If hummus is a vegetarian cliché, the grilled Portobello mushroom is a downright crutch. The ultimate ‘wedding meal vegetarian entrée’ let-down! Both veggie and carnivore chefs alike fuck it up: wash it, throw it on a grill for marks, and serve it black and dry, like a mouth full of psilocybin shrooms without the side effects.
We won’t take it anymore. So what’s to be done with this king of mushrooms? Braising, kids.
Please, think of this more as advice about technique, and less about an exact recipe. There is not just one braising liquid this will work with. But since we started drinking with, and occasionally working alongside, the anarchists behind Elf Café, we’ve been enamored with their Portobello preparations. Long braised in stock and Marsala, their shroomies are always moist. This made us realize that once you fortify the membranes of this biggie with spiced vinegar and stock and liquor, it’s perfectly prepped for the grill or a hot pan, without losing its moisture or shriveling up.
We have played with proportions, made a couple mistakes (cider vinegar…pucker, pucker, oops) and can boast that this one is our favorite way, so far, to braise the shrooms for two awesome formats: tacos and sandwich “meat.”
So take this and run. Just know that you will never, ever, ever again be able to check “vegetarian entrée” without cringing with fear that you will be let down.

4 Portobello mushrooms
1 carrot
1 jalapeño pepper
1 white onion
2 Tbs. olive oil
2 red beets
2 cups red wine (dry)
2 cups vegetable stock
1 cup Marsala wine
1/3 cup Balsamic vinegar
2 Tbs. soy sauce
1 tsp. liquid smoke (optional)
1 Tbs. Dijon mustard
Cracked black pepper to taste
1. Remove the stumpy base from your mushrooms but leave the gills. Rinse under water and set aside.
2. Chop the carrot, onion and jalapeño pepper. Put a stock pot or cast iron pot on medium high flame. Add oil and toss in the chopped veg. Stir and cook until barely brown. Meanwhile peel the beets, chop and add.
3. Pour the wine, stock, Marsala wine, vinegar and liquid smoke into the pot. Spoon in mustard and stir. Then add the mushrooms with the gills up. Cover pot with a lid and cook for 20-30 minutes on medium heat.
4. Once shrooms are cooked throughout, remove from heat and let sit until cool. Remove mushrooms and place in a bowl or Tupperware, cover them with a couple tablespoons of liquid, and refrigerate (stays good up to 5 days).
5. Strain out the beets, onions, carrots and pepper but save the liquid. Return liquid to the pot on low heat. Cook for an additional 10-12 minutes or until the liquid has reduced by half but before it foams. Save this reduction as a “aus jus,” perfect for french dips, garnish or marinades.

1 braised Portobello mushroom
1 Tbs. grapeseed oil
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. red chile
1/2 tsp. kosker salt
1. For sandwich slices: place the mushroom on a cutting board, gill-side face down. Flatten the mushroom gently with your hand and use a serrated knife to cut very thin slices off the mushroom. Serve it cold or hot.
2. For taco meat: chop into big chunky cubes.
3. Place mushroom slices or cubes into a large bowl. Coat with oil. Sprinkle with ground cumin, red chile, salt and toss to coat well.
4. Serve sandwiches on a roll with hamburger garnishes.
5. Or for tacos, serve on corn tortillas with chopped tomatoes, onions and jalapeños.
Beverage: Craftsman Saison
Soundtrack: The Cure’s “Meat Hook”

One of the great culinary inventions is also one of the dumbest vegetarian cliches: hummus or hommos.
Either way hummus translates simply to “chick peas,” or garbanzos, the bean from which its typically birthed. An eminent spread that depends on right spicing and good olive oil, and that with a hunk of unleavened bread forms a perfect protein, which Arabs and Jews have agreed upon for thousands of years.
We are not hummus newbies or puritans. We’ve gone deeply nutty with a pistachio-version , festive with a weird christmas version, and we’ve scolded friends for not making their own.
Now, it’s time to take it up a notch, some next level shit… fresh hummus. (Fresh as in these chickpeas never touched a tin can and they don’t have to be dumped and rinsed to remove that mystery slick that gums up all canned beans and makes them smell like hangover urine.) The texture and taste of hummus made from fresh chick peas is genuinely superior — crisper, never gloopy. Several farmers market stands around Los Angeles boast bean sprout vendors and they all sell chick peas.
The beans are firm when they’re fresh, just hard enough to make a thud when you plop ’em on the kitchen counter, but still moist. We like to steam them and blend them still warm. This time of year green garlic is all over our markets too, so you’ll see that in this recipe, but the real magic here is the simple truth that farm fresh is always better than supermarket metal.

