Tag: Mushroom

Mushroom cappucino

I hope you realise how lucky you are to have me. How hard I work on your behalf. Do you know how much washing up there is involved in this little jig? I mean, I could just eat takeaway every night but I don’t. I slaaaave away! Over a stove! Barefoot and pregnant! Just so you don’t make a mess of recipes.

This is the sort of mood I’m in at the moment. Vile. Self-pitying. Martyrish. Rather than just doing whatever it takes to keep myself in a decent mood, I am tiring myself out, trying to do certain things, tick certain boxes and then snapping at everyone because I have run myself ragged or not had a nice time.

I’ve got to stop this. That way misery and divorce lies. I realised at some point last year that if you are a wife and mother, you control the mood in your house. It’s not your husband, or your child, it’s you. If you are in a rat, everyone suffers; if you are depressed, everyone suffers. Happy wife, goes the saying, happy life.

Take yesterday. I decided on a whim to cook a three-course meal for my husband from things picked out of Celebrate, by Pippa Middleton. They all looked tasty to me and I haven’t been doing many new things recently, so I thought I would. The menu went as follows:

Mushroom cappucino
Gravadlax
Raspberry souffle

P-Mid did not, I ought to point out, put this menu together herself – these are just things I picked at random to make up a dinner.

And I ran myself absolutely flipping ragged doing it. By 8.30pm I was basically asleep on the sofa but hadn’t yet finished the raspberry souffle, which was unbelievably complicated (although in the end a terrific success).

Anyway I recommend each of these dishes to you individually, (my husband said he had never eaten such good food in a domestic kitchen before, which makes rather a mockery of the last five years), but maybe don’t do them altogether.

It would be too much to post all three recipes here, so I’ll do each one in turn. Today it’s mushroom cappucino, which is basically a little cup of delicious mushroom soup garnished with a froth. Giles says this is very early Nineties – Gordon Ramsay invented the soup cappucino apparently. But in 1993 I still hadn’t been to a restaurant that wasn’t McDonald’s, so it all rather passed me by.

Generally-speaking I don’t like soup, but what I mean by that is that I don’t like a huge bowl of sloppy soup that you have to plough through. I’m always delighted with a little shot-glass amuse bouche of incredibly tasty soup that you gulp in one or two goes and go “yum yum”. So this is what this is.

Mushroom cappucino
Serves 6

300g mixed mushrooms – chestnut/portobello mushrooms, for example
300ml milk
100ml double cream
dried mushrooms – wild or portobello or whatever
1 pint chicken stock
salt and pepper
4 spring onions
1 large clove garlic
butter and oil for frying
salt and pepper

1 Wash and roughly chop the mushrooms and spring onions. Melt about 40g butter with 2 tbsp groundut oil in a large pan and then sautee the mushrooms, spring onions and sliced garlic very hot for 4 minutes. Keep an eye on the time and keep everything moving around the pan. You do not want the garlic to catch and burn because it will taste filthy.

2 Now pour over the chicken stock and bring it all to a simmer for a minute.

3 Blend this however you can – with a stick blender or in a whizzer or whatever. Add 200ml milk, a long sloop of double cream and then season generously with salt and pepper.

4 To make your sprinkles, grind a palmful of dried mushrooms with a pinch of salt and about 10 turns of the pepper grinder in a peste and mortar if you have one. If not, you could probably just about get it all chopped up in a whizzer.

5 To serve put a ladleful of soup in a cup, topped with the froth off some frothed milk and a sprinkling of your dried mushroom powder.

To froth your milk, put about 100 ml in a pan and heat it gently then using one of those stick frother things, froth the milk in the pan over the heat. You will probably have to hold the pan at an angle and heat the cornered milk up over the flame.

(I am grateful to my sister Harriet for this tip as I had always tried to froth milk just heated up in the microwave and it doesn’t work – at least, you don’t get a foam.)

