Plus, they look as pretty as they taste:

I found some dried porcini mushrooms at the farmer’s market a few weeks ago, early in January when otherwise there wasn’t much there.  I came home with a ziploc bag full, which I expect will last a while.  I love porcinis especially, because they have a very dark, meaty flavor, but chantrelles, morels, shiitakes, and others are all an equally good buy.

You can find dried wild mushrooms in most grocery stores, especially higher-end ones.  They are expensive – don’t look at the price per pound! – and they come in small bags, but when you’re cooking with them, a little goes a long way.  These dry, shriveled things pack a whole lot of flavor.

To use dried mushrooms, put them in a bowl and cover them with warm water.  Then just let them sit for about 15 minutes, until they’ve absorbed the water and become soft and squishy.  Then fish them out, chop them up, and add them to your cooking.  But save the liquid!  Carefully pour it off into another container (dirt and debris from the mushrooms will sometimes settle to the bottom of the liquid – don’t be grossed out, but don’t save those bits, either) and stick it in the fridge.

You can put dried mushrooms in lots of things – just about anywhere you’d use regular button mushrooms.  In fact, one of the best ways to use them is alongside button mushrooms, to enhance the flavor while the cheaper mushrooms provide most of the substance.  Try:

• Add them to soup (porcinis make the best mushroom soup you’ll ever taste)
• Putt them on pizza
• Add them to stir fries (especially shiitakes)
• Stir them into risotto
• Put them into pasta sauce, or just serve them over pasta, sauted with a little butter

You can use the liquid anywhere you’d use stock – and since you can use stock almost anywhere you’d use water, there are lots of possibilities.  You can use it with the mushrooms, or for extra flavor in another dish. It’s especially good:

• In soups
• In risotto
• In the cooking water for rice or pasta
• In sauces and gravy

If you’ve never used dried mushrooms, you’ll be amazed how much they boost the flavor in a dish.  They’re like a secret weapon of deliciousness.

One pitfall: don’t hoard them.  I have a bad habit of not using them except on the most special of occasions… but they’re not that pricey when you use them in small quantities. And when you let them get pushed to the back of your pantry, you’ll forget they’re there.  So get them, and use them!

Our first all-vegetarian Thanksgiving (and our first Thanksgiving in our new house) was a definite success.  Low-key and low-stress, we spent the day hanging around the kitchen: cooking, eating, cooking more, eating more.  Not a bad way to spend a day off.  Considering how adventuresome our menu was, I’m feeling proud – I’ve never made ravioli from scratch before, and they were the highlight of the day.  The cranberry bread, mushroom sauce, and apple pie all came out various degrees of tasty, but the sweet potato ravioli were something else.  I’m going to share the recipe (to the best of my memory) below.

We got started around 10:30 with baking the sweet potatoes, mixing up the bread, and prepping the crust for the pie.  Then we broke for a “light” lunch – cheese and crackers.  But it turned out to be heavier than we planned, because the cheese was addictive.  We splurged on two nice, imported cheeses from Whole Foods, neither of which we’d had before.

The first was Tallegio, a semi-soft, rinded cheese that’s most similar to brie, but sweeter and a little bit nutty in flavor.  It was creamy and almost-but-not-quite soft enough just to spread on the crackers.

The other, cocoa cardona, was at the opposite end of the spectrum – a hard, tangy goat’s milk cheese, and as the name suggests, it was aged with cocoa powder smeared on the outside.  It wasn’t sweet at all, but the cocoa made it rich and gave it a nice edge.  It was about all I could do not to eat them all at once.  (It’s about all I can do now not to get them out of the fridge for “inspiration” while I write this post.)

After lunch, we started the ravioli.  Making the filling was easy and quick (a mixture of mashed sweet potato, cheese, and seasonings); shaping the ravioli was less time consuming than I expected, and easier than many other filled foods I’ve made.  (Assuming you use the right amount of filling, about a teaspoon, the ravioli were easier to work with and to seal than dumplings, wontons, or stuffed pastries.  If our pasta wasn’t exactly refined-looking, it also didn’t leak, even a little.)

