a shortcut to mushrooms
fun guys, a new fave soup, and the jar wars
Over the summer I started teaching myself how to knit, and since then I have made 2 dishcloths— one horribly misshapen and one somewhat closer to normal. After practicing stockinette with leftover yarn and buying myself some circular needles, I’m now working on my first hat! One cool thing about knitting is it gives you an excuse to watch some tv you’ve already seen so that you have something to do while you knit, and with this project I started Star Trek: The Next Generation from the beginning. I’ve seen plenty of episodes over the years but have never watched the series all the way through, so this is exciting! Everyone says the first season is the absolute worst, but I kind of like getting to know the characters and their universe in a clumsy way (even if it did mean being subjected to “Hide and Q”).
I used to believe I “couldn’t cook”, so I let others do it for me, or did some bare-bones frying of vegetables with pre-made sauces for stir fries or pasta. Mostly I ate a lot of sandwiches. I didn’t really know what I was doing yet, and I didn’t know how to get to a place where I did. It took me forever to chop vegetables, so I hated doing it. I didn’t know when to add the garlic, so it always got burnt. I had no idea what spices would work for what dishes, so I always used the same handful of things. Watching other people make food it always seemed like there was some inherent knowledge that was missing for me… but the reality is that you just have to want to be good at it, and keep learning. Like anything, it gets better with practice, and easier too. Vegetable prep that took me 40 minutes 8 years ago now takes 15. I look at recipes for guidance, but feel no hesitation about using a different method or ingredient I feel will work better.
It’s always been hard for me to keep going with things if I’m not reasonably good at them right away, so taking up knitting has been a huge personal challenge: it’s literally impossible to get into it and have it be easy right away. But it’s been so rewarding to go from something making no sense to it being something I can do with half my attention while watching Riker and Troi have awkward feelings time. I find it incredible the way our brains can continually add new skills and knowledge (shouldn’t it be full at this point?)— so if you’ve felt disheartened with your cooking, just compare season 1 of TNG with season 5. It’s the same show, but it’s better now! I’ve been in both places. You can get there.
You may recall that last month, a friend of mine organized a vegan soup swap. One of the soups I received was Hungarian mushroom, which I’d never had before or even heard of, but I absolutely loved it. So when chanterelles showed up in my produce bin again, I decided not to make mushroom risotto a third time, and went for this instead. I considered asking the soup maker for the recipe, but since she’d confessed she just searched for one on the internet, I decided to do the same and see what came up. All the top results had similar lists of ingredients, but I settled on this one, which seems to have been borne of doing just what I was doing: perusing the internet for a consensus on the recipe. There’s a fair bit of dairy involved, but I used all vegan versions (Earth Balance, soy milk, Tofutti sour cream) to great effect. I also used a vegetarian chicken bouillon, which made for a rich, savoury base, but I’m sure mushroom or vegetable broth would be good too.
The most important element to pay attention to with this soup is the paprika: use a deep red Hungarian one to get the intended flavour profile. Compared with domestic paprika (the one that just says ‘paprika’ on the label with no qualifiers), Hungarian will be sweeter and more pungent. You also definitely don’t want one that’s labelled as ‘smoked’ or ‘hot’ for this soup. My ratio of white mushrooms to chanterelles was about 2:1, but pretty much any meaty mushroom will be good, so no need to break the bank buying loads of wild mushrooms if you don’t want to. I added thyme and some garlic with the initial spice roux and some white wine vinegar at the end in addition to the lemon, which helped balance the acidity and complement the flavour of the mushrooms. This was an uncommonly delicious soup: richly textured, creamy, tangy, comforting. It might dethrone my trusty cream of mushroom recipe as my new favourite fall soup.
On Monday, I came home from work and spent over an hour mucking about on the internet, safe in the knowledge that the dinner I’d planned would only take 20 minutes to make. Unfortunately, this assumes you remembered to put brown rice in the rice cooker when you got home, so at 6:45 when I realized I’d neglected to do this, I had to scrap that plan and make something else. I was annoyed because I make my meal plans around what’s going to go bad in my fridge first and this throws everything out of whack, but on the plus side, it meant I could eat some spaghetti. I put a pot of water on to boil and pulled a container of pasta sauce from the freezer, thanking my past self. The sauce was made in September, when I had too much free time and too much fresh produce (such things seem impossibly far away now…). It’s unfancy but incredibly tasty: all you do is roast a bunch of vegetables on a sheet pan and throw it all in the food processor with some tomato paste and basil.
Obviously the tomatoes are the main component— I used romas and peeled them after, but any tomato will work and mini ones don’t need to be peeled— but onions, mushrooms, and garlic add a lot of flavour. I also used a banana pepper from our friends’ garden haul, and a few sprigs of fresh thyme and oregano. The spice level was great and the mushrooms provided a nice earthiness that is so welcome on a rainy November night. This meal reminded me a bit of being 18 and having just moved out, when “making dinner” meant opening a jar of pasta sauce and heating it up in the pasta pot while the noodles were draining… but in a not sad way.
