You have bought or picked some delicious looking mushrooms, Portobello or button, brought them home and now what will you cook?
You don’t have to go to our mushroom cookbook and recipe page (please do, please do … it’s OK, stick right here 😉
There are so many mushroom recipes in non-mushroom recipe books, which is hardly surprising.
I was leafing through one of my old favourites, Carole Handslip’s ‘The Sainsbury Book of Salads’ from 1984 and here we are:
Mushroom and bacon salad. Why mushrooms and bacon go so well together might be a future subject, but for the moment, here we go.
The mushrooms are not cooked in this recipe, so to persuade them to drink up your tasty garlic dressing, slice them thinly.
This salad is one of those which is tastiest when served lukewarm. Pull the mushrooms, sitting in the dressing, from the fridge, a good hour before adding the hot bacon.
When using button mushrooms, I enjoy their taste when raw, so you can also modify the recipe in this way if you are like-minded. Slice or chop your mushrooms, fry your chopped smoky bacon until crispy. Using a slotted spoon or similar weapon, remove the bacon from the pan and add to the mushrooms. Now you you are left with some hot bacon fat in the pan, so turn down the heat and carefully add some lemon juice. Watch out for the mixture spitting! Now you can pour this tasty dressing over the bacon and mushrooms. Don’t forget the chopped parsley, it goes really well with this. I think chopped, curled parsley is yummier for this than the flat-leaf variety, principally because of the texture.
Anything missing?
Yes! Have you made some fresh bread? Don’t worry if you haven’t, a good chunk of soft-on-the-inside, crisp-on-the-outside, bread from the shop, once warmed in the oven, will do just fine.
If you would like some more suggestions for making a garlic dressing, leave a comment below 🙂