Kennet Square Mushrooms, home and cooked

I was at the farmers' market this morning, and picked up a small ($6) box of mixed shiitake and crimini mushrooms from the Kennet Square nice people, very knowledgeable about their crops, I love to buy from farmers who know what they're doing.

It looks like a small box, but once you prep and cut, here I chopped coarsely, it's a lot.  I ended up using two castiron pans side by side, knob of butter and blurt of olive oil in each, heated till the butter stopped foaming.  

Minced several cloves of garlic, and shared them between pans, then tossed in the mushrooms.  Shake of kosher salt over, couple of grinds of white pepper, cook on fairly high till they smell wonderful and start to soften. 

Then a nice slosh of red wine, here trusty Yellow Tail Shiraz, and let that cook off, lower heat at the end since castiron stays hot for ages, so you can overdo if you don't watch out.  And you did know there's no such thing as cooking wine, no?  if it's not good enough to drink on its own, it's not good enough to cook with, is my mantra. 

Anyway, one part of this was for my lunch and the rest frozen ready to reheat and serve along with other items for next time Handsome Son comes calling.

So here's lunch, mushrooms with garlic and wine over thick slices of homebaked wheat bread, toasted, not to lose any of the remaining wine sauce.  And I pronounced it Good!

In the mail today, early afternoon, came a Very Exciting Parcel of various things, including a package of Albert Square tea, new to me, but evidently popular in London, and this will have a test drive this afternoon for tea, along with a scone and the lemon and tomato jam.  After I've cleared up the dishes after lunch, that is.

The sender plans to style me HRH in future mailings, which I suspect means Her Reputed Haughtiness. But if it comes with tea and other goodies, I'm fine with it. 

And the Dollivers, having shaken off their summer lethargy, are now jonesing for a field trip to the farmers' market.  Maybe that will happen soon.  Farmers being good businessmen, I expect they'll be happy to be featured on this blog, even with Dollivers in the offing.