stuffed mushrooms

stuffed mushrooms

Using up: portabella mushrooms, bacon, blue cheese

I’ve never done stuffed mushrooms before, but had seen a couple of people prepared them on Come Dine with Me, a programme which I rather like.  We had some lovely bacon in the freezer, from a friend’s first attempt at pig rearing, but it was sliced very thin and so is not really any good for bacon sarnies (the proper thing to do with bacon), so that needed something doing to it.  We also had a lump of ancient blue cheese – dolcelatte, I think.  So off I went …

I put about 25g of porcini to soak in some boiling water – about 150ml, I should think – for about 20 minutes.  Then I took out the mushrooms, and put about 3 large teaspoons full of couscous into the water.  I know this is not the normal way to cook couscous, and it took a while, but it was fine after about 15 minutes, when I was ready for it!

Cleaned the mushrooms, cut off what little stalk they had and saved them, and put them in a shallow dish, which I sprayed with sunflower oil (I’m trying, not very hard, to eat more healthily).

Then I chopped the mushroom stalks, one huge spring onion, 2 cloves of garlic, the porcini, 2 rashers of bacon (ingredients here).  I fried off the bacon in some olive oil until it was crispy, then set it to drain on kitchen paper. Then I put the mushroom stalks, spring onion, porcini and garlic into the pan with some more olive oil and fried it up until the veg were soft.  Returned the bacon to the pan, fished the couscous out of the mushroom water and mixed it all together – photo.

Ladled the mix into/on top of the mushrooms, topped with cubes of blue cheese, and baked at gas 4 for 30 minutes.  I put a foil hat on for the first 10 minutes, but I don’t think it was needed.

We ate them with steamed new potatoes – they were gorgeous.