Stuffed Mushrooms
Anika on Thursday, April 2
As a kid, my mom had go-to recipes for when she was having friends over for things like Bunco or book club. One of my favorites was her stuffed-mushroom recipe. These are probably my favorite way to eat mushrooms. Plus, just the addition of a vegetable side dish and you get to have a delicious appetizer for dinner. My mom’s recipe uses italian sausage, so mine does as well, but any meat substitute like tempeh could be used instead.
Ingredients
What you’ll need:
- mushrooms (I used white because $, but crimini are best IMO)
- breadcrumbs
- parmesan or nutritional yeast (for funk)
- cream cheese
- smoked paprika
- chopped garlic
- black pepper
- cayenne
- italian sausage or meat substitute
Prepping
The main steps are:
- cleaning the mushrooms
- removing bottoms of the mushrooms
- chopping up the mushroom bottoms
- cooking the sausage
- incorporating all the ingredients to stuff into the mushroom tops
Step by Step
The first necessary step is cleaning mushrooms. For those unfamiliar, do not simply rinse your mushrooms. Instead, use a slightly damp paper towel to rub each mushroom and remove excess dirt. Then trim the very end (sort of like flower stems) from the bottoms of the mushrooms.
For this recipe, you will use the full mushroom but need to remove the bottoms from the tops. The bottoms will be chopped fine and added to the sausage filling! No waste! Crimini mushrooms make this the simplest— simply wiggling the bottom around will help remove it from the top, leaving you a nice, fillable mushroom top for your filling. The white mushrooms I used in this recipe required a little more effort to remove the bottom, and then I had to use a spoon to excavate and make room for filling. Either way, you should end up with nice hollow mushroom tops and some nice, choppable mushroom bottoms.
Once separated, chop up the mushroom bottoms nice and fine. Saute your sausage in a pan (this step may not be necessary if using a meat sausage substitute) and cook so that your sausage is cooked through and crumbly but not too cripsy.
Mix together your filling ingredients: chopped mushroom bottoms, cooked sausage (or meat substitute), bread crumbs, cream cheese, parmesan, and spices. Then stuff into your mushroom tops.
Place all your stuffed mushrooms onto a baking sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes at 400 degrees F or until your mushrooms feels soft with a crispy topping.
Serve however you want and enjoy! We ate ours with some garlicky, sauteed bell peppers.
