Mushrooms? YES PLEASE!

So I took today off. A personal day you might say. To come into the city of Chicago to visit my good friend Amber before my two British boys show up. (That's an entirely different story.) So we slept in this morning which was absolutely fabulous, not getting up until 9:30ish.

The morning started out with the making of eggs in a hole using the amazing multi-grain bread that I bought for Amber and Bethany as a 'thank you for letting us take over your apartment' gift. It was the beginning of something beautiful. As I sat on the floor of Amber's kitchen eating my egg in a hole, I was flipping through a cookbook and ooohing and ahhhing over the recipes and the photos that are ever so helpful. And that's where our day of food began.

We had a plan. This plan was to make ourselves a wonderful meal as an early dinner before picking the boys up from the airport. We had all day to go shopping for food and then create our masterpieces. We knew that we wanted mushrooms in some form or another. So after looking through the cookbooks we settled on chicken and mushroom risotto and asparagus for the main dish and then a strawberry rhubarb pie for dessert. Amazing? I think so.

I wish I could say that we went to the store and got the things we needed and put on our aprons and created these amazing things. Well this wasn't the case. I got a message that my friends were actually going to be getting in at 6:3opm rather than the original 7:00pm that we had planned into our days events. This cut a very crucial 30 minutes off of the time we had counted on. But no worries we regrouped and came up with a new idea.

NOW the idea was to have a light, late lunch of whatever struck our fancy at the grocery store and then take the boys out for some Chicago style pizza as a late 'welcome to Chicago!' dinner. Then Amber had the idea to make stuffed mushrooms using cream cheese, bleu cheese and green onions. I said I could make home made guacamole to go along with it. Then while we were at the store we decided to splurge on roasted red pepper hummus and pita chips. Throw in with those things some carrots, snap peas and grapes and we had ourselves a feast.

Oh and what a beautiful feast it was! The mushrooms were divine and simply melted in your mouth. The guacamole was amazing (once we figured out what spice was missing...silly salt). The hummus went brilliantly with the pita chips, carrots and snap peas. The grapes and blueberries were extremely refreshing. Add to that a mango green tea and SNAP. An amazingly, awesome and perfect meal.

So now we get back to the mushrooms. You know the ones that simply melted in your mouth? Yeah, you know you're jealous (as you should be!). Well, the very last mushroom I ate was by far the best one. It had great flavor. I can't even begin to describe it to you. For those of you who have seen Ratatouille, it's kind of like when Remi is experiencing food and there are all sorts of colors and shapes that explode around him as each flavor comes out in the dish. Yeah it was ten times better than that! Needless to say that after I ate this last mushroom, I was absolutely devastated. I wanted there to be more! In fact, I told Amber that I wished that someone would ring the doorbell at that very moment and have a dish full of these stuffed mushrooms. And I honestly really did!

But alas the doorbell did not ring. And there were no more stuffed mushrooms. But it was pretty much the most amazing thrown together meal ever! It was like we had a party. For the two of us. In our bellies. :)

Now onto the strawberry rhubarb pie, that's now going to be a strawberry (no rhubarb) crispish thing that we are creating ourselves....and the fun continues! YAY!


Bon appetit!