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Monday, November 23, 2009

Another Argh

(My oh-so-proper cookbookstand)


So, quite a while ago now, I went to the home of some friends for dinner, and they served this amazing mushroom soup. I think it has since starred in some of my dreams. It was delicious, rich, simmery, tasting full of flavor while not being chunky. So I thought I'd try my hand at a mushroom soup.
I knew I wasn't following following a similar recipe, but I thought I'd break myself in easy to the mushroom: start stew-style, with a combination chicken-barley-mushroom, and get a feel for the ingredient. Well.
I had bought a large container of dried mushrooms a few days before from Costco, while the plan was already simmering in my head, and thought I had just to follow the directions to rehydrate them and incorporate them into the Daily Soup recipe I had (also the first time I'd used one from their book). Unfortunately, I needed to dash to the Giant across the street to get the parsley (an inconsequential and unwanted flavor here anyway, it turned out), and due to the less-than-fabulous service there, the mushrooms ended up sitting in the water for 30 minutes instead of 20. Perhaps that was the fatal flaw. Or maybe they were just bad mushrooms. Or maybe, as my mother confessed to me when I told her of the ordeal, the cooks in my family just can't do dried mushrooms.

(doesn't it look good?? ah, the agony!)

Whatever the problem, I didn't realize it until I got to the very end and sat down with a chunk of warm, crusty bread on top of the stew, and took the first shocking bite, which lasted longer than it should, needing as I did to chew, and chew, and chew. So before the next bite, I picked out all the mushrooms from my mushroom-chicken-barley soup. Argh.

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