Mushroom mushroom!

Many fine treasures do grow in the forest
For those who have eyes and the knowledge to see.With little but patience and feet who will carry:
A fearsome, bold warrior you need not be.

But you must be humble if you wish to find them:
Refuse not to kneel nor to look at your feet;

You find not the treasure commanding and shouting,
But bend your head down and soon you will eat.

Remember the good ones but fear not the poison;
All that you need is to trust in your head:

A knife and a basket, a friend and a forest:
A Hobbit with Mushrooms is a Hobbit well fed.

(Hobbit mushroom poem by me, on Laurelin Archives)

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Bento #350

Is this a real pie? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a hunger dream, got no key for the pantry!
Open your eyes, just grab a slice and see…
I’m a poor Hobbit, I need pie regularly…
A little apple pie, cherry pie, mushroom pie, berry pie…
Any flavour really, it doesn’t really matter, to me, to me.

Um, I mean with summer almost gone and having let myself go a little by eating out way too much, I thought I’d get back into making bentos. Also, Chanterelles are in season again! Yay!
So I made a bunch of mushroom pie for freezing, and loaded up the lunchbox with some mixed lettuces, cherry tomatoes and a nasturtium flower.

Edit: Since so many asked, here’s the recipe I used (I mostly just winged it but here we go). It’s such a common thing to get here in Sweden I never thought anyone would be interested!

I made 2 big and one small pie, but I will adjust the sizes to about what I used for one of the big ones.
1 pie crust (I made my usual graham pie crust, in a pan about 24cm in diameter and 3cm high)
1 big handful (ca. 70g?) of mushrooms, cut into not-too-small pieces
1/2 (small) red onion, chopped
2 eggs
Olive oil or butter, dash of white wine, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper
Start with preheating the oven to 200 degrees Celsius (or if you have just blind baked your pie crusts, it will still be warm).
I asked the BF if I should pre-fry the stuffing and he enthusiastically agreed. Fried mushrooms just taste better! Also, they will no longer lose water when they are stuffed in the pie.
So I started with glazing the red onion in a pan with the butter and a little garlic, then added the mushrooms, parsley, salt and pepper. When they started to let out their water, I added the dash of white wine, took them off the heat and stirred in the eggs, then poured the whole mixture into the pie shell. It took about 15-20 minutes to bake in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius. Since it starts out warm this is quite quick!

“Ode to a stolen pie” is by me, made for a RP character.

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A lazy cheater’s Chanterelle Gnocchi

OK, when I said I was going to post a complete recipe I lied – I still haven’t gotten over my respect for making gnocchi myself, so those are of the storebought “fresh” variant. But the final dish is so infused with the delicious flavour of chanterelles I didn’t want to keep it from you!
It’s just to my taste – simple and lazy, but with a fantastic final result.

Here are the mushrooms in their glorious yellow goodness. I cleaned them – you shouldn’t really clean mushrooms under running water, but those were full of moss and pine needles and associated things, and needed to be cleaned. Since I was going to use them immediately, I didn’t bother about it too much. There’s also a red onion, already chopped, a clove of garlic and about half a cup of chopped parsley.

I started by frying the onion and garlic in some chili oil (you can also use butter) until it was soft and translucent. Taking some time seems to really be worth a lot in this dish – I am usually all about getting things done quick but the flavour gets better here if you really get everything timed correctly.
The next step was to fry the parsley a little, and then add the chanterelles, salt and pepper.

At this point, I started to warm the lazy gnocchi: I emptied the bag into a sieve, hung the sieve in a pot on the warm stove, and poured boiling water on it, leaving them to steam for another minute.
I also added 1/2-1 cup of cream to the pan to infuse it with the mushroom taste.

I love gnocchi for their ability to really soak up sauces and flavours, much better than pasta. Therefore, just pouring the sauce over them would be wrong. They have to go in the pan and finish cooking with the sauce! Since they’re pre-made it takes about 2 more minutes, just enough to set the table and pour the wine. Perfect!
Aah… it’s good to be lazy…

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