Experiment Failed- ish.

I finally got to trying out slow-cooked stuffed mushrooms on sunday. It was a random idea given to me by Xtina from grouprecipes.com, she left it as a suggestion when I posted my slow-cooked stuffed peppers. (Those were awesome by the way, check them out here.) The mushrooms were stuffed with an experimental gluten-free mixture:

2 Packages of large white stuffing mushrooms
About 2 lbs. Ground chicken
1/2 of a Red and green pepper, diced
3 Garlic cloves, diced
All the mushroom stems, diced
Smoked paprika, onion and chili powder, parsley, garlic pepper, thyme.
Par-boiled rice, Rice flour, tapioca flour, potato starch, crushed up corn flakes, 1 egg.
It took TONS of flour and starch to get it to the right consistency- a trait I loathe in ground poultry. By the time I was done it looked more like salmon mousse. Had so much stuffing leftover that I ended up stuffing the rest of the peppers with it and baking them.
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I used the tomato sauce leftover from the stuffed peppers last week, but there wasn't quite enough so I added 1 more 6 oz can of tomato paste, and since I didn't have any more sauce, I did something really stupid; I added a can of condensed tomato soup. Big, BIG mistake. Why? Because of two reasons: Mushrooms are very much like corn in the way that you should only cook it for a certain amount of time. Anything past that and they become rubbery. This slipped my mind, of course. The second thing is that tomato soup burns a lot quicker than sauce. I hate to tell you how bitterly burnt the sauce was, it came out downright awful. I was so disappointed, these could have been amazing but I fucked up.

Looked pretty damn good though.



Another thing was the consistency of the meat stuffing, which was watery and gross. With every bite I was paranoid that I was eating raw stuffing. It was piping hot and I know it had been cooking for 9 hours; prying the burnt mushrooms off the sides of the plastic lining was all the proof I needed, but it still felt raw in my mouth. Coupled with the chewy mushrooms and the bitter sauce, I couldn't eat it. What a waste. Tammy liked it, though she's an organic garbage disposal and will eat damn near anything.

The good news is that it's gluten-free so I plan on pawning it all off to my dad and my friend Dani. lol So yeah, first failed experiment of 2011. If you do try this at home, bake them at 375 F for no longer than 75 minutes. And for the love of all that's delicious--- omit the tomato soup!!