Roasted Mushrooms

As a normal child, I rejected vegetables with a passion. Specifically anything that wasn’t broccoli. This did not deter my mother from trying such terrible things as brussel sprouts or people from insisting supreme pizza, which had mushrooms, was a great plan. I preferred plain, pretty simple tastes over here. Eventually, like eons later, I tried mushrooms (I can tell you exactly when it was, surprisingly it was at sport’s camp and it was lunch time and I’m pretty sure I mistook a Portobello mushroom to be a hamburger. Happy accidents.) and discovered perhaps they weren’t so terrible. They should still not be mixed into such delicious things as pasta sauce and pizza though; those things exist in perfection and need not be tainted by other things like chunky vegetables.

Large quantity of cleaned and chopped mushrooms

Anyways, I found this recipe on Pinterest (what a shock!) and it just so happened that the grocery store had a sale on mushrooms (BOGO which for those of you who are like me and never understood that term, stands for Buy One Get One…YOLO so BOGO!!). Typically I ignore the part where you’re meant to wash produce. If it comes pre-packaged (strawberries, bananas, blueberries etc.), then I assume it’s clean. However the recipe specifically tells you how to wipe off the mushrooms (not that it’s hard to figure out) so I assumed this might be an important step, mushrooms are a fungus after all. Oh my am I glad I did: visible dirt coming off of those lovely ‘shrooms. You’d think this would change my approach to washing things but no really, just mushrooms. Once they were all nice and clean, I did that thing where I followed the directions and had a moment of “well, it says ‘until they’re cooked’ but I have no idea what that means…” but figured it out once they looked mushroom-y enough. Fun fact: there are little herb boxes at the store for types of meat so instead of having to buy three herb bunches separately that would have gone to waste since I needed small amounts, I bought the one entitled “Poultry” which contained most of what I needed. How important can parsley be anyways?

Mmm seasonings

I also bought a bottle of balsamic vinegar only to realize that it requires a teaspoon. If I had known that, I probably wouldn’t have bought the bottle but I guess I can use it for other things like more mushrooms and salad dressings and—Pinterest/Googling ‘balsamic recipes’.

Ready for the oven!

Fun fact: these mushrooms are delicious. And they’re even more delicious if you put them in a grilled cheese sandwich. And then you dip that sandwich into tomato soup on a cold fall day and it’s heaven. And then you realize you have bread, cheese, tomato, and mushroom and it all surprisingly tastes like pizza. But that does not mean putting mushrooms on pizza is okay. There is no transitive property of mushrooms, it’s not the same!

And all done! Tenderly cooked and marinated. So delicious!