I love button mushrooms
Did you think I was going to go away after one newsletter? LOL. Today I'd like to explain my crush on white button mushrooms. To do that, I need to tell you a story about the friendship between Alice Waters and Marion Cunningham. Alice Waters, as you probably know, started Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., and, basically, is the reason we can buy local, organic produce almost everywhere. Marion Cunningham was James Beard's longtime assistant, a cookbook author and a champion of the home cook. Her target audience was people who thought that when a recipe says to toss apples in a bowl, they should stand across the room like cornhole players. Marion brought James to Chez Panisse in 1974 and insisted the two meet. He wrote about it. It became famous. Marion loved heavy heads of iceberg lettuce from the grocery store. This, as you can imagine, frustrated Alice. That kind of lettuce, Alice told me, symbolizes all that is wrong with modern American food production: "It's omnipresent. It doesn't have a season. It doesn't have a sense of place." One year, Alice gave Marion little heads of crisp lettuce grown from French seeds as a birthday present. She knew Marion was clinging to a taste and a texture she remembered from childhood. Marion was moved, but her stand on iceberg wasn't. "All you have to do is eat at Chez Panisse and you know you aren't doing it right," she told me when I was a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. "But iceberg is meaningful to me. Alice has tried to reform my eating and buying habits in very tactful ways, but somehow I haven't changed very well." That's me and white button mushrooms. I have foraged chanterelles and reconstituted shiitakes and once found a morel in Alaska as big as my hand. But nothing compares to the smell of button mushrooms browning in butter, or the juiciness of a hot mushroom cap filled with cheese and breadcrumbs. I just sliced a pound of them into this stew of eggplant and caramelized onion that my colleague Yewande Komolafe created as a vegan version of the Senegalese sauce yassa. Heat comes from a whole scotch bonnet pepper you pierce with the tip of a knife and simmer with the eggplant. The juice of a lime and a tablespoon of Dijon stirred in at the end provide character. I put a fried egg on the leftovers for lunch, which I 10 out of 10 recommend. Featured Recipe Mushroom and Eggplant YassaIf that's not on the agenda, please honor my button mushroom relationship with this simple dish of mushrooms on toast from David Tanis (who, just to neatly tie all of this up, spent years cooking with Alice at Chez Panisse and now leads the kitchen at Lulu, their restaurant in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.) I've got a few peaches left that aren't exactly in peak form, and they'll be put to good use in yet another excellent chicken dinner from Melissa Clark. (Is there anything she can't do?) You brush the peaches with a mix of honey, butter and thyme, which has my vote as the best throuple in a recipe. And she uses good balsamic vinegar punched up with ginger to make the thighs all sticky and sweet against the char. While you have the grill out, consider putting your cast iron on the grates and trying Kenji López-Alt's Oklahoma onion burgers. I make these a lot, and not everyone I live with appreciates that the luscious aroma of seared beef and browned onion hangs in the kitchen air for some time. His outdoor method, which is outlined at the end of the recipe, is a solution. At this point, you probably want a salad. Let me now tell you about the dressing voted most likely to live in my refrigerator. It's part of the recipe for the "super happy salad" Samin Nosrat got from Jody Williams and Rita Sodi at Via Carota in the West Village. Little things make the difference here: the minced shallots get a little rinse under cold water to remove their harshest bite; a tablespoon of warm water mellows the sherry vinegar; and grainy and Dijon mustards add character. Lastly, if you know me, you know I argue for cake's superiority to pie. (No one ever tried to break someone out of jail with a pie, friends.) The classic white cake of my dreams comes from Yossy Arefi. It requires a baker's attention. The batter uses only egg whites, and she asks you to execute the reverse cream maneuver, which is a favorite of the baking authority Rose Levy Beranbaum. You cut the hard fat into the flour first, sort of as if you were making biscuits. I want to remind you that we have a gajillion more recipes to cook on New York Times Cooking. You need a subscription to read them because we pay people to test and retest the recipes and make pretty photographs of them and assemble it all inside of the app and clean the kitchen and edit my writing. Should I go on? No, I shouldn't. Consider subscribing today. We thank you. If our technology is vexing you or acting buggy, get in contact with cookingcare@nytimes.com. If someone doesn't get back to you, then come to me and I will fight for you: severson@nytimes.com. My last gig subbing in for Sam is Sunday. There are still plenty of tickets left.
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Friday, August 23, 2024
I just really love button mushrooms
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