The hard part was rolling out the dough.  We used about a pound of egg pasta, which consists of flour, a couple eggs, a pinch of salt, and enough water to hold it all together.  We had the benefit of a pasta maker, which we hadn’t used before yesterday, and it was a big help but didn’t stop the pasta from being long and unwieldy.  You can see in the pictures how long the strips were – and know that many of these we actually cut in half so they’d fit on the counter!

I didn’t get any pictures of the pasta going through the machine, because it was really a 4-hand process.  However, the dough is really forgiving stuff.  It didn’t tear, didn’t stick to itself too badly, and didn’t get pulled out of shape as we passed it awkwardly around and around.

The process goes like this: you cut off a piece of the dough (we cut it in thirds), flatten it, and pass it through the machine on the widest setting.  If it isn’t quite smooth, you can fold it over on itself and pass it through a few more times.  Then, you move the machine to the next narrower setting, pass the dough through, move to the next setting, pass the dough through, and so on until you get the thickness you want.  Technically easy, but logistically complicated, because your fist-sized ball of dough quickly becomes a thin strip several feet long.  If you don’t have a pasta maker, you could almost certainly roll it out by hand and cut it into 2-inch strips, but the benefit of the machine is that everything comes out fairly uniform.  Plus, cranking the machine is much easier than rolling by hand (I know this, because I also made pie yesterday, and rolled that crust by hand).

The best part?  We not only had a filling dinner, but we now have several meals worth of frozen ravioli waiting for us in the future!

Sweet Potato Ravioli

Adapted from Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” (highly recommended)

Filling

• 1.5-2 cups mashed sweet potato
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/4 cup toasted pecans, finely ground
• 1/4 cup breadcrumbs
• 1/3 cup cream cheese
• salt & pepper

Pasta

• 2 cups flour
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 eggs
• water

To make the filling, mash the sweet potato with butter.  Once it’s fully cooled, stir in the other ingredients, season to taste, and set aside.  (Refrigerate if not using immediately.)

To make the pasta, measure out the flour and make a well in the middle.  Add the other ingredients (except water), break up the eggs with a fork, and stir it all together.  If it won’t come together into a ball, add water, just a little at a time, and stir it all up until it holds together.  Knead the dough until it’s smooth, then cover and let it rest a few minutes.

To shape the pasta, roll out the dough into long strips (2 or 4 inches wide) using a pasta maker or a rolling pin.  The dough should be very thin but not so fragile you can’t work with it.  (Mine was almost transparent when it was done.)  On each strip, place a heaping teaspoon of filling in the middle of each 2-inch square, for half the length of the strip.  Dip your finger in water and wet the edges and the spaces between the filling – this will help the dough to seal.  Then fold the other half of the dough back over the filling, working slowly and pressing around the edges to seal it.  Then, cut them apart with a knife and place the finished ravioli on wax paper.

You can cook them immediately in (gently) boiling water for 4-5 minutes; if not, cover them with wax paper so they don’t dry out.

To store them for the future, place them on trays in the freezer until frozen, then keep them in a plastic bag.

The truth is, I started making the gnocchi with the thought of writing about how easy it was, how it seems so intimidating but really it’s a breeze, how I don’t know why everyone doesn’t make them all the time.  Then I made them, and it simply wasn’t so.  These things were kind of a pain in the ass.  A tasty pain, but still a pain.

None of the steps are very hard, or complex, or finicky.  That’s a benefit: there’s very little chance you could mess these up.  It might take an afternoon, and they might not be pretty, but you will have gnocchi and it will be good.  There is plenty of labor involved, though, and I’ll give you one piece of advice: if you have a good stand mixer, use it.  I think that’s where I got my misconceptions: last time I made these, I was in an industrial kitchen and had a mixer as big as me to do the hard work.  If you’re mixing by hand, be prepared to work it.  Or draft a “volunteer” to help you.

The process is straightforward, so simple that you barely need a recipe.  In fact, the recipe might be counterproductive, since the proportions are almost sure not to be what the recipe says.  Here’s what you do: first boil some potatoes – mashing potatoes like Russets are best, because once they’re cooked through, you’ll need to peel them and mash them.  Make sure they’re really, really smooth, then start to stir in flour.  And more flour.  And more flour.  But not too much!  You’re aiming for a dough that you can handle and shape nicely – but I never got mine beyond “tolerably sticky”.  The pretty, uniform gnocchi that you can find at nice Italian restaurants?  Mine looked nothing like that.  Mine looked more like globs, because I got tired of stirring in flour.  Once the dough is at whatever point it’s going to be at, form it into little balls and drop them, a few at a time, into simmering water.  In two or three minutes, they’ll start to float, and then you just fish them out and eat them.

