Portobello Mushrooms: Take Two



Stuffed Portobello Mushroom Burgers with Crunchy Winter Salad

We're trying to eat seriously healthy.....seriously....it's a challenge at our house. I love to cook and my husband loves to eat. Well, that's not exactly fair, since I love to cook and eat. As part of our quest to eat healthier, last  night I made Stuffed Portobello Mushroom Burgers with Crunchy Winter Salad, and it was delicious as well as being seriously healthy!   ( Here's my other portobello recipe ) And, here's the best part,  everything I made took me about 30 minutes AND it was pretty economical. Make your salad and set it aside, then start with the stuffing and cooking up the mushrooms. They were really, really good, even my meat loving husband thought so. He admitted to being full, in spite of no potatoes, no real dressing on the salad and LOTS of veggies. Score!

Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

2 portobello mushrooms

olive oil and balsamic vinegar

1 tsp butter

1 medium onion, sliced

2 - 3 cloves of minced garlic

2 handfuls fresh spinach

1 link turkey Italian sausage**

1 slice Alpine Lace reduced fat Swiss Cheese

1 roasted red pepper, cut in half (from a jar is fine)

2 burger buns, your favorite, I recommend whole grain or "white/wheat"

kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

First prepare your stuffing: In a small non-stick frying pan, melt the butter with a few drops of olive oil. Add the sliced onion and cook until lightly browned but still slightly firm. Remove the onion to a bowl. Slit the casing of the sausage with a sharp knife and push out the meat into the same frying pan (discard the casing). Cook over medium, stirring and breaking up the meat, until the sausage is crumbled and brown. Add the garlic, and the onions to the pan along with the spinach. Sprinkle with a little Kosher salt and fresh pepper, stirring to incorporate the spinach. Cook for 1 minute. Cover and set aside. The heat will continue to wilt the spinach.

Wipe the mushrooms clean with a damp paper towel. Using a spoon, remove the stems and most of the gills from them. A spoon works well for removing the gills. 

Preheat a grill pan over medium high heat. Brush the mushroom caps with a little olive oil. Put them on the grill and cover them loosely. Cook 5 minutes on each side, watching them so they don't burn. Use a sturdy spatula for this, so the mushrooms remain whole. You can press them down slightly so that they maintain good contact with the pan, but don't break them if you help it.

Place the mushrooms on a cookie sheet or baking pan and fill them with the sausage/onion/spinach mixture. Place 1/2 of roasted red pepper on top of each one. Put them into the oven for 5 - 7 minutes. Add 1/2 slice of the cheese to each mushroom during the last minute of cooking. While the stuffing heats through,, grill the buns in the same pan you used to cook the mushrooms, over medium to high heat. You kind of want to toast them a bit. Press them down gently with the back of the spatula so that they crisp up and get sturdy -- the mushrooms are heavy and juicy!  Top the toasted roll with your stuffed mushroom. Drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar. Serve with Crunchy Winter Salad, recipe below! Enjoy!!

**Cooks Note: To make this meal totally vegetarian and even healthier, eliminate the turkey sausage from the stuffing and crumble in some tofu or the veggie sausage crumbles that you find in the freezer section of the grocery store. OR add more spinach or some sauted, finely chopped zucchini.  I bet it would still be yummy. DON'T eliminate the balsamic vinegar, though, it really makes a difference!

Crunchy Winter Salad

1 small Granny Smith apples, peeled and chopped

2 ribs celery, washed, halved and chopped

1 small carrot or 2 baby carrots, grated

1 ring canned pineapple, cut into small pieces (get the kind packed in it's own juice, not syrup)

1 - 2 thin slices red or purple onion, cut into small pieces

zest from 1/2 a lemon

1 oz. coarsely chopped walnuts

1 T. pineapple juice (from the can is fine)

1 tsp. lemon juice

Mix all the above together in a bowl. Serve it over:

2 handfuls washed and chopped romaine lettuce

2 handfuls washed and stemmed spinach, torn up a little

This salad is crunchy and really, really good! Any kind of nuts would probably work, but I was thinking along the lines of a Waldorf salad, sorta' deconstructed!

