Adventures in Cooking: Oyster mushroom tacos

You know what they say: Behind every great taco is a great story, and behind every great story is a great mycelium. Here is the story of my mycelium.

One day recently, a friend called me from a farmer's market, and asked me if I wanted to grow my own mushrooms. Sure, I said. I couldn't see why not.

An hour or so later, said friend showed up at my house with a large plastic bag filled with an unsightly gray-and-white mass. It did not look appetizing, but it was, apparently, the substrate upon which I was destined to grow my own oyster mushrooms. It did not come with instructions. I asked my friend how it was supposed to work, and he said something about putting the bag in a humid spot like the bathroom. That was all he had.

I looked online for further information, and eventually discovered a couple of tutorials that featured mushroom bags similar to my own. The mass inside, supposedly a mixture of sawdust and mushroom spores, was supposed to be a mycelium (immature fungal colony) which would sprout when exposed to the the right conditions—namely a lot of humidity and just a little bit of indirect sunlight. I was supposed to cut a few slits in the bag, place it somewhere shady, and mist with water twice a day.

The home I chose for my mycelium was on top of a wardrobe. About a week of spritzing later, the first fruiting bodies sprouted from one of the slits. I was excited. Over the next few days, my oyster mushrooms grew in size until they could be ignored no longer, until I harvested them with great pride.

Then my excitement promptly turned to anxiety. How on earth was someone who never cooks supposed to eat these mushrooms?

As usual, the Internet was my saving grace. I found a couple of oyster mushroom recipes, and among them, one for oyster mushroom tacos. Tacos would be the perfect food, since I have lots of taco ingredients stockpiled over the course of several visits to Mexican restaurants!

Once I had skimmed over the recipe and gotten the gist of what comprises a mushroom taco, I decided to wing it—that's how Adventures in Cooking are born! So without further ado, let's see the recipe:

Mushroom Tacos Taco, Rube Goldberg style!

Prep time: a few months + 1 week + 15 minutes + 1 night + 5 minutes

Servings: four one

Ingredients:

• Oyster mushroom mycelium
• Taco seasoning...or any old bunch of miscellaneous spices
• Olive oil
• Flour tortillas
• Maybe some nutritional yeast, why not?
• Cheese? Sure.
• Something green and leafy to put on top of the tacos
• Sour cream would be nice, but if you don't have it, NBD.
• Guacamole

Steps:

1. Visit some Mexican restaurants and acquire the following: a huge collection of tortillas because your boyfriend always orders fajitas but doesn't eat carbs; guacamole; some of those black beans that always come as a side dish but that no one ever eats except the vegetarian (you). It would be nice to get some sour cream during this process, but if you don't, NBD. I hope you're not hungry yet, because this step will take a few months.
2. Grow oyster mushrooms from mycelium. Ripen for 1 week.
3. Cut mushrooms from mycelium.
4. Pour some olive oil into a heated skillet—no need to measure, just put in as much as you think you'll need to properly sauté whatever quantity of mushrooms you have.
5. Dump mushrooms into skillet.
6. While the mushrooms are cooking, sprinkle with taco seasoning. If you have taco seasoning, but are worried it will be too spicy for you, you can use some taco seasoning recipes from the internet as inspiration. These recipes seem to all include the following: ground chile, onion, garlic, oregano, cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle the mushrooms with a small amount of each of these spices according to your taste. If you don't like spicy food or alliums, put hardly any chile powder or garlic or onion, but go heavy on the oregano.
7. By the time you're done sprinkling spices, the mushrooms should be basically cooked. Taste one, and immediately realize two things: 1) Despite barely using any chile powder, the mushrooms are too spicy, and 2) they are almost uniformly as tough as leather!
8. To solve #1 above, rinse all the mushrooms under running water to wash off as much of the spiciness as possible.
9. To solve #2 in Step 7 above, cut off and discard the stems of each mushroom. By this point, you will have barely enough mushrooms to fill one half a taco. That's OK, it just means you'll need less spice for step 10!
10. Re-apply all of the spices as in Step 5 above, but in smaller quantities...and leave out the ground chile.
11. You had originally planned to mix this taco filling with corn and cilantro to make it a proper Mexican dish, but you have since realized you do not have any corn. To help fill out the really pitiful amount of mushrooms, sprinkle them with nutritional yeast, which you just happened to find in the spice cabinet. It's a vegan cheese substitute, so it should add a little oomph to the recipe!
12. As a base for your tacos half-taco, you will need one tortilla. Unfortunately, all of your tortillas have been in the freezer for a few months, and they have become desiccated and inseparable from each other. Find a different frozen tortilla that was stored singly and still has a little give to it, and hope for the best.
13. Pack up all your ingredients and store for later consumption. The next day, bring the ingredients to work, because the best lunch is one that needs to be assembled on top of the office mini-fridge.
14. Upon arriving at work, realize that you have some black beans in the fridge from Friday's visit to the taqueria that you had totally forgotten about! Heave a sigh of relief. Between the mushrooms and the beans, there should be enough food to make your half a taco into a whole taco!
15. Spread the beans and mushrooms on top of the tortilla. Add a dollop of guacamole (also left over from Friday's taco run) and some shredded cheddar. It would be nice if you had some sour cream, but you don't, so NBD! Garnish with arugula.
16. Attempt to eat your taco, but find that even this slightly-less-desiccated tortilla is too crunchy for human consumption, so instead eat the filling with a fork.

