Aloha, welcome to the beautiful north shore of Kauai.
I’m chef Brandon Reid at Postcards Café in beautiful Hanalei town, I’m out in the
garden today.
I’d like to prepare one of our most famous dishes, if not the most popular, our stuffed
portabello mushroom.
This is a portobello mushroom, it’s basically a mature-sized chrimini mushroom, those little
brown ones you see at the supermarket.
We’re going to start off by removing the stem and we’re going to put those into a
bowl like so.
We’re going to toss them with extra virgin cold pressed organic olive oil.
And some balsamic vinegar.
A little salt, a little fresh ground black pepper.
Give it a nice couple of grinds like that so you really get the flavor in there.
Go ahead and toss them in the bowl like so, that’s how we professional chefs do it.
Remove them to a plate and let them marinate.
Using the same bowl we’re going to create our stuffing now.
We’ll start with pinto beans.
A little brown rice, you can use white rice also.
Simply cooked, some fresh corn.
Red and green bell pepper, small diced, just so everything is more or less the same size.
Some diced tomato, in this case we’re using some cherry tomatoes.
A little bit of hemp seed.
If you can’t find hemp seed, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, anything like that would do
fine.
Bit of green onion.
And some basil oil.
We’re going to take these, a little bit of chiffonade basil also.
We’re going to toss it in a bowl until they're will combined, and since we’re in the garden
today, I’m going to imagine I turned around and sautéed this on a stove, and we end up
with something like this - a nice sautéed version.
The beans have softened, and it’s kind of all come together.
Let me set this aside.
At this point we’re going to add our cheese.
We’re using a white cheddar cheese.
Mix that in like so, this is the glue that holds everything together when you put it
in the oven.
If you want to make this dish vegan, you can certainly omit the cheese and have a lovely
vegan dish.
We’re going to go ahead and stuff these mushrooms by placing the stuffing on top like
so.
We like to use a nice mound.
And there we are.
The other cheese we’re using today is parmesan cheese.
I just use a little bit of that on the top so that when we put it in the oven it gets
a nice brown crust; it comes out golden brown and delicious.
And there we are.
So we take the mushrooms, again using our imagination we put them in a 350 degree oven
for about 15 minutes.
And when we’re done, we’ll end up with something like this.
A beautiful, golden brown stuffed portobello mushroom.
To dress it, we simply take a small plate and use a bit of red bell pepper puree.
Very simple, some red peppers and olive oil, a little tomato vinaigrette, and
basil oil.
Take our portobello, set it on the plate, garnish with basil, and if you have a garden
maybe a nice chive bouquet, and if you like, a couple of beautiful sautéed shrimp go very
nicely with that.
So there you have it, the finished product.
Beautiful and tasty.
It’s the grilled, stuffed portobello mushroom with shrimp.