Perfect Burger? Part 2

There is always a debate at our house over burgers: Cheese or no cheese? Fried egg on top? Lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise? Additions to the ground beef or simply let it be? Mustard? Pickles? It goes on and on.....
On Memorial Day we continued our quest for the perfect burger with this combination: Plain beef burgers on the grill, Hot Pepper Monterrey Jack cheese melted over them, topped with a Chipotle Ranch Mayo, lettuce and tomato. Here's how I made the mayo:

Chipotle Ranch Mayo
3 T. light Dukes Mayonnaise
1 heaping T. light sour cream
2 T. Ranch Dressing
2 chipotles plus a T. of juice from a can of "Chipotles en Adobo"
Finely chop up the peppers and add to the other ingredients. Let it sit for about an hour to meld the flavors. Can be done ahead and stored for about 3 days in the refrigerator.

Lean ground beef burger with Monterey Jack cheese and chipotle mayo, lettuce and tomato
Perfect?

For those who are not familiar with Chipotles en Adobo, they are a canned item, found in the Hispanic foods section of every grocery store near me, so I bet they are easy to find where you are! Chipotles en Adobo are simply smoked jalapeno peppers packed with a smokey, onion-y type relish on them. The remaining peppers and sauce can be frozen for another use. They are good in chili, scrambled eggs, salsas -- anything you want to give a smokey little kick to!
Let me also comment that I think the best burgers are make with a little dimple in the middle when you form them. This is another ongoing battle in my kitchen, as my grillmaster husband seems to prefer burgers that resemble flying saucers -- fat in the middle, with overcooked tapered edges. The even formation of the meat and the dimple in the center ensures even cooking and the burger won't puff up with juice in the middle,which is what will happen without the dimple. We do agree, however, that 80/20 or 70/30 ground beef seems to make a juicier, more flavorful burger. The leaner ground beef is often dry and doesn't have too much flavor. If you do use that kind, add a T. of olive oil and a T. of Worchestershire Sauce to your ground beef to keep it juicy when grilled! We also agree that the buns ought to be slightly toasted either in the oven or on the grill, 2 - 3 minutes, cut side down. What do you think? Perfect or not so much?

Making Homemade Onion Rings

Onion Rings?? REALLY??!!?? I know, not exactly healthy eating, but OK once in a while, in limited amounts. My family loves onion rings and often bake up a few frozen ones for eating alongside burgers and such. My mom used to fry up homemade ones every now and then, and I've always remembered them fondly, so I decided to try some myself. I did this YEARS ago and decided it was more trouble than it was worth, but forged ahead out of motherly love. The results were absolutely delish, and only a little trouble. Halfway through the frying process, dear husband came in to man the frying pan, because, Baby, IT'S HOT standing over one, dipping and turning! I even remembered to take some pictures along the way so you could see exactly how to do them!!

Homemade Onion Rings

First, start slicing some onions. Slice them about 1/4' thick and separate them into rings. Discard the very center of the onions and save them for another dish in a baggie. Lay them out in a single layer on paper towels and let them dry out a little while you prepare the batter. I tried to take a picture of them laid out on paper towels, but you could not see the onions against the white towels, so here is a representation for size.

Cut the onions kind of thick, like this.

The batter:

2/3 cup Bisquick

1 small egg

a few ounces of beer

Break the egg into the bottom of a shallow dish, wide enough to put a few of your rings into. A pie plate will work for this. Add the Bisquick and then drizzle in a little beer, whisking together until you get a thick batter. The batter should be thicker than pancake batter but not like dough.

Preheat a large skillet with an inch of vegetable oil in it. The oil is ready for frying when a drop of batter sizzles and rises immediately to the top. Begin frying your onion rings in a single layer, without crowding the pan.

Don't crowd the pan while cooking!

