Mushroom Recipes | Finding Feasts

Pierogi with Smoked Slippery Jack Mushrooms

Finding Feasts - Pierogi — Click image for recipe

Pierogi, ahh just saying the word takes me back to my childhood.

Pierogi are synonymous with the Polish. My mother would make these every few weeks with different fillings. One of my favourite was a farm cheese filling with burnt butter and cinnamon sugar – a dessert style dish. My other favourite version was filled with Sauerkraut and Slippery Jack Mushrooms that we had picked in autumn during one of the many mushroom foraging tours I did with my parents and many other Polish families.

I loved biting into the fresh pasta to reveal the dark and rich mushroom filling. The Sauerkraut gives the pierogi a bit of zing as well.

Finding Feasts was recently very fortunate to be asked to take the gorgeous Lyndey Milan on a mushroom forage in Oberon for her upcoming Taste of Australia show which is due to air at the end of the year. Talking to her about all my past mushroom picking escapades with my family made me realise that I have been mushroom picking for a very long time! Since the early 1980′s! That is well over 30 years.

My dad recently came across this gorgeous picture of our family mushroom picking down the Southern Highlands, in 1983! I’m the one with the brown hair not looking at the camera and the gorgeous lady sitting in the picnic chair is my beautiful babcia (grandmother) who is no longer with us but was an avid mushroomer!

Pierogi can be made with various different fillings and once you start experimenting there is no limit to the fillings you can make.

Seeing as ’tis the wild mushroom picking season’ I thought I would share this very traditional recipe with you, however with a very FinSki’s twist on it. This recipe calls for smoked mushrooms and where do you get these I hear you ask? Why FinSki’s of course!

Blondie and I have been experimenting in the kitchen for about 2 years now. We have both tried our hand at smoked mushrooms. Drying the mushrooms elevates them to another level, it increases the flavour tenfold and these smoked mushroom and sauerkraut pierogi are full of wintery smokey flavour.

Enjoy!

Bella

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Smoked Mushroom Bruschetta w/ Wild Cherry Brandy Sauce

Wild Musrhoom Bruschetta — Click on image for recipe

As simple as this dish looks, this bruschetta mix was a whole weekend’s labour of LOVE! Yes it took me a whole weekend to do!

Let me explain…the mushroom bruschetta mix you are looking at comprises of oyster, swiss brown and shiitake mushrooms. They have all been lightly smoked using hickory chips, dehydrated overnight and re-hydrated prior to cooking.

This isn’t your average bruschetta mix, it’s what I will call heaven on sourdough, if there ever was such a thing!

So why all the effort? Mushrooms are yummy on their own, however I wanted to experiment and take them to the next level. Ever since I was a little girl I remember that mum would slow dry her slippery jacks or saffron’s in the oven overnight, the house would be filled with the most amazing aroma, the drying process would accentuate the flavour of the mushroom giving them a much richer and deeper flavour. Did I just sound like Manu from the Continental Stock commercial???

I know I sound like I am bragging but my efforts paid off! I cannot begin to explain the taste sensation. Smoking the mushrooms gave them that meaty, hearty taste without the meat!

Ohhhh and the tiny drizzle of Walsh’s Homemade Wild Cherry Brandy sauce took it to another dimension, honestly out of this world!

It took a whole weekend to cook but ohhh so worth it!

With love from a self-professed mushroom addict…a.k.a Bella

PS…a huge thank you to the ABC’s The Cook & the Chef for providing inspiration and base ideas for this recipe.

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Shiitake and Pork Spring Rolls

FinSkis Pork and Shiitake Spring Rolls — Shiitake and Pork Spring Rolls recipe

Shiitake and Pork Spring Rolls… One of my favourite recipe books at the moment is Thai Street Food by David Thompson. It’s a massive book both in content and actual size, brimming with gorgeous Thai recipes and stunning photography.

I often go through stages of food styles and my latest one is Thai – although this one has been going on for a while – as soon as there is a warm day I find myself drawn back into the heady aroma of Asian cooking.

This is my first attempt at this one, well, it’s my first attempt at spring rolls so I was quite surprised at how difficult it was to separate the spring roll sheets, but was equally surprised at just how stretchy they were. I was certain I was going to tear them to pieces trying to pull them apart, and I wasn’t being at all gentle!

I got 8 large spring rolls from this recipe so when I do them again I will be at least tripling the ingredients just so I have leftovers to freeze. I like to have emergency rations for when family or friends drop around or to take with me when it’s my family doing the drop-ins.

Happy folding!

Blondie

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