This was the starter to our three course meal this weekend. The recipe calls for wild rice (which is very long, thin, black, and looks nothing like normal rice) but we couldn’t get hold of it so we used brown rice.
Like an ordinary sized mushroom, only bigger, and filled with rice and roasted onions.
Basically, all you do here is roast some onions, shallots and leeks, roast the mushrooms (separately, to get them to cook properly), whilst boiling the rice. Then pile everything on the mushroom and throw it back in the oven.
The end result is… a bit dull. The only flavour here is coming from the vegetables themselves, which are good roasted but not enough on their own. As a starter we thought this was just OK. However, we had some of the rice and vegetable mixture left over and had it with our main course, and it tasted amazing – a really flavoursome rice dish. I think the general idea would make an excellent alternative to risotto, but the poor mushroom doesn’t have enough flavour on its own for this recipe.
We will definitely be trying something like this again, but will be tweaking the recipe beyond recognition. This would have gone well as part of a main course.
Who made it: Dan and Anna jointly.
Recipe: “the Complete Vegetarian Cookbook” by Sarah Brown, page 173.
