This was going to be another one of those where I took a bunch of close-ups and had fun with it. The only problem is that disaster struck and one face of the dish fell apart as I was running out of time to work on it. Super frustrating! But, as usual, it was delicious. (I'm going to have some much-less-pretty leftovers for lunch as soon as I get this typed up and submitted!)
These three pics are displaying the starting points. I got two different assorted, dehydrated forest-mushroom packs; some wakame and bay-leaf; some brown rice, onion, garlic, and an egg; and some chiles and an orange for the sauce. There were other things that I grabbed as I was cooking -- spices and whatnot.
So I started out by rehydrating the fungi. This is a fun step. They're so pretty when dried and then even prettier when they're in the water. I poured hot water (not boiling, but hot) over the mushrooms with some dried wakame and a bay leaf, lidded the bowl, and let it stand for about an hour. Some of the pieces of mushroom were thick and hard, so I gave it a lot of time.
Toward the end of that time, I started sauteing the onion and four large cloves of garlic, and then I squeezed each of the mushrooms gently, to extract the water, rinsing the morels an extra time to try and get debris out of the caps, and added all the fungi to the saute pan (throwing away the seaweed and bay).
After eight or ten minutes, I picked through the mixture, pulling off all the attractive and/or structural pieces to use a few minutes later for plating.
and I added about as much cooked rice by volume to the pan as the sauteed mixture occupied, once the rice was up to temperature I added an egg ans stirred until it was done.
I'm still trying to learn how to plate! I went with puck of the mushroom fried rice on top of which, I was going to arrange the larger mushroom pieces with fresh herb sprigs and pea shoots. (I had some cranberries available -- which seemed like a pretty and earthy addition, but the scale was all wrong so they didn't get used.)
I started work on a white plate and decided to move to the earthier red plate, which required rebuilding the rice-puck and I think in the end that's what killed me. It was much firmer the first time and I should have left well-enough alone. The red plate was prettier with this dish -- that call was right, but wasn't worth messing things up over once I started elsewhere. I got a bunch of the mushrooms in place but my wife was bugging me and messing with the table and then my cats had a fight and slammed a chair into the table and it just started feeling like the universe wasn't with me. (I'm smiling now at such a melodramatic statement, but man, I was really upset in the moment.) So, as I was trying to keep one side from caving out and get the basil rosettes stuck into the mushroom forest, one section disintegrated and I gave up -- taking this final picture and deciding to stop rather than fight. I had other cooking that the family needed done and there was a schedule to keep.
Oh, I should mention the sauce! I put the mushroom soaking liquid through cheesecloth to keep out the residual dirt and chunks, added some chiles and an orange left over from last week's challenge, and started reducing it. I added some salt and pepper and then some chile sauce to warm it up a little. And then I decided (humorously, but maybe foolishly) to add a little agar to thicken it up. I don't know what I'm doing with this stuff. I think I added too much! the "sauce" ended up seeming like plastic strips and I made quite a mess to clean up when ran it through the sieve. So, I'm going to do some reading and figure out how to use that more productively. :-)
So no array of closeups this week, and a story of some failure. But let me reiterate, it was really tasty. Now I'm off to go reheat the leftovers...