fortification fridays - gyro-stuffed mushrooms

Mr. Reluctant is a big fan of stuffed mushrooms, but I find them bland. In my new zest for chopping up things that normally make classic dishes and reassembling them in new vessels, I invented a new stuffing. It's based on the Greek pita sandwich gyros, and it is made of ground lamb, garlic, pine nuts and other good things. To add a bit of summery cool tang, you should top these off with a dollop of tzatziki, a garlicky yogurt cucumber sauce. They keep for a few hours at room temperature, but add the sauce just before serving.

This recipe is a bit more complex than my usual style, but it's worth it. Martha Stewart provided the technique for pre-cooking the mushroom vessels (I believe her recipe is called "Golden Mushroom Caps" in her hors d'oeuvres book.) Removing as much liquid as possible is crucial, and her method makes for dripless mushrooms. I'm also indebted to Cook's Illustrated for the recent recipe for making gyros at home, which provided me with the inspiration to make the stuffing.

Gyro-Stuffed Mushrooms with Dollops of Tzatziki

Kitchen needs: broiler or oven to brown tops of mushrooms, range to brown meat, food processor
Serves: 8-10 as an appetizer

24 large white mushrooms
olive oil
1 piece pita bread
1/4 cup milk
5-6 cloves garlic
1 cup plain whole milk Greek yogurt (if you use the American kind, you'll need to drain it overnight because it must be thick like sour cream)
1/4 firm cucumber, grated
1 lb. ground lamb (don't use hamburger, you need the flavor)
2 shallots or a few tablespoons of red onion
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts
juice from 1/2 lemon
fresh oregano
fresh mint
fresh parsley
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Tear pita bread into pieces and soak in a small bowl with milk to cover.

For Dollops of Tzatziki: grate cucumber using a box grater. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible, place in small bowl, then salt with about 1/2 t. salt and let sit to remove more water. After 15 minutes or so, squeeze again and blot with paper towels. Mix together salted cucumber bits, yogurt, a few tablespoons of chopped mint, and a large clove of garlic, pressed in a press. Refrigerate until immediately prior to serving.


Scoop out stems from mushrooms with a small spoon make pretty vessels. Be careful not to break the sides. Chop mushroom stems and set aside in bowl. Rub baking sheet and mushrooms with olive oil (you could use a brush, but I just use my hands). Bake, cap-side up, for 7-10 minutes. (But I messed up and did cap-side down, to no great harm). Mushrooms will turn golden and will exude liquid when they are ready.

While you are baking the mushroom caps, brown ground lamb in olive oil on medium high heat . Add chopped mushroom stems, 4-5 cloves chopped garlic and a couple of chopped shallots after cooking meat for a few minutes. When nice and brown, remove from heat and add salt and pepper.

In a large food processor, pulse the soaked bread and the meat mixture to combine. Don't turn it into a paste; you just want it smushed together so it will hold. Return to saute pan and add a handful of chopped parsley, a few tablespoons of chopped oregano, lemon juice, and pine nuts.

Remove mushrooms from baking sheet, drain and blot dry as much as possible with paper towels. Return to baking sheet for stuffing.

Preheat oven to broil on high.

Stuff mushroom caps and broil close to the heat source for a few minutes, or until browned and crusty on top. Watch carefully, since they can burn easily.

Serve on a white platter with dollops of tzatziki sauce on top. These hold well, since you've been diligent about liquid removal, so it's ok to let them sit, but add chilled tzatziki only immediately prior to serving. If you're fancy, garnish each mushroom with an oregano leaf.

I'd imagine this stuffing would also be good stuffed in tomatoes or peppers.

a must-have

If you don't have one of these upright sweeper sets, you must drop that drywall sander and run out to the store to purchase one. What with all the dirt you're making, you'll need it. I've spent my whole life bending down and sticking my face into little clouds of dust to sweep into a traditional dustpan. This set eliminates the need to bend. Hurrah!

The image above is a Casabella Duck Upright Sweep Set, which seems to be available everywhere from The Container Store to Cost Plus to amazon.com. It's the one I have (but mine is blue), and I recommend it. But if you find another one you like better, snag it.

Mr. Reluctant is off for several weeks, so I've decided that to stay on track and unlonely, I'm going to make myself do house projects and work projects each day, even though I'd rather mope around looking at LOLcats all day and eating potato chips. So far, I've already planted grass seed on the bare spots in the lawn (see picture), gouged my arm disentangling grape vines from the butterfly bush tree, and pinched my upper arm hard when the camera lens retracted suddenly (don't ask). So far, so good. The picture is notable because it represents the first time Mr. Reluctant has ever voluntarily weeded anything on his own. Hence, the bare spots in the lawn that needed seeding. Yes, I know it's the middle of summer, and I don't care. I'm very proud of him.

