Shiitake Mushroom “Bacon” Crumbles

Last year, Jen and I decided to increase the vegetarianism in our diets. We didn’t cut out animal products entirely, but we stopped buying meat and most of our meals were vegetarian or vegan. Among many other reasons for making this change, we really want to shake our cooking up. While we have gone back to eating meat this year, the time we spent without it taught us a lot about what sates our appetites.

I don’t find meat to be an essential part of a meal, in general. But if you are used to cooking with it regularly, it can be a challenge creating balanced meals without it. That’s probably why so many “meat” substitutes exist. Don’t get me wrong, protein is an important nutritional element, and many touted meat substitutes such as tofu (soy), seitan (made of wheat gluten) or tempeh (another soy product) provide that nutrient in abundance. But I do find that some people (mostly non-vegetarians) get much more worked up over getting enough than the average person really needs to worry about. Grains, legumes, and many vegetables can provide just as much protein when included regularly in a diet.

Meat substitutes can be great, and I plan on talking more about them in future weeks. If you’ve read much of this blog, you have probably gathered that I prefer food to be processed as little as possible when I begin cooking with it. So I knew that no matter what we were going to be eating we would be making much of it ourselves. And that points out another problem with relying on most meat substitutes for the bulk of a vegetarian diet – they are often heavily processed and expensive.

In my new diet, I wanted to focus on fresh food, that I knew as much about as possible, and that would keep me interested and coming back for more. I also had to combat with no longer having some of my favorite foods, which was less about nutrition or cost cutting and more about giving my taste buds what they wanted. After going without bacon for some time, I did begin to crave it quite a bit. That’s when I remembered this recipe that I had come across when following a recipe for seitan bourguignon (also amazing, but we’ll get to that later).

Fresh (undried) shiitake mushrooms are used here, roasted with a bit of oil and salt, until they are crispy. It’s not just the crisping that makes them wonderful – though the texture is quite addictive. The musky, sulfuric flavor of shiitake mushrooms turns into magic when they are cooked. They take on a remarkable similarity to the meaty, salty, umami of bacon. It’s not an exact match, for sure, but it’s so close, I’d wager that someone might be fooled in a blind taste test.

I couldn’t believe how good they turned out, I made them over and over again. This is a recipe any person who avoids bacon, or meat, should have in their repertoire. The only downside is that a pound of mushrooms, once the stems are removed, and the caps are cooked, turn into maybe a cup of crunchies. At the lowest price I’ve found for fresh shiitake, that’s much steeper than the price of even good bacon.

Recipe: Roasted Shiitake Bacon

Recipe originally found on WholeLiving.com

• 1/2 to 1lb fresh shiitake mushroom caps, sliced
• 1 tbs olive oil
• light sprinkle of course salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 degress. 
2. Spread mushroom slices on an oiled pan. A glass or pyrex pan cooks more slowly, a metal pan cooks more quickly. I found I liked the way they came out better on the glass pan, but they took a lot more time to crisp. 
3. Allow to roast uncovered, tossing every 10 minutes, until dry, crisp, and not burnt. The first few times you check on them, they may not seem like they will ever become crispy, but have patience. The process can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on the amount of mushrooms, and the kind of pan. 
4. Once removed from the oven, allow to cool. 

Enjoy anywhere you might include bacon. And even more places. Since these were more like crumbles than slices, we put them on salads, wraps, on pizza, in macaroni and cheese, and crunched as a snack. The only place they didn’t really work was as a soup topping, as they became soggy pretty quickly.

Hey! When you’re chopping up the mushrooms, don’t throw away the stems! They are full of flavor, even if the texture is unpleasant. Clean them off and use them to make a mushroom or vegetable stock. I just save them in a large zip-top bag in the freezer until I have enough to make a large pot.

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White Bean salad, spread, or dip

Sometimes you have to admit that, no matter how hard you try to prove otherwise, you are wrong. Right on the heels of my last post about how great dried beans are, I have to take it back – at least partially. Dried beans can be great. Just not if you’re as absent-minded as me. And not if you need them right now.

