Wednesday, 24 October 2007

And we thought we loved our mushrooms!

We don't mind admitting that we love our wild mushrooms - but Canadian Chef Nancy Hinton is barking about the things!

"I'm in the mushrooms constantly. I smell like mushrooms and I dream about mushrooms at night," sighed Hinton as she took a brief break in her busy kitchen. "It's absolutely crazy."

The mushroom menus at her restaurant have attracted a cult following among fungus freaks with demand so big at her À la Table des Jardins Sauvages restaurant - even at $75 per person (bring your own wine) - that most of her sittings have already sold out!

Just for interest sake, here's her seven course menu:

Puffball and sanglichon sausage with black trumpet mushrooms, porcini duxelles en gelée, with wild ginger mustard

Shaggy mane and yellow-brown boletus soup with lemon foam

Lobster and lobster-mushroom fricassée, sautéed chanterelles and corn, in a cattail flour crêpe with sea spinach

Crisp autumn vegetable salad with boletus insignia-scented oil, pickled pine mushrooms, smoked duck, toasted almonds and Fêtard cheese with wild grape coulis and fried oyster mushrooms

Roasted venison in a mushroom salt crust, delicious lactarius, hedgehog, smooth lepiota and blewit mushroom risotto cake, topped with morel sauce

Orange-capped bolete ice cream milk shake with glabrescent bolete and hedgehog mushroom shortbread cookies

Larch boletus frangipane and chocolate tartlet with fairy ring mushroom butterscotch sauce and coconut-meadow mushroom wafers

Mushroom caramel toffee

So, there you go.

Makes a change from Garlic Mushrooms doesn't it?

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