The Slapdash Cook

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I went to a catered event last night, an event that included dinner. People attending got a choice between grilled salmon or chicken breasts in a mushroom cream sauce. As a vegetarian, I am not a big fan of chicken — but I am a huge fan of mushrooms and (unfortunately) dairy fat. Since I also managed to score some button mushrooms on manager’s special (they’re soooo expensive!), I thought I’d try an imitation for tonight’s dinner, using tofu and skim milk. This one worked, my friends. I regret only that there wasn’t lots more of it.

I should confess that this isn’t a totally new idea for me — I worked out something similar last fall when I figured out that green bean casserole is really good, even though it’s also full of unhealthy things from cans. But at that time, I was sorta flying blind, using an idea from a Weight Watchers mac and cheese recipe to thicken the mushroom sauce without using tons of butter. So I think it counts.

Mushroom ‘Cream’ Sauce, for tofu or pasta or the protein of your choice

Serves two mushroom lovers or four people who just kinda like them.

Note: This recipe gives you a sauce that’s really thick with delicious mushrooms. I could easily have doubled the milk and made lots more sauce. I didn’t because I’m trying to conserve milk, and because it doesn’t do to use anything too soupy to put over a solid piece of protein. But if it had been for pasta sauce, I would have, so I’m adding directions for that here. You might also consider doubling if you have really big chicken breasts or something.

One 8-oz package white button mushrooms, or mushrooms of your choice, sliced. I’d cube portobellos.
1/2 tb olive oil or butter
2 mediumish cloves garlic, or to taste, crushed or diced
1/4 to 1/2 onion
1 tb flour, white or whole wheat, or 2 tb for more sauce
1/4 cup skim milk, or 1/2 cup for more sauce. You could use unsweetened soy milk or some higher-fat dairy product if you like.
1 bay leaf
1/8 to 1/4 tsp dried rosemary
(hey, a pinch of red pepper flakes might be nice too!)
salt to taste — I probably used 1/8 tsp, but I would double that if I did it again and take it to 1/2 tsp for the doubled recipe
enough ground black pepper to make you bored and/or your wrists hurt
Glug or two of white wine (I actually used sake) — optional but nice

As with so many of my recipes, this begins in the slow cooker. Melt butter in slow cooker (or high or low — depends on how much time you got), add onions. Ignore until soft and translucent, stirring occasionally. You can, of course, also do this in a saucepan.

Turn slow-cooker down to low. Add mushrooms, garlic cloves, rosemary and bay leaf. Stir and ignore mushrooms until they’ve all released their liquid.

Turn off slow cooker. The goal here is to preserve the liquid; I’ve cooked it off before, and what fun is that? You can now ignore the liquid until it’s time to make dinner.

Transfer the whole mess into a saucepan. Add all the other ingredients, stir to combine the flour and milk and then turn on the heat to medium. Stir often, until thickened. Fish out bay leaf. Ta-dah! At that point, I dumped in my tofu, which was already baked to a toothsome consistency, and covered to keep it warm while I did the rest of dinner. You could easily do this with pasta or any other pre-cooked protein.

I think you could probably thicken the sauce in the oven, pouring the pre-thickened sauce over chicken parts and then baking until the chicken is done, but don’t trust me on that. I don’t know how long it takes to bake chicken.

Rice pilaf not included. Sorry for the bad photos; my camera ran out of battery juice.