1 and 1/2 cups fresh garbanzos (not dried)
1 bulb of green garlic (w/ green tips)
2 cloves white garlic
1/4 cup tahini
Juice of one lemon
1/3 cup water (as needed)
1/3 cup olive oil
10-15 fresh spinach leaves, roughly chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
1 Tbs. zartar (optional)
1. Steam the fresh beans in a soup pot with steam table insert over medium-high heat for about 30 minutes, or until beans are cooked but still slightly crunchy. Skins should slide off under a firm pinch. If the beans you start off with are particularly hard, simply boil them rather than steam. Remove and set aside to cool for a couple minutes. Blending while still warm is fine too.
2. In a food processor, add steamed beans, tahini and lemon juice. Roughly chop your green garlic like you would scallions and add the pieces along with the regular, white garlic cloves. Pulse and begin slowly adding olive oil. If the mixture has trouble moving, add up to a 1/3 cup water as needed. Puree for several minutes.
3. Finely add chopped spinach leaves for color. And season with salt and pepper for a final blend.
4. Serve with olive oil drizzle, green garlic and fresh garbanzo garnish. We like a pinch of zartar for garnish as well.
Soundtrack: Dinosaur Jr.’s “Green Mind”
Beverage: Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale

It might be good for you, but we hate the taste of glycyrrhizin. In high school, we used to taste it at night, right before bed, brushing with the lights out. It’s a natural derivative of licorice root, found in the light purple-y tubes of Tom’s of Maine brand toothpaste mom started buying. We knew it as “Fennel death flavored” cuz it’s kind of horrible. Think stiff, chemically enhanced potpourri in your grandmother’s shitter.
We only bring it up because we had a bad flashback to this natural toothpaste while drinking beer. These things shouldn’t go together, right?
The beer in question, Alagash Fluxus, is cool and clean looking. It’s label looks like it’s printed on linen — an off-white pant suit to be more exact — and it’s decorated with hand-drawn flowers. Fluxus is latin, of course, for “flow” or “continuous change,” which the label points out helpfully like a Scientific botany field guide to California flowers. Or like a tube of yuppie toothpaste might. Or a swiftly dropped reference in a bossanova pop song about personal growth.
Theoretically, this name makes sense because it’s a seasonal recipe that Allagash’s brewers play with each time they brew it. This year’s Fluxus sounded compelling and wholesome, it’s brewed with sweet potato and black pepper. Not a bad flavor for a sweetly Belgian-via-East Coast saison-style brew. We started wishing we’d had it around Thanksgiving.
But we got bad vibes right off the bat.
The head just wouldn’t quit when we first popped this bottle, which you can see looking closely at our beers in the foie gras video. Thick creamy foam on top of more bubbles. The hue and texture was perfect, buxom, completely gorgeous. But off camera we marveled at the pure cane rum kick of this weird, chemically brew. Sometimes we think beers fall into upper and downer categories. This was definitely an upper — a ‘run-tell-them-on-the-mountain’ type of sativa drunk. We got giddy lapping up this blinding, sweet amber sap. Halfway through one of us realized what taste was tripping us up: the tooth paste. Sweet but root-like, the peppery plant taste nearly hidden behind big golden bangs of saccharine.
Cute and strong, this beer had appealing qualities; it just didn’t speak our language.

Dairy Pairy: Delice Des Cremiers, a soft, bloomy triple creme
Soundtrack: Vampire Weekend’s “California English”

While I fiddle devices way beyond my mechanical capabilities (power converters, seat backs, tray tables), check out Part One of a recent “lecture” I gave at a local bookstore as an envoy of Nicole’s Gourmet Foods. Evan hid in the bookshelves to chronicle the speech, which was part of the store’s “Expert Series.” (SNAP!)
Reporting from a tin can 30,000 feet above the frigid shark infested waters of the Atlantic ocean – soon I will descend into a deep scotch and Diazepam induced slumber, ending (if I’m lucky) at 7.00 am tomorrow morning in Paris.
Yeah, France.
I am embarking on my first international business trip. I’ll be accompanied by other top minds in my field (cheese): Adam Moskowitz, our patron and the controller of literally all awesome edibles that enter America from Europe, Sarah Zabrowski, a former foot soldier of Murray’s cheese, the all seeing all knowing Brad Dube (who runs a swat team specialty cheese distribution company in NYC), a current sub lord of Formaggio Kitchen, and new friends from Bedford Cheese, a very highly regarded house of caseus in Brooklyn, as well as Kate Arding, the founder of Culture Magazine.
Heavy hitters. I guess this means I rule?
We’re headed first to the Salon Du Fromage (exactly what it sounds like: the biggest cheese show in Europe), a visit to Adam’s facilities on the other side of the pond (i.e. where everything leaves on its way to America), and then off to Switzerland to (gasp) visit 15 cheese producers. Real farm and farmstead heavies (no industrial factory farms here.)
In the mountains. In Switzerland. I will watch cheeses that I’ve known and loved be made. I will smell the cellars where they age. I will (god willing) take innumerable Facebook photos with alpine livestock.

In the meantime, here’s some more gabbing about the cheeses that should be on your next cheese plate. I’m going to ready my proverbial elephant gun for the cheese safari and take a nap before we land in the shit. You will see it all.
– a