VeganMoFo Day 8 - Portobello Mushrooms and Beans

This week I'll wander into Dr. Fuhrman's nutritarian territory. Since getting a gift subscription to Dr. Fuhrman's web site by my husband back in early Spring when he saw me reading the updated version of Eat To Live, most of my time there consisted of gathering recipes that are not only Fuhrman-approved but would do great on the McDougall program, too.

Don't worry, my fellow McDougallers, I'm not abandoning the McDougall way of eating! Even Susan Voisin of the Fat Free Vegan web site and blog has plenty of recipes suitable for both plans on her site. I've been McDougalling off and on since the Health Supporting Cookbooks first appeared in my local health food store back in the 1980's. They had a 'book nook' where people could come and browse through the books on display, even had a table and chairs set up to encourage note-taking. I still use some of those recipes and wound up buying those used copies of the 2 volumes from them when they disbanded their book section in favor of (sigh) an Atkins product display area. At least the Atkins stuff is now gone, a fad that passed, but the books never returned.

Portobella Mushrooms and Beans is one of the first ones I ever copied from the Fuhrman web site. It's been a few weeks since I made it, but after seeing NutriDude and NutriWife's VeganMoFo post on it the other day I had a yen for it, so when doing the weekly grocery shopping bought the mushrooms & tomatoes for it. The rest of the ingredients I usually have plenty of on hand, anyway.

Unlike NutriDude/NutriWife, I never have wine around the house so used a half cup of broth made from Bryanna Clark Grogan's broth powder recipe (I always exclude the salt when making this stuff) to saute the veggies in. I'm also using double the onions and garlic and probably even the cherry tomatoes, because those are three ingredients we love in this family. Besides, the extra garlic will be good for hubby's cough. The portobellos are fairly large so the 2 are quite enough. If not, I have some button mushrooms I can slice up and add to it. A handful of baby spinach tossed in near the end of cooking will round this out nicely. I'll be serving this over a bed of brown rice, and knowing my husband, he'll grab some bread to soak up all the juices left on the plate and skillet.

Oops, ran into a problem. Even though I JUST bought these mushrooms, I unwrapped the package and got hit with a stronger than usual moldy mushroom smell. Then I touched the caps and found them slimy, and those gills on the underside left a black powder all over my fingers. Ugh! Out they go! I'm glad I also had those button mushrooms in the refrigerator because I already had the onions sliced and garlic chopped and in the skillet and the tomatoes halved and in a bowl waiting to go in.

You can see why this is one of our favorite recipes - just look at this! 

What you can't see is the juice it made, hiding under this. The onions started to burn on a bit while I was playing with those mushrooms and I added about another quarter cup of plain water to loosen it all up, and between that and the liquid the mushrooms and tomatoes gave off it made a nice flavorful gravy of its own. 

Between the 2 of us, we each had 2 servings and polished the whole thing off in one meal.