Though I hate to admit it, I have a job that sometimes makes demands of me. This explains how Tara, Baby, and I found ourselves at the farmers’ market in Boulder, Colorado last weekend. It’s gotten even better than when we lived here: the weather has cooperated this year, the old-line farmers are doing well, and the inventive younger generation (Red Wagon, Abbondanza, and Cure Organic farms) have thrived, establishing CSAs and good relationships with local restaurants. We bought big bags of summer vegetables to cook for the friends who so graciously put us up. Our favorite purchase, I have to say, was the pound of mixed mushrooms—shitake, lion’s mane, oyster, and my favorite, the king oyster (or pleurotus)—we bought from Chad the Mushroom Man at Hazel Dell.
There are mushroom vendors at the New York Greenmarket, but they’re expensive and a little unimaginative about varieties, so I usually pass them by. I’d almost forgotten how much I like mushrooms. I made a mushroom omelette with shallots, thyme, and market eggs for Sunday brunch, and I sautéed more mushrooms with herbs, garlic, and a little white wine to spoon over bruschetta for an evening appetizer. The real highlight, though, was a version of the mushroom salad I learned to make as a cook at L’Etoile.
That salad was the one thing former Chef Odessa Piper never took off menu, and it taught me a lot about how great ingredients and attention to detail can trump fancy technique. The salad starts with a well-balanced dressing: grate a little shallot with a Microplane and let it macerate for half an hour with salt in a little sherry vinegar. Add a bit of Dijon mustard and a couple grindings of fresh black pepper, then slowly whisk in good quality neutral oil (a mixture of grapeseed and light olive oil, for example) so the dressing is emulsified and creamy. Taste it. The dressing should nip you back gently.
Next come the mushrooms, each kind prepared separately to leave them perfectly cooked and bring out what’s special about them. Most can be cut up, tossed with oil, salt, and pepper, and roasted on a tray in a hot oven until they’re perfectly done, but pay attention to the shape of each mushroom. With last week’s mix, for example, I trimmed the base off the oysters and roasted them whole, then cut thick medallions of king oyster stems, thin slices of shitake caps, and little matchsticks of the lion’s mane.
(The kitchen and waitstaff ate dinner together every night before service at L’Etoile, when the kitchen staff would detail the dishes on the evening’s menu. My boss Deb often listed the evening’s collection of mushrooms, since they changed so often. Walter, the Central American dishwasher, had a nickname for everyone, and Deb’s became “Enoki, shitake, crimini…” But I digress.)
The mushroom salad also needs some soft greens. We bought a mix of baby greens from Pastures of Plenty, but any mixture that’s mostly delicate lettuces (think butterhead, not romaine) will do.
Wash and dry the lettuce, pour some of dressing in the bottom of a big salad bowl, then add the greens. Pop the mushrooms back in the oven for a few minutes and get out your serving plates. When the mushrooms have warmed through, put them in the bowl on top of the lettuce and mix everything together by hand. Taste again—the sharpness of the shallot and the acidity in the dressing should tingle against warm meatiness of the mushrooms, with the unctuous oil and sweet lettuce underlining both. Add more dressing if you need to. Put it on the plates and serve it while the mushrooms are warm.