If you don’t have a stick frother thingy, it’s perfectly okay to just drizzle on top of the soup some more double cream and add your sprinkles to that. I’m sure you could still call it a mushroom cappucino. I won’t tell Gordon.

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Turkey roll

As Christmas gets ever closer, if you haven’t got your food sorted, there’s no need to panic – it might be time to cheat! And cheating doesn’t mean poorer quality when you buy from Tesco’s Finest range. Don’t spend time fiddling around with bacon and sausages – buy your pigs already in blankets! Roasties can be hit and miss – make sure yours are always a hit with Finest Goose Fat Roast Potatoes or follow our easy recipe. Add Christmas cake, pud and mince pies to your shopping list and make sure you keep our roast turkey with olde English chestnut stuffing recipe handy and you’re all set for the big day. Happy Christmas! Nichola Palmer – Recipes Editor, goodtoknow

A delicious, moist and tender beef fillet wrapped in crusty puff pastry. A red wine sauce accompanies the beef. Great for Sunday lunch or dinner celebrations

Serves: 12
Prep time: 45 mins
Cooking time: 1 hr 20 mins
Total time: 2 hrs 5 mins
Skill level: Bit of effort
Costs: Mid-price

Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1-1.5kg (2¼-3lb) beef fillet
60g (2oz) butter
2 shallots, peeled and chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
250g (8oz) chestnut mushrooms, finely chopped
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme leaves
250g tub mascarpone cheese
2 tbs wholegrain mustard
2 x 80g packs Parma ham
375g packet ready-rolled puff pastry
1 medium egg, beaten

For the sauce:

2 tbs olive oil
350g (12oz) shallots, peeled and chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
3 tbs tomato purée
2 tbs balsamic vinegar
200ml (7fl oz) red wine
300ml (½ pint) hot beef stock

This recipe is a great idea for an alternative to turkey for Christmas dinner.

Season beef well. Heat 30g (1oz) butter in a large frying pan over a medium heat and, when foaming, put the fillet in pan and brown it all over for 4-5 mins, taking care not to let the butter burn. Cool meat, and cover.
Meanwhile, melt rest of butter in the pan, add the chopped shallots and cook for 1 min. Add the garlic, mushrooms and thyme and fry for a few mins.
Beat the mascarpone with the mustard until smooth. Mix in mushroom mixture. Season.
Lay half the Parma ham slices on a large piece of cling film with slices overlapping. Spread half the mushroom mixture on one side of the beef, then turn it over on top of the Parma ham. Spread rest of mushroom mixture over top and sides of beef, then wrap the rest of the Parma ham slices round, overlapping on top of the mushroom mixture. Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge.
Heat the oven to Gas Mark 7 or 220°C. Unroll the pastry and cut off a third. Roll out the smaller piece to 5mm (¼in) thickness and 2.5cm (1in) bigger than the beef. Prick several times with a fork. Transfer to a baking sheet and bake for 12-15 mins or until brown and crisp. Allow to cool for a few mins, then trim to the size of the beef. Remove the cling film from the beef and place on the cooked pastry, brushing pastry edges with egg.
Roll out the rest of the pastry to a rectangle 25 x 30cm (10 x 12in). Cut 10 diagonal slashes in the pastry. Cover the beef with the pastry, tucking the ends under the cooked pastry base. Brush with beaten egg. Cook on a baking sheet for 40 mins for rare to medium-rare; 45 mins for medium. Leave to stand for 10 mins before serving.
For the red wine sauce: Heat the olive oil in a pan, and fry shallots until soft, about 10 mins. Add garlic and tomato purée and cook for 1 min, then add the balsamic vinegar. Bubble for 1 min, before adding red wine. Continue to boil for a few mins to reduce, then add the beef stock and boil for 10 mins more until reduced by a third. Serve with the beef. Freeze unbaked. Defrost overnight in the fridge. Cook as above.

By Woman’s Weekly

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