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Thursday, May 5, 2011

Mushrooms & Memory

Tomorrow evening Jean & I will travel from the environs of Meadows Place to somewhere in Katy to attend my niece Felicia's celebration / her mother insists not a goodbye party as Felicia leaves for the Navy.

At some moment I either volunteered to make the stuffed mushrooms Felicia's mother adores or perhaps she asked me - I don't know.  But this afternoon, I went to the store for the ingredients.  

I knew exactly what to buy - Italian sausage, black olives, scallions, mushrooms.  Make a bechamel sauce, saute the sausage, add the ingredients with a bit of spice, stuff the mushrooms.

Because it had been a  bit since I last whipped this delicacy up, I pulled down the recipe book I believed held the recipe.

I found recipes for spinach stuffed mushrooms, for marinated mushrooms, for mushrooms stuffed with minced mushrooms, for mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat.

But no mushrooms my niece & her mother were expecting.

So I consulted Jean - how, I asked, could I buy what I know are the correct ingredients & still not know the recipe?
I called off all the recipes in the volume I believed held my recipe & then suddenly, I saw that the recipe for mushrooms with spinach required a bechamel sauce.

As the lightbulb went off in my head, I said to Jean, "Bechamel, bechamel."

She must have felt a bit like Watson listening to a seemingly inane declaration from Holmes.

But, like Holmes, I knew exactly where to go - I pulled out the "Silver Palate" cookbook given to me by Stephen Sachnick, & turned instantly to the recipe for sausage stuffed mushrooms.

Which begins with a bechamel sauce.

Jean laughed.










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