My projects will include stuff I can manage on my own:

- finish painting the kitchen;
- organize the shed;
- organize the painting materials and the increasingly messy back room;
- paint the laundry room;
- start planning exterior painting (paint the shed as a sample?);
- trim the back hedge (aucuba japonica);
- weed the front area around the house (gulp);
- chop down the wisteria and begin the painful process of removing the underground suckers;
- replace the crappy broken trim on the counter.

there goes the neighborhood?

The little turquoise cottage I mentioned in my blog entry about mid-century vernacular architecture in Eugene is on the market. Two bed, one bath. Only about 950 square feet, but the real estate agent/owner is trying to claim that the "finished" (i.e., not a dirt floor) basement ups the square footage to almost 2000. Um, no. The yard is actually quite nice in the back, with a dramatic terrace effect and mature roses and some overgrown hedges and fruit trees. A gardener could make it really lovely. The kitchen has original cabinetry, first growth Doug fir floors, and it's very, very cute but small. The floors have some condition problems but could be refinished easily (although the kitchen is Doug fir, the rest of the house is in short slat red and white oak, like our floors). The house was built in 1938 (if I remember correctly) and it's a true WWII cottage, with wrap-around windows, a compact footprint, low ceilings, and small rooms. The house itself is adorable but really small, unless you are a couple with no kids and no need for a study. The major down side is that the house is next to the neighborhood convenience store market and restaurant, and the yard abuts the garbage dumpsters for the restaurant. Sure, there are privacy fences, but still. The convenience store is situated on a busy corner of two thoroughfares, and the house doesn't have much of a front yard (see picture). The neighbor on the other side is a house of about the same era that was built too close to the cottage, so the houses look like they're huddling together next to the restaurant parking lot. In short, the location is a dealbreaker.

So how much would you pay for this little gem? If you're not singing to the tune of $325K, you'd be left out in the cold.

Crazy, huh? All I can say is I hope it sells for that, because then my house will be as valuable as the Hope Diamond.

garden update

I'm currently planning my attack on the garden. I gave myself a full year since moving in to see what plants we have and how the sun travels through the yard, and I'm itching to change everything. A neighbor lent us a copy of Ann Lovejoy's Organic Garden Design School, which I'm reading with relish. Ann Lovejoy writes a garden column in a Seattle newspaper and teaches classes on organic gardening in the Pacific Northwest. I'd particularly recommend her books to people who live in the colder parts of the West Coast.

In other garden news, I discovered (sadly) that our butterfly bush tree has purple blooms. What a surprise. The transplanted yucca is doing well on the strip, but I was rather disgusted by the ones I've seen in full bloom. Could that be an uglier flower? Several red and white dahlia (Yokokobe) are growing well in the front yard bed. Being away intermittently for several weeks, however, has taken a toll on my weeding, and I have much work to do in both the front and back. I'm getting better at just pulling out plants without thinking there might be a hope for them, once I've identified them.

The vegetable garden is doing well. The soil really does need work. I kind of regret not putting in raised beds, but I installed a very rudimentary soaker hose irrigation system, and everything looks good. You can see the hoses, the tomatoes, the cucumber hills, the brussells sprouts, and the tiny beans (Maxibel bush and Liana yard-long pole) starting to grow. Ignore the fence. I try to.

fortification fridays - grilled salsa shrimp

It's barbecue time! We recently enjoyed a variation of a recipe we frequently use for grilled shrimp, based on the Cook's Illustrated recipe that appeared in the magazine in 2006. Since we grill vegetables at the same time we grill our main course, we thought we'd combine them in this delicious, lemony, buttery, garlicky sauce. It uses the ingredients in salsa, but is really nothing like fresh salsa. Use jumbo shrimp (16-20 count), the freshest you can find. The recipe below is for a standard charcoal grill (Weber kettle, to be precise), and I'm assuming you have some grill knowledge. See Cook's Illlustrated if you need to adapt the recipe to a gas grill, since I don't have one.

Kitchen needs: charcoal grill, chimney starter
Serves: 4-6 as a main dish



Grilled Salsa Shrimp

2 lbs. raw jumbo shrimp (16-20 count), shelled but with the tail on
2 T. olive oil
1/2 t. red pepper flakes (or paprika, if they are too hot for you)
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 T. butter
1 large lemon, juiced
salt and pepper to taste
about 2 dozen cherry tomatoes
1 green pepper (or pasilla pepper, or red pepper)
cilantro

Heat coals in a chimney starter, then prepare the shrimp skewers and marinade. The shrimp should be shelled and with the tail still on. Place them on the skewers so they are fitted rather tightly into one another, then brush with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper. Skewer the tomatoes, too, and seed and cut the pepper into quarters.