The good news is that once they’re covered in sauce, no one cares in the slightest what they look like, and they will taste delicious even if your potato-to-flour ratio is slightly off.

One recipe I read suggested a pound of potatoes to a cup of flour – but it’ll undoubtedly vary with your potatoes and your flour.

That’s all there is to it.  You could probably add other things to them: a little salt and pepper, some finely grated parmesan (which I did), even some herbs.  But at the core, they’re just potato and flour.  But when you eat them, they’re so light and fluffy, you’d never know it.

If you think that’s fun, the next thing to try is cheese gnocchi – similar creatures, but perhaps even more delicious.  I made the cheese gnocchi recipe from Moosewood a couple years ago, and it was… well, come to think of it, maybe it’s about time to make those again…

Especially at a time when so many people (myself included) are trying to save money, it’s interesting to think about where we’re willing to skimp, and where we hold the line on the foods that really matter to us.  Here are a few of mine:

• Chocolate: I’m a chocoholic.  I admit it.  But if it’s not good enough, I’d rather eat something that’s actually healthy, and wait for the good stuff.
• Cheese: Aged and imported cheeses tend to be much more flavorful and satisfying.  With a lot of domestic, industrial cheeses, they don’t really taste like anything.  Give me an aged British cheddar, or a smoked gouda, and I’ll be a happy camper.  As a vegetarian, cheese is for me what meat would be to a real meat-and-potatoes person.  (I don’t mean to dump on American-made cheeses.  There are some great artisan cheeses being produced in this country right now.  But our “cheese heritage” these days is more closely linked to Kraft than to craft.  It’s sad.)
• Tea: I’m not a very picky tea drinker, but the more tea I drink, the more I recognize that higher-quality tea actually tastes less bitter and more flavorful.  It’s a pretty complex beverage.  When I was traveling a couple months ago, I kept trying to order tea and kept getting Lipton’s, which tasted so bitter it was like drinking dirt.  I’ve written about my new affinity for loose tea, which is not only pretty and fun to make, but you can actually see what’s in it and know what you’re getting.

Those are my top foods, the ones where I’m most religious about buying good quality.  What foods are you not willing to compromise on?  Which ones could you care less about?

Fresh porcini mushrooms (WikiMedia)

Some things are worth spending silly amounts of money on, and porcinis are one of them.  Their flavor was rich, dark, and earthy; they tasted more mushroomy than any mushrooms I’ve had.  There’s a reason why they’re considered gourmet.  You’ll more often see them dried, and adding just a few dried porcinis can light up a dish.  Still, the fresh ones are something else.

I think a lot of home cooks, especially new or timid cooks, avoid buying nice or expensive ingredients for fear of ruining them in the cooking.  If you have something special to work with, you want to do it justice.  My usual method of becoming familiar with new ingredients is to saute them with olive oil and butter, but in this case, I wanted something a little more substantial.  So, I went to the books.  I found a recipe in “Moosewood Cooks at Home” for Broiled Polenta with Mushrooms and Cheese, which I made once before with ordinary mushrooms, and seemed perfect for my porcinis.  (The recipe called for dried porcinis – I substituted my fresh ones.)  In fact, the mushrooms stole the show.  This is a real treat and feels appropriately fancy, though the preparation is fairly simple.

Broiled Polenta with Mushrooms and Cheese (from Moosewood Cooks at Home)

• Cook polenta (1 cup coarse cornmeal, 3 cups boiling water) over low heat until thick – stir so it does not burn.
• Saute some garlic and a couple cups of chopped mushrooms (I supplemented the porcinis with some button mushrooms) in olive oil until they are a little soft and the oil is absorbed.  Add about a tablespoon of wine, some salt, and herbs if desired, and cook another minute or two.
• Spread the polenta in an oiled baking dish.  Top with the mushrooms, then some grated cheese (we used feta; the original calls for mozarella and cheddar) and broil until the cheese browns.  Serve hot!