Ground chuck and ground pork, garlic, onions, carrots and celery, thyme, oregano and red pepper, white wine, milk, peeled tomatoes and tomato paste.Hefty can of delicious San Marzano tomatoes mixes with, or rather sits atop a pool of juices.
Simmerin'
Czar Champignon spotted a huge fruiting of inky caps between the sidewalk and road. Not the rarest or most delectable of mushrooms, but tasty enough, and into the pan they go. We harvested only a few of well over a dozen fruiting bodies.
A suitable topping for a humble meat sauce. Don't forget the parmesan.
This next meal actually coincided with the bolognese preparation, but the marriage of ragu and coprinus atramentarius, which didn't occur until two days later, deserved a detour.
Pork quesadilla
Saute carrots as long as you can, add onion, then ground pork, season, butter cast iron skillet, cover with fresh tortillas, spread meat mixture over, add grated cheese, cover with more tortillas, add more cheese and salsa verde. Bake for 10-15 minutes. Top with more salsa verde and cilantro.
Cheese on meat mixture on tortillas. I would add salsa here too, if I did it again.
Into the oven
Just wait for some more salsa and fresh cilantro
More pizza
Used a new dough recipe, which I like more than Alton's. Also rested the dough a lot longer before forming pies, which is essential. Amateur tossing not pictured. Also not pictured is a sauteed pepper and onion pie which got pretty charred by the blazing heat in our gas oven. This shortly before our poor stone tile gave up the ghost.
Pizza margherita, simple and nearly perfect.
Zucchini/calavacitas pizza baking on the broken stone. It broke again, in another place, after this.
That looks pretty good, but we can do better...
After a jaunt through the beautiful and mycologically diverse sandstone canyons of the Illinois River plain/valley, we returned with a rich bounty and a vigorous appetite. Luckily, the rest of the pizza dough awaited us.
A sampling of specimens that were interesting enough to bring home. The boletes at top left were especially promising but turned out to be quite bitter. The puffball just below them was a tasty treat, but not as good as the small, fully opened bolete just below that.
Boletes will have their day, but this one belonged to the diminutive red chanterelle, a lovely specimen equally pleasing to the eye, nose and taste bud.Beautiful
Beautiful
Beautiful
Chanterelles frying in butter
In the spirit of the chanterelle, whose delicate aesthetic qualities, invitation to invention and accomodating grace are anathema to despotism, King Boletus abdicated responsibility for the pizzas, leaving their conception and execution to his friends. The results represent three distinct culinary visions that, whether due to the quality of ingredients used, or some intrinsic genius, were both consistently excellent and totally coherent.
The first pizza was composed of tomato sauce, mozzerella and cheddar cheese, a salted, dried Mexican meat called Cecina that was fried with onions and a sprinkling of chanterelles. An optional cilantro garnish added a pitch-perfect top-note to this complex and resonant pie.
Don't let looks decieve you. This slightly misshapen pie, featuring crispy fried cabbage, onions and hot sauce on a base of mozzerella and tomato sauce, was beautiful.
The final pie required a difficult and almost catastrophic rescue effort from a sticky peel, but it was well worth the effort. Composed of spicy tomato sauce, cecina, caramelized onion, chanterelle, copious shavings of parmesan and basil, this malformed pie was reminiscent of a chanterelle, growing even more beautiful as its radial symettry broke down. More beautiful and more cooked - which for pizza as well as for chanterelles - means more delicious.
Also, King Boletus cooked up some meatballs that together with leftover pasta and tomato sauce cooked in a little bit of the fat became irresistible.
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