Cooking with Kent and Vidushi: Stuffed Mushroom Caps

Dearest fine readers of Mirror,

Welcome back to yet another edition of Cooking with Kent and Vidushi! As the days get colder and shorter, Vidushi is writing an ode to sharing meals with friends. We hope you have a wonderful end of the term! 

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Hello from London! I am currently lucky enough to be on a study abroad program in London Town with 17 other Dartmouth students. While Kent has been putting in the hours in Hanover and sharing a wide variety of amazing recipes, I have been — in full honesty — mostly just cooking pasta or rice with beans in my small apartment kitchen. Sometimes I switch it up and cook rice with lentils! Upon seeing my repetitive diet, some of my friends have been shocked to learn that I co-write a cooking column. 

If you can’t tell, I’ve been a little starved — pun — for cooking creativity. That is, until my friend and fellow FSPer Sofia Piraino ’27 invited me to a wonderful and spontaneous lunch in her room following a particularly dreary walk back to our apartments from class. This week’s recipe is from that glorious lunch and is a creation of Sofia and her mom’s, with some inspiration from “Bon Appétit” magazine.

Ingredients:

• 4 fresh portobello mushrooms, cleaned and with stems removed. Look for mushrooms with minimal damage to their caps.
• 2 cups of spinach
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 2 cups of tomato sauce
• 2 shallots
• 1 log of goat cheese
• Olive oil, salt, pepper and oregano, to taste

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Cover the mushrooms with olive oil, salt, pepper and oregano to taste, and place them on a baking sheet.
3. Bake the mushrooms at 425 degrees for 15 minutes.
4. While the mushrooms bake, warm a skillet over medium heat and drizzle in olive oil.
5. Add diced shallots and diced garlic to the pan, and allow them to brown slightly.
6. Once the shallots and garlic have browned, add in spinach and allow it to cook down, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat to low.
7. Once the mushrooms have baked for 15 minutes, take them out of the oven and remove any excess liquid from the baking sheet or in the mushrooms.
8. Fill each mushroom cap with about half a cup of tomato sauce. Top each cap with some of the cooked spinach, and then place a cut round of goat cheese on top of the spinach.
9. Bake the filled mushroom caps at 425 degrees for 10 more minutes until the goat cheese has browned slightly.

We ate our mushroom caps alongside pasta, but they are great on their own as well. Enjoy!

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