Oven Baked Portobello Mushroom and Egg with Bacon

This is a super simple breakfast or meal if you are trying to eat clean, Paleo or low carb.

Preheat you oven to 400 degrees.
Spray a baking dish with nonstick spray.
Remove stem from the mushroom and place gill side up in the dish.
Crack an egg on top.
Sprinkle with bacon crumbles, salt and pepper.
Bake for 20-25 minutes to desired egg hardness.
Enjoy!

Pinterest Inspired Food

I thought today I would share some of the dishes that I have made from pins I have found. Give you my thoughts and any changes I made to the the recipe and let you check out the recipe for yourselves on the blogs and websites where I found them. These are pictures of the food I made using these recipes provided in the links. Sometimes I just like to share the items I made on my blog so that I have a reference of how to make it again, like my own recipe catalog.

This recipe as titled by the author at Second Thought is Polenta with Mushrooms and Leeks. I varied from the recipe by making a mushroom and leek meat sauce to top it with. The only change I made to the recipe is I decreased the water to 1.5 C. Also, I wanted to note that it took quite a bit longer to get to the consistency described (even with a decrease in water). It took me 10 minutes longer than the 5-6 minutes in the recipe. Other than that, next time I won't add additional salt. I did like it and wasn't sure if I would like polenta, but it was good and I would make this again.

Recently, Chipotle released it's guacamole recipe and Takepart.com has the original recipe published on their website that you can copy. All ingredients are fresh and no dried seasonings. I made it and thought it tasted awesome and was able to use a hot pepper and cilantro from my garden to make it, which made this Chipotle Guacamole taste even more awesome!

In the spirit of trying Chipotle copycat recipes, I thought we would also try a Chipotle Cilantro-Lime Rice recipe as well that was featured on the Culinary Hill blog. The recipe seems spot on and I would give it a try if you are a Chipotle fan. I would not have thought about needing a bay leaf to make this recipe if I had not seen it listed.

Mushrooms 101

Before you get all excited that I have this wonderful bout of information to teach you about mushrooms, let me just start off by telling you that I just took a Mushrooms 101 class with my son at Rice Lake State Park. I thought that I would share what I have learned, basically so I don't forget about it. I am pretty stoked to learn more about mushrooming and identification and even more specifically foraging.

Let's first start off by telling you that our guide suggested that in the beginning when we are foraging, we stick to the Safe 6 Mushrooms in Minnesota. The above picture is Hen of the Woods, which is on the list of Safe 6 and some of this was sauteed up below in the picture of the spaghetti. It was delicious. It has a nutty flavor to it. He said that Hen of the Wood like to grow at the base of a tree and particularly like Burr Oak, but also grow on other oaks and trees.

This is a picture of the bottom side of an oyster mushroom (also on the Safe 6), but it is old and has gotten moldy, so we would not be harvesting it for consumption.

Just another picture of the oyster mushrooms. Sorry the picture quality isn't the best as I just had my phone with to use. Another mushroom on the Safe 6 that I have hunted for on a few occasions (but really it's only available for a couple weeks in Minnesota) is the Morel Mushroom (I had always heard that morels grew on dead elms, but our guide claims to find them on dead locust trees and to start hunting for them at the south end of a hill.) The other 3 Safe 6 mushrooms include Shaggy Manes (we did find some of these but I didn't get a picture and they were small ones which they said not to eat because with they are little they can be confused with something poisonous), Chicken of the Woods, and Puffballs. On our excursion we did not find the edible white puffball (which my kids have found before but we didn't know it was edible), but we did find the poisonous Pigskin Puffball.

Now, is the section of mushrooms that are not edible, which is actually the majority of mushroom you will find. This is a coral mushroom.

Here is my son showing off what our guide liked to call "Little Brown Jobs". LOL! My son really enjoyed going out looking for mushrooms.I actually think between the two of us, we found the majority of the mushrooms our guide wanted out group of 17 to find so he could show us the edibles and teach us about the different structures of mushrooms. I have some lingo to learn!

To be honest, I don't remember what he called these red ones but they were all over the place. We didn't forage any of them so I presume they were poisonous and they ar not on my Safe 6 list so we'll leave it alone.

 Some more that I don't know what they are. This top one has a honeycomb pattern instead of gills, like the one below. The one below has a thin dark stripe (or stem) that is different from a lot of the other mushroom we found. I did find one to show the group that had a veil, but I didn't take a picture of it before I handed it to our guide and he started staking it apart to show everyone.

Another thing he had told us is that honey mushrooms have a look-a-like poisonous mushroom, but if you take the stem and try to peel it, the edible honey mushroom will peel like string cheese and the poisonous one doe snot.

We did attempt to do spore prints, which he said is a really good way to help identify mushrooms and said to never eat anything with white spores. He showed us how to make spore prints with white & colored paper and covering the mushroom with a glass.

He also told us we need to be looking for edible mushroom when they are young and usually 3-5 days after a big rain is a really good time to go looking for them and the mushrooms will have bloomed.

 Our class split up the Hen of the Woods, so we didn't have a lot to saute up, but my son and I did enjoy some spaghetti with sauteed Hen of the Woods with zucchini (from our garden), garlic, onions and tomatoes.

He highly recommended we get the National Audubon Society  Field Guide to Mushrooms. I came home and promptly ordered this one from Amazon. He mentioned a couple other books worth picking up and I have requested those from the library to see what they are like before purchasing, since he only had these for us to look at during our class.

This was a pretty informative class and it was FREE! You should really check to see if State Parks near you offer events and class. Often they are free or very affordable