Mushroom Mustaches

We Mustache You a Question…

Okay, that joke doesn’t really work without the meme of Sean Connery with a mustache, but whatever. Did you know that sliced portobello mushrooms look like mustaches when you cut them right?

I was introduced to the wonder that is the portobello mushroom for the first time when I was about ten or eleven years old. My parents had switched me to a specialized (mostly) vegetarian diet as part of a cancer prevention program, and one of the things that I was allowed to have was mushrooms. My family went to visit my Aunt Ann in New York, and over the course of a week my aunt introduced me to a huge array of delicious foods I’d never tasted before. Two items stood out to me in particular, though.

The first was black olives. As a child and even later as an adult, I’ve never had a taste for green olives. I love olive oil, but I can’t stand eating green olives whole. But I’d never tasted black olives before. Aunt Ann cracked open a can of them, and she and I proceeded to eat them straight out of the can. No cooking required, just an aunt and a nephew both with Italian heritage enjoying one of the most quintessential Mediterranean foods around. They were delicious! Tangy, rich, a little oily, and the perfect middle ground between tough and smushy.

The second item was the one that really blew my eleven-year-old mind. Aunt Ann asked if I liked mushrooms, which I said I did. She then pulled a pack of portobello mushrooms out of her fridge and showed me. I’d never seen mushrooms that big before! Well, edible mushrooms. My parents had big puffball mushrooms growing in the yard that I liked to stomp on and pretend they were bombs exploding, but I knew not to eat those. Portobellos made my eyes widen. It was like a steak, but in mushroom form.

So she cooked them up in olive oil and salt and gave me some, and my transformation to portobello lover was complete. A portobello mushroom has so much substance, so much flesh to it, that restaurants figured out that you could make it the “meat” of a vegetarian sandwich if you cooked it like a steak on the grill.

Our splurge for this past week was a pack of three portobellos, which I de-stemmed before cutting them in slices across the top of the cap. This creates the “mustache” shape mentioned earlier. I prepped the pan with olive oil, salt, pepper, basil, and some garlic powder, and cooked the mustaches on medium heat for about three minutes per side. Oh man were they good… I also took a second portobello and sliced it width-wise, so it made two big slabs, which I cooked the same way as the mustaches and used them as filler for a sandwich.

Oh, and just so you know, I am passing my love of this wonderful fungus down to the next generation, just like my Aunt Ann did for me. Our three littles crowded around me asking for “a bite, a bite!” All three of them got several bites each, and they loved it. That put a smile on my face.

Oops, and now I think I have some mushroom mustache in my actual mustache…