I find the perfect recipe, I'll publish it. In the meantime, you're welcome to peruse the 584,000 Google entries. If there is any mention of margarine, green pepper, mushroom soup or non-fat sour cream, run like hell.

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Salade Niçoise

We had company this weekend and due to working around a theater curtain time, etc., I decided to make a Salade niçoise, I chose the salad in Julia Child's The Way to Cook as my recipe.

Now we all know that Julia is not the short-cut queen, no recipes in 30 minutes from the French Chef, so I was prepared for a bit of work. My only "shortcut" if indeed it was, was to cook the small Yukon Gold potatoes whole and peel them. I also omitted anchovies since I don't like anchovies and when you are the cook you can do what you damn well please.

O.K. second substitution was to buy three small beautiful tuna steaks and grill them. I made Julia's potato salad, cooked the beans, S.O. grilled the tuna, and I boiled some eggs, and pounced upon a beautiful red tomato, capers, black olives, lettuce, the works all laid out beautifully on a big ceramic platter.

The dressing was a lemon-garlic affair, with both lemon peel and lemon juice and raw garlic pounded to a paste. A bit of work but well worth it. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts and we had a feast.

At the other end of the spectrum was dessert. I know our friend likes strawberries, so a strawberry dessert seemed optimal. I recalled back in the first years of marriage I had been on a Bavarian cream kick, making various flavors of a French dessert called Bavarian cream.

I looked in the old New York Times cookbook and lo, there is was, but it was the shortcut version--Julia would have disapproved big time. I measured out all the ingredients including a heaping cup of chipped ice and dumped them into the blender in the prescribed order, and blended the prescibed number of second, and lo, strawberry Bavarian cream in less than a minute, no cooking. Raw eggs, too. My bad. I licked the spoon to test whether the eggs were safe and I guess they were.

We ate it with sliced strawberries from Wards Berry Farm, altogether lucious with no hard white centers, but red berry all the way through.

So this was yin and yang of meals, but lovely.

As for lovely, the garden looks and smells lovely. The white carnations bloomed and have sent a fragrance over the yard and now into the house as I picked a few and added the sage blossoms, favored by the bumble bees.

The tomatoes, heirloom beets, pepper and herbs are growing apace, and the flowers are blooming, even the new white lupine, and the clematis has huge purple blossoms. The hummingbirds come to the feeder regularly and one looked at us in the window this morning. We had a fantastically large butterfly, all yellow and black, and of course the dragon flies swoop and land on the flowers. So life is good on the edge of the slough.

Big goldfinch battle yesterday. They are territorial little guys. Catbirds have discovered how to get into the suet feeder for small birds.

We had a good rain this morning and everything is lush. Looking at the garden puts me into a good mood, which is a good thing, because Festival Madness has two more rejections. We looked at the beginning again, and it read pretty good.

The New York Times Book Review today had many of the same books as the WSJ. Not my cuppa tea. The Globe's list is more literate, but Boston readers are obviously not typical.

Tonight I'll do a few more pages of the new book. I really need a working title.

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