You survived your first foray into making oyster mushroom tacos! Now you just have to wait for your mycelium to produce more shrooms (it's supposed to fruit about 3 times before it's depleted), and then you can try it all over again!

Sunday Chef

You might be surprised to learn, since one of the recurring topics on my blog is Adventures in Cooking, that I'm really not a fan of cooking. It's time-consuming, and the results are never as good as what I'd get from even a box of something frozen, so why bother?

Theoretically, there are financial benefits to cooking for yourself, but only if you diligently and consistently use up all your ingredients and cooked meals before they spoil, which is apparently really hard for people to do. Some folks find a creative outlet in cooking, but while I consider myself creative in many ways, gastronomically is not one of them. I do not enjoy the process of cooking—food is for eating, not for laboring over. And lastly, there's the simple problem of time management. By the time I'm ready to think about a meal, I'm already too hungry to endure the long effort of converting raw ingredients into something fit to eat. I want to eat now, and cooking first is not a viable option.

So for many years I've been content to live off restaurant food, leftovers, packaged dinners, and zero-prep foods like nuts, cheese, and fresh vegetables...but a lot of things have changed over the past few months. 1) I decided to reduce the amount of cheese in my life and replace it with low-fat protein. 2) I decided to stop eating protein bars for breakfast every day, and mix it up sometimes with vegan whole foods. 3) I haven't been eating in restaurants as much.

These things have necessitated a change in the way I provide for my nutritional needs: I have been cooking a lot more.

Well, "cooking" is not entirely accurate—most of what I've been doing is not so much cooking (which has to involve the application of heat), as just mixing a couple of ingredients together and calling it a day. But I am making my own food, and it hasn't been that terrible. Still, terrible or no, food prep is something that I'd rather not spend my time on, and as such, I have found ways to make it as quick and efficient as possible.

Like many other people on the internet, I have come to embrace Sunday as the optimal day for food prep for the week. In this way, I can assemble all the foods I will need for the foreseeable future in one fell swoop, and I can do it first thing in the morning, before I'm too ravenous to think straight.

The fruits of my labor

This past Sunday was a real marathon of food prep.

I whipped together a batch of chia pudding (mix chia seeds with coconut milk, shake and put in fridge!) — a batch of quinoa (dump quinoa in water, boil for ten minutes, put in fridge!) — a batch of no-bake cheesecake (blend cream cheese and condensed milk in mixer, put in fridge!) — and even a very ambitious (though small) serving of mushroom taco filling (which I put in the fridge).

Of course I have bloggable thoughts about all of the foods I made on Sunday (if there's one thing that makes cooking for yourself worthwhile, it's being able to brag about it in a blog!):

• I am becoming a real chia pudding connoisseur. Since sharing my recipe for pista-chia pudding, I've made the dish with all sorts of different liquid bases and mix-ins, but my favorite variation yet is a coconut milk base. It gives the pudding a thicker consistency that makes it more fun to eat, and look less slimy too!
• My mission to find appetizing ways to prepare quinoa continues apace. Since my first adventures with the ingredient, I tried mixing it with fruits and beet powder as a breakfast food, but that was also a no-go. Finally I threw in the towel. The one and only way to make quinoa enjoyable is ... to mix it with cheese powder. Yes, this totally defeats the purpose of quinoa as a low-fat, non-cheese protein source, but at least it will help me get through my remaining supply of uncooked quinoa (how does one quart of quinoa last so long!?) without cursing its very existence.
  

  

  This is as good as I've ever seen quinoa look.

• No-bake cheesecake is hardly the kind of healthy food that one should be meal-prepping on Sunday, but I still have a sweet tooth that will not be denied. Since I learned how to make this very simple mixture, I have been unable to eat real cheesecake (unless it's from the Cheesecake Factory and has a ton of mix-ins), because this version is so much better! So creamy, and not dry at all, and versatile! You can toss any kind of candy or fruit into it to enhance its flavor and texture profile! It is one of my favorite treats to have waiting for me at the end of a long day!
• Ah, now we get to the mushroom taco filling! Can I condense this all into one bullet point? No! Should I make it into an Adventure in Cooking all its own? Sure! Stay tuned, readers! My next post should be lots of fun(gus)!