I’m currently cooking my way through Mary Berry’s Complete Cook Book, which the Pragmatist gave/lent to me when I moved out for my first full-time job. I wanted to document the experience as a kind of cooking diary, and so “The English Student Cooks” was born. This will be an irregular feature, as I only cook when I’m home on my days off, which is Not That Often.
Mushroom Triangles
I actually cooked this on Sunday but was too lazy to write it up. So, serendipitous midweek post!
Method: Easy peasy: I made pancake batter (85g plain flour, 85ml milk, one egg, a bit of water, whisk it all up, then add 85ml water) and left it to stand for half an hour, during which time I diced six mushrooms very very tiny indeed and grated down 125g (or so) mature Cheddar cheese. I mixed the mushrooms up with the cheese, added some dried tarragon, and then made pancakes!
Next came the tricky part: I cut the pancakes into quarters, put some mushroom mixture on each quarter and tried to wrap them up so they looked vaguely like triangles. (Very vaguely.) Then I put the sort-of triangles back in the pan to cook.
Substitutions/alterations: Mary’s pancake recipe uses oil in the batter, but I did that once and they were far too greasy, so I just left it out. It seemed to work OK nonetheless. Also, I know there’s no hope of my using up leftover fresh herbs, so I used dried tarragon instead.
Verdict: Too fiddly to be worth it. The ones that worked were quite nice (I did like the hint of tarragon at the back of the mushroom mixture), but the sum total of the ones that worked was about three out of twelve, which is not a fantastic ratio. Even as a canapé I don’t think they’re terrific: I would have thought pancakes are a bit greasy to serve as finger food, besides which all the filling wanted to fall out anyway.
Also, Mary’s recipe makes a vast amount of cheese and mushroom mixture. As well as filling twelve pancake quarters I had enough to make a very cheesy omelette indeed this evening and I still have some left over (which I will probably use for some very odd cheese on toast).
The English Student 