Turn them once as they begin to brown. Watch them closely so they don't burn. As they are done, drain them on some more paper towels. This takes a little time, but it's worth the extra work. We had them alongside some sloppy joes, a few french fries and marinated cucumbers from my neighbors garden. YUMMY!

Ther's nothing like Homemade Onion Rings!

Perfect burger?

This is my sons' idea of HIS perfect burger, complete with cheddar cheese, mayo, juicy tomato and a FRIED EGG! He toasted his bun on the outside grill and then loaded it up. I don't know what I think of the fried egg on top, but I must admit it LOOKED tasty. See how cute the egg is? We attended a family party over the weekend, and one of my many cousins brought tiny little chicken eggs, from her "teenage" chickens, as she called them. They were organic, free range, happy chickens too, with little speckles on their tiny eggs. They fried up into a perfect size for burger topping.

Prior to cooking our burgers on the grill, there ensued a major, rather loud discussion, about how to form the patties. My husband likes to make the patties, and he forms them into roughly the shape of a fat flying saucer, with a big hump in the middle. After many hours spent watching the Food Network, I think they should be slightly hollowed out in the center, with uniform edges. Dear hubs taper off at the edges, resulting in overcooked edges and almost raw middles. I won last night, and the burgers were perfect, if I do say so myself. Cudos to Bobby Flay and Rachel Ray for the shaping lessons!!

Turkey Burgers

My husband really likes to cook burgers on the grill. The only thing is, I find them to be a little bland. While I can fully appreciate the ol' American favorite, cheeseburger with all the fixin's, I sometimes want something a little different. I watch a pretty fair amount of Foodnetwork TV, and if you do to, than you all know who I am talking about when I say that's she's the one who calls herself "queen of sammies", "queen of burgers", "queen of" .... how can you be "queen of" everything? Anyway, some of her recipes are good, but I must say, rarely do they really take only 30 minutes to prepare, unless you like your meat really, really rare! I took one of her weeknight burger suggestions and changed it up, not only to make it more healthy, but also to suit my own taste. Southwestern Turkey Burgers 1 pkg. ground turkey breast (most of them are about 1 1/3 lbs.) 1 handful cilantro 1/3 c. roasted red pepper 1/4 of a medium onion, yellow or red, whatever you have 2 garlic cloves 1 heaping T. grill seasoning (I used the mesquite flavor kind) 1 med. jalapeno pepper, seeded No one in my family will even try a burger with big pieces of anything in it, so I put everything but the meat into my mini food processor, and process until fairly smooth. Then, I add it into the ground turkey and mix it in with my hands (it's the only way to get everything distributed evenly). Form this into 5 patties. Get your grill hot. Grill these ( I used a grill pan on my stove ala the queen of everything) for about 3 - 4 minutes on each side. They will get a nice little crust on each side. Split 5 sturdy rolls (kaiser or sandwhich) and remove a little of the bread from the inside of the roll, making a little well to fit your burger and toppings. When you take burgers out of the pan, grill the rolls a minute or 2, cut side down first, then a quick flip, to toast them up a little. Or put them under the broiler for a minute, but I am terrible at that and always burn them Maybe I am queen of burning rolls... Toppings: your favorite salsa leafy lettuce pickled jalapenos monteray jack pepper cheese red pepper jelly cajun mayo* Use any combo of the previous to top your burgers. I choose a little salsa, a thin slice of pepper jack cheese and some leafy lettuce, chopped up. I've done the cajun mayo on one side with the red pepper jelly on the other and lots of lettuce and that's yummy too, but probably more calories than I wanted on a Tuesday night! Play around with it to suit your taste. The mayo keeps several days in the frig, and is good to jazz up a plain turkey sandwich! *To make cajun mayo, combine 3 T. light mayo w/1 tsp. chili powder, 2 - 3 drops tabasco sauce, 1 tsp. LF sour cream and a sprinkle of the grill seasoning (again, I used the mesquite kind). Stir well and let sit to combine flavors.