Oyster Mushrooms

So the oyster mushrooms.  They were a total impulse buy.  They looked super interesting and happened to be in season.  I decided to cook with Bryan because Brooks hates mushrooms. We ended up making an oyster cream sauce with chicken and pasta.  Bryan had already taken the chicken breasts out, so we just decided to use it. The chicken we simply sprayed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper. We baked the chicken at 350 degrees until the thermometer showed 165 internal temperature at the thickest part of the breasts.  The chicken we then sliced into strips, as you can see to the right.  The sauce was a bit more complicated.

I had only bought about half the mushrooms that we needed for the recipe, so I ran to the store and bought an additional thing of shiitake mushrooms.  When I say a "thing" of mushrooms, I mean the pre-packed, saran wrapped mushrooms that come in the blue boxes. Also, when I say recipe, I mean I totally made it up. I looked up about 10 different recipes and just got the general ingredients, then used my own estimations.  Here are the ingredients we used:

2 TBSP olive oil
5 Shallots, diced
3 cloves garlic, chopped
About 16 oz mushrooms, 8 oz oyster, 8 oz shiitake
2 cups white cooking wine
16 oz can low sodium chicken stock
2 cups heavy cream
1 lb pasta

Start by boiling the water and cooking the pasta to however you want.  I had some leftover gluten free pasta that I rejuvenated by microwaving it with a few tablespoons of water.  Gluten free pasta gets very hard and brittle when left over, so adding the water put some moisture back into it.  When your pasta is done, set it aside.  We kept ours in the microwave to keep it semi warm.  Start the sauce by heating the olive oil in a pot.  We used a pot big enough to hold the pasta and all the liquids.  When the oil is heated, add the shallots and garlic.  Cook until just tender.  We cooked them about 5 minutes over medium-high heat.  Add the mushrooms and cook until about halfway done.  (The doneness here is all dependent on how soft you want your mushrooms.  We cooked them 5 minutes and they were just barely softened. They will cook the rest of the way when the liquids are added.)  After your mushrooms are to your liking, add the white cooking wine.  Let this boil until it is almost completely evaporated.  We had about a tablespoon of liquid left in the bottom of the pot.  Make sure to stir the mushrooms and wine frequently so they don't start to stick to the bottom.  After the wine is evaporated, pour in the chicken stock.  We let this reduce by half.  That took almost 10 minutes.  After it was reduced, we added in the cream and let it boil until the desired thickness was reached.  The recipes we read said it would be thick enough when the back of the spoon was coated.  The finished sauce is pictured above and to the left.  It had a nice wine taste, without the alcohol content.  The mushrooms also made it super hearty and meaty feeling.  I could have easily eaten this as a meatless dish!

Bryan also had leftover sourdough bread that was getting stale.  He made it into garlic bread.  He melted 1.5 sticks of butter with 4 cloves of smashed garlic.  I made him add some parsley flakes for color.  He cut the bread in half and poured the butter over.  After sprinkling on parmesan cheese, the bread was baked for 7 minutes at 350 degrees, until the cheese was brown and delicious looking. The baked bread is pictured to the right! I ended up eating some of this bread, causing major joint and stomach pain the next day.

Bryan and I ended up plating our pasta over a bed of spinach.  This added some color as well as some nutritional values.  We put the spinach on the plate, put the pasta on top, added the chicken, and poured the sauce on top.  The chicken ended up being a bit over salted, while the sauce was under seasoned.  They balanced each other out well.  The raw spinach wilted just a bit, which created a great texture contrast.  We also added too much liquid, and ended up reducing it further to boil out some of the liquid.  I would recommend only adding 12 oz chicken stock and 1.5 cups of cream.  Overall, this was a fun experiment we did, and we essentially created our own recipes.  So cool!