In a large aluminum (disposable) pan, combine red pepper flakes, minced garlic, lemon juice and butter.

When the coals are ready, pile them all on one half of the grill to create a two-level fire. Don't forget to lightly oil the grilling surface. On the "hot" side of the grill, place aluminum pan to melt the butter and cook the garlic a bit. Move to the "cold" side or take off the grill after garlic is golden. Place the shrimp and tomato skewers on the hot side of the grill, and the peppers where they will get charred. Flip shrimp when opaque, about 2/3 of the way through. Flip tomatoes several times so they don't completely burn, but some charring is ok. Turn peppers, too. This procedure will be quite quick from start to finish.

When shrimp is cooked through and tomatoes are charred a bit, add both to aluminum pan, and cook in sauce over "hot" side for a few minutes. Remove peppers and chop into little pieces; add to sauce. Immediately prior to serving, add chopped cilantro, a few more squeezes of lemon, and salt and pepper to taste.

If you have another vegetable side dish, the original recipe (see shrimp in green bowl) is also nice. Just substitute cilantro for parsley and use the same marinade.

let there be light?

We had the electricians come out and fix a minor problem with a GFCI outside on the back porch, so I took the opportunity to ask about other stuff. Looks like it will be an easy matter to install a light on the shed (northeast corner) that will illuminate the otherwise dark backyard, since we already have electricity in the shed. We have a hole drilled for a light to the right of the door (I assume, since I don't think the original use was for a bird house, which was its use until I kicked some feathery ass), but the electrician said a northeast corner light (above the yellow paint sample in the picture) would light up both areas of the yard. Good point, that.

Also easy is installing a new back porch overhead light -- I'm going to tackle that project on my own, now that I know the wires are in good shape. Not quite so easy is pulling a line under the house and through to the front porch, but it's doable. And not super easy at all is disconnecting the fan/light combo and running a separate line for the fan. I think the latter will have to wait for the bathroom remodel.

what lies beneath

So we open up a letter from the city, asking for us to notify them when we have fixed the plumbing issue from our outtake to the alley. A year ago, they reminded us, they noticed that black smoke was billowing out of the broken end cap, and told us it was our responsibility to fix it.

Um. Yeah. Considering we didn't move in until Oct 31, and there was nothing disclosed in the sale transaction, thanks for the letter A YEAR LATER.

We did fix the broken end cap (barely visible next to the black mat in the picture, my fantasy flagstone project that still has not been started), thinking that the crappy POs just knocked it off with a lawn mower and didn't bother to replace it. But billowing black smoke from the sewer? Say it ain't so.

disaster preparedness

Somehow, I lost both my umbrella and my sunglasses. Now I am unprepared for both the 90+ degree weather and the thunderstorms in Texas, where I'll be going tomorrow. I know they are somewhere in one of the drawers. Or boxes. Or bins. Or something. Sigh.

we're pregnant!

No, not like that. Sorry to disappoint. But I've got baby veggies and fruits just bursting from their mama plants: artichokes, peas, fava beans, raspberries and grapes. Pass the cigars...ready or not, here they come!

hell's kitchen

OK, compared to some other kitchens I've seen, it's not really hell's kitchen, but it has been a bummer because of the poor finish work that needed to be addressed before I painted the whole thing. It's come a long way (see last picture with the horrible apple wallpaper border), but there's still miles to go before I sleep.

I had been really dragging my heels. My mom came to visit and lit the proverbial fire under me. I'm amazed by her energy. She not only spent hours digging caulk out of the crack between the counter and the wall (which had clearly been applied with a rusty spoon), she TSPd the ceiling, mudded holes and messed-up parts of the walls, and recaulked the new(ish) kitchen sink, which the plumber had done with clear caulk over a dirty counter (UGH!).

You can see her powerful cleaning action in the picture of the sponge in motion. She can tackle soy sauce explosions and grease on the ceiling like it's no one's business.

The paint colors I'm using in the kitchen are -- as they are in the rest of the house -- Woolskein and Dover White, in Bath Paint (for scrubbitude) by Sherwin Williams.

We still need to work on painting the rest of the room, and doing something with the frustrating window sitch, like ripping the whole damn thing out. Behind that weird panel just above the sink is wooden ventilation slats (louvers? I have no idea how to spell that) which were covered oh-so-elegantly with a piece of plywood.

Isn't that just the prettiest sink caulking job in the whole world? If you remember, we replaced the utilitarian stainless steel sink with uber-heavy enameled cast iron one the plumber "found" for us, via a client who upgraded to who-knows-what because of her new granite counters.

THANKS, MOM!