I’m sure you all know about saving pasta water to make or thin out sauces (very important for a thick sauce like this, especially after it’s been in the freezer), but do you know about saving pasta water for your leftovers? This was a game changer for me. Pasta leftovers tend to get kind of dry and pasty, as the pasta tends to absorb the liquid from the sauce when you heat it up again. But tossing a couple tablespoons of pasta water into the bowl before reheating goes a long way in terms of giving the sauce its consistency back without diluting the flavour. The pasta texture still won’t be exactly the same as it was the night you made it, but it’ll make for a much more palatable lunch the next day, I promise.
Mushrooms became a theme this week— I had a couple of apple bangers left after we opened the packet on the weekend, and I chose a mushroom and sausage stew to put them to good use. The recipe comes from Isa Does It, so it was originally vegan, using seitan sausage. I’ve made it both ways and it’s delicious no matter what (if you’re not making your own seitan, I’m a fan of the Field Roast bratwurst or Gusta Germaine sausages for this stew). The recipe also uses dried mushrooms, which I’ve mentioned that I like to keep in the pantry because they have all the flavour of fresh mushrooms without having to remember to use them before they get slimy.
This, to me, evokes the feeling of the quintessential British pub stew: wooden floors and tables, wide leather chairs, a crackling fireplace, pints of beer spilling onto stained coasters, and a hearty bowl of winter vegetables in dark gravy. Thyme, fennel, and rosemary make it taste the way you always wanted those canned stews from the grocery store to taste, and a red wine base for the gravy provides richness and acidity. I also love the different textures, with chewy mushrooms and sausage, creamy potatoes and onions, and more solid pieces of carrot. I bet this would make a good pot pie filling, too, if you cut everything a little smaller and added some peas. Foods like this may not have the looks, but they make up for it in pure, delicious comfort.
Also this week: a quick pan of salted brownies that came out not as chocolatey as I might have hoped (I only had semi-sweet chocolate, not unsweetened) but still fudgy with nice crisp edges and good enough for me to eat three in one day. Wednesday I was grumpy and headachy and ate a chili cheese dog provided by my roommate for dinner instead of cooking what was on my meal plan, so in a feat of pure strength, I made that dinner for lunch the following day. Pan-fried tofu and broccoli with kale, brown rice, and curried peanut sauce leftover from last week. Peanut sauce: definitely one of the best ways to make a bowl of healthy food taste like an amazing treat.
Media:
If you too are a home preserves maker, you probably also noticed it was next to impossible to buy new jars this summer. This Marker piece by Jen Doll dissects the nationwide shortage, and I found it fascinating. The author talks about the history of canning jars and how they reflect what’s happening in our society. You might remember in the early to mid-2010s when mason jars were everywhere, seemingly for every purpose except canning— carrying a salad to work, making candle holders for weddings, painting to use as home decor, putting a special lid on for your iced coffee, and so on. It’s usually not difficult for suppliers to keep up with the demand for new jars, because jars are reusable, and the subset of habitual home canners are a fairly stable market. So in a time of abundance, jar makers tried to appeal to people’s desires in ways other than preserving your own food: sustainability, creativity, a rustic sense of luxury.
But in times where people’s sense of social and financial safety is threatened, that fear is evident in the growth of the market for home canning jars:
“This pattern happened in the Great Depression and World War II, when canning surged and there were mason jar sales spikes and lid shortages; again during the back-to-the land movement in the 1970s and ’80s; and again as people prepared for the Y2K disaster that never came. Now, in a time of pandemic, employment upheaval, political turmoil, a growing distrust in our established systems, the jars are once again in high demand.
In other words, there may be no better barometer of the state of our economy than the mason jar.”
I’ve been canning for some time, and although I go through years where I do a lot and years where I only do a little, at least a couple times every summer I’ll end up with too much of something and go, “ok, I guess I’ll pickle that.” This year, between being unemployed and having a flourishing garden, I did a lot. I was doing fine with the jars I had until late August, when I ran out of the 500ml size and asked Jeff to pick some up for me while he was out, and he went to three stores with no luck. No stores listed them in stock, and opportunists on FB Marketplace and Amazon were attempting to sell them for three (or more!) times the usual price. I gave up and canned sauces in 250ml jars, and resigned myself to not making any more pickles. But when we found a full, unopened flat of 500ml Ball jars at the thrift store for $9 last month, you know I couldn’t leave without it. I may not be making anything right now, but our future feels so uncertain at the moment… whether I use them for canning next year or for bartering in our apocalyptic society remains to be seen.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please pass it along to someone new! If you’d like to send me a little gift for my birthday next weekend, you can find my wishlist here and my paypal here. Thank you so much to those of you who’ve already sent something! I really appreciate the love in these isolated times.
In closing, here is a very short (SFW) video featuring whipped cream.