Portobellos are gourmet mushrooms. Right?

Actually…no.

Portobellos are poseurs. They are just your common Agaricus bisporus (button) mushroom with good PR. Who knew?

It turns out that until the 1980s,  those big beefy mushrooms we now call portobellos were the overly-mature culls that more often found their way into the compost pile than onto the dinner plate. Today, those same mushrooms command premium prices–$14 a pound at Amazon Whole Foods right now!

So…what in the heck happened here?

To put it bluntly, elderly common mushrooms got the Cinderella treatment. 

As is true so often in life, timing was everything. In the 1980s, the food world was experiencing an “eat your broccoli” healthy food moment. Seeing that unfold, the mushroom industry seized that moment to introduce the portobello.  To make it happen, marketing experts (Don Draper?) were enlisted to sell the heretofore mushroom discards to the general public as healthful delicacies. Ingenious! No?

Along the way, the mushroom promoters experimented with names: Portobello? Portobella? Portobella? Today, those names are used interchangeably. They also promoted the brown portobellos as a healthier (albeit more earthy-appearing) alternative to the pristine younger white button mushroom strain of Agaricus bisporus that had dominated the market since they were popularized in 18th Century France.

But how? The public had to be sold on the deep musty flavor and scent of the “new” mushrooms. (As mushrooms mature, they lose some of their water content and the flavor of the mushroom intensifies.) The PR men pulled that one off brilliantly. The portobellos were promoted as having a “picked fresh from the forest floor” scent and taste. You’ve gotta respect the sheer chutzpah of that “forrest floor” line! 

The growing health food conscious public (literally) ate it up.  Today, portobello mushrooms make up a substantial part of the billion dollar U.S. mushroom industry. 

I’m a portobello fan. I’m first in line to enjoy a juicy grilled portobello as a main or on a bun. Sometimes, though, I long for preparations that take the mushrooms in new directions. This innovative portobello mushroom recipe, Portobello Mushroom Steaks And Butter Bean Mash, fits that bill perfectly. 

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Flavor. The book is excellent and is available on Amazon and in your local bookstores.

Oh Instacart!

It’s not you, it’s me.  Well…actually…it’s you.

How did we lose that beautiful thing that  we had? We’ve been so close since March. Whatever I’ve needed, you were there.

Wine? You’ve always given my glass a generous pour.

Ripe tomatoes? You’ve searched for them like a trooper, knowing that the transcendent flavor of truly ripe tomatoes would make me happy. I loved you for that.

Makrut lime leaves? OK. My bad. I told you I knew that order was unfair. I didn’t think you held a grudge.

But, then, this happened.

My usually flawless Instacart order arrived this week with a bouquet of six grossly overripe avocados–packed at the bottom of the box. Six overripe avocados! (You know…the squishy ones that would have been perfectly ripe like two days ago but are now…ugh!…on. their. decline.) That was hurtful.

We need to talk.

You’ve forced Sweet Juliet and me to struggle so that we wouldn’t waste food. In the end, we decided that one foodie wannabe and one small dog could only eat so much guac and avocado toast–although Juliet was more optimistic than I about the guac gorge.

As luck would have it, I had  been leafing through the pages of a newly-acquired cookbook, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Flavor, when this week’s avocado crisis reared its ugly head. And…there it was on page 83! Chilled Avocado Soup With Crunchy Garlic Oil. Once again, Yotam saved the day.

Is there a future for us, Instacart, or have you kicked me to the curb? (That would be Ralph’s curbside.) Sad.

The Yotam Ottolenghi  cookbook Flavor is available at your local bookstore.

We owe a big thank you to H. David Dalquist. He invented the bundt pan for the Nordic Ware Company in 1950.

As the story goes, Mr. Dalquist, a co-owner of Nordic Ware in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was approached by two women from a local Jewish women’s service organization, Hadassah. They were looking for a heavy pan that would bake the dense Eastern European-style cakes they remembered fondly from their youths. They brought Mr. Dalquist a ceramic kugelhopf pan as an example and he used it as the prototype for his first cast aluminum bundt pans. He coined the name for the pan from the German word for community, bund, and added a “t.”  The first pans were modest sellers for the company.

Then—bam! (as Emeril would say)—the market for bundt pans exploded thanks to Texas home baker Ella Helfrich. That year her Tunnel of Fudge Cake won second place in the annual Pillsbury Bake Off. Suddenly, every baker wanted to bake a bundt! Soon, Nordic Ware was manufacturing 30,000 bundt pans a day to keep up with demand. Today, it is estimated that there are more than 70,000,000 bundt pans in use in American kitchens.

The Nordic Ware Company, a privately held family business, is a real American entrepreneurial success story. Their products continue to be made almost entirely in their American factory in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their company employs hundreds of American workers and is renown for producing quality products. Their bundt pans carry a lifetime guarantee.

Here is a short video showing the technique for baking a bundt in a Nordic Ware pan. The pan, by the way, is the company’s 60th Anniversary pan, manufactured as an exact replica of their original 1950 pan.

Here is a great bundt cake recipe for a Bundt de Noel.

This cake is billed as a breakfast cake. I’ve been testing it–a lot.  I can personally attest to the fact that it is a great cake for any time of the day or for that late night snack craving that rolls you out of bed at 3 a.m.

This recipe was adapted from one on the Anson Mills site. You can find the original recipe here.