Meatless Monday: A Mushroom Feast

Happy Monday everyone. Some of you have been asking what ever happened with my mushroom farm. I may have have gotten sidetracked by other topics, but I didn’t forget about the post I promised you. If you’ve been wondering about my fungi, your wait is over!

We got a good crop of mushrooms from our kit, and I celebrated them by making this delicious dish for a special Saturday night feast — Mario Batali’s Pasta with Oyster Mushrooms, Sweet Garlic, and Arugula — found online using Google search with recipe view. I searched for pasta and oyster mushrooms. After I checked that I had arugula and garlic, but not pumpkin, this recipe came up as the first result. Since I did not make my own pasta, my guess is that the difficulty level became easy rather than intermediate, that is unless you factor in the time and dedication required to grow the mushrooms in the first place [more on that in a future post]. I did have to run around the corner to buy some sweet vermouth, but the little extra effort was definitely worth the trouble. 

The mushrooms imparted a texture and taste reminiscent of seafood to the dish, and we could see how they acquired their name. The 5 star rating on this recipe is well-deserved, and it was very cool that we had grown the featured ingredient. Thanks Chef Batali. Thanks Back to the Roots. We are looking forward to the leftovers tonight…

Have a great week. And come back again soon.

I try to blog on food or food issues each Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”