I was going to write this whole post about how, now that you’ve got your pantry stocked with dried beans, you should try to enjoy them in something summery instead of the usual types of heavy bean dishes one thinks of. Well, there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of summer bean recipes that use dried beans. They are really winter ingredients, for when you don’t have as much fresh anything around. They take a long time to cook and, if you’re me, they burn if you aren’t paying close enough attention.

But however you get your white beans into a soft enough state for this dish, do it. It is delightful. It’s a great lunch or side, or even dinner for one or two. I make it when I want something quiet. The flavors are nothing to write home about, but this dish can be perfectly satisfying to snack on while doing something else. I also make this when I find it hard to rustle up an appetite for a full meal, or anything too rich. And hey, if you do repeatedly burn them (like me), you get a nice smoky flavor on the non-burnt beans.

This dish is simple, though it requires some advance planning to be able to use dried beans. The beans will need to soak, be cooked, and then the mixture should marinate so that the flavors permeate the beans.  In a pinch, a can of small white beans will also do – just rinse and add the rest of the ingredients (see step 4 and on, below). The dried beans have a much better texture and flavor, but make the dish much more complicated, so it is a trade-off.

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Dilly Potatoes

August went by quickly. I took a vacation with family, and it ended up being a “vacation” from this site as well. It has not, however, been a vacation from cooking. In fact, as the summer has been winding down, I’ve been experimenting with entirely new techniques to add to my repertoire. Expect more to come on those soon!

I’ve been cooking with dill a lot lately. It all started with an experiment I have been planning to write about for some time. A bunch of dill, while not too pricey in my neck of the woods, is large. I split a bunch with a friend and I still had more fresh dill than I knew what to do with. After using as much of it as I could in my mysterious experiments, I still had plenty left for a fresh batch of tzatziki  sauce. I only used the fuzzy little leaves in the sauce, but I didn’t want to throw away the stems. I took a taste of one and the dilly flavor was intense. I just couldn’t throw away such flavorful stems, so I reserved them until I could figure out what to do with them.

The day, shortly after, when tiny red potatoes were on sale.  I thought of the dill stems and came up with this simple dish to make the most of the flavor. Since the recipe is so simple, I’m not going to post amounts, just general guidelines.

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Being Gluten-Free and the Benefits of Whole Grains

To be honest, I, like many people, have often been confused by “gluten-free” labels on many products. For one, I had no idea what gluten was. Two, why would someone need to be free of it? I know several people who cannot eat gluten because of Celiac’s Disease, but the gluten-free labels on products these days sort of seemed fadish. A friend of mine had started a “gluten-free” diet when she was trying to lose weight. Since I do not believe in weight-loss diets (just simple well-rounded, moderated, healthy eating all the time), I found myself moved to find out what gluten is and what benefits exist in leaving it out.

These questions have stayed with me for some time and I still haven’t found answers. Though I know that some people truly need to keep their diets free of gluten because of the digestive issues it causes them, it’s hard for me to believe that this disease is so prevalent as to create the buzz I am often hearing about it. Don’t get me wrong, gluten-free restaurants and product lines are great for the people who need them, but is there a reason for someone who doesn’t to patronize them? Please, someone who knows more about this inform me, because it baffles me.

Emily over at Dragonfly: Tales from the Phantom Rickshaw just wrote an interesting post on her family’s reasons for being gluten-free (and dairy-free) and how they did it. She also sprinkles in some interesting points about generally maintaining nutritional value through using unrefined sugars, and fresher, uncracked grains. I learned a lot, and if you are confused about these things as I am, check out her “Gluten-Free Brain Dump,” parts 1, 2, 3 and 4. The last part is especially interesting as it includes her recipe for rice milk and its uses. I think I might try this soon, as rice milk is just plain delicious, and sometimes my stomach is just happier if I avoid dairy.

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