SC - Martino Question (Blancmange)

[CBlackwill@aol.com]

Mushrooms and Mint

       or

How Do You Spell That?


Several days before the Middle Kingdom coronation
feast I stumbled into one of several problems. By
the time the night before the feast arrived, I'd solved
all the major ones but one: mushrooms. Of all the
places I'd looked, not one had mushrooms worth
buying. Most of the standard grocery stores had the
standard white mushrooms, overpriced and not
well treated. The local farmer's market had nothing,
and, surprisingly, the gourmet stores had very very
little and not enough of what I needed. Mushrooms
were on sale at the local restaurant supply store,
but they looked...well, to be honest they looked awful.
I didn't buy them, though I probably could have and
saved myself a lot of agony.

Late in the evening, the night before the feast, my
dear friend Bogdan and his lovely wife arrive at my
house. I was happy to see them and sad that I could not
give them the welcome they deserved. I was tired from
prep cooking two days and the lack of mushrooms was
really bothering me. I thought I had one of two choices:
either find a way to get through a closed stretch of
major highway at 6 am the next morning to make it
to the Detroit Farmer's Market (risk not getting a
spot to park, not finding what I needed, and being late
for the feast), or I could go to the last possible store
in town that I hadn't checked and pray that the cooking
gods would smile on me. I needed eggs anyway because
our egg donation fell through and no one sold egg whites
that was still open.

So. At 1 am Bogdan and I are merrily curbing the wheels
of my car on a narrow stretch of road and nattering
away about this and that on our way to the last open
grocery store that might have mushrooms. A surprising
number of people were at the store at that time, but
apparently none who actually *worked* in the store,
especially the produce department where we needed
to be. We found some greens we needed for tray decorations
(parsley, kale, mint) and of course we found the eggs.
But the mushrooms were a little more troublesome.

The store didn't have a lot of Crimini's, which would have
been ideal for the roasted dish I was doing. They had some
but not a lot. So off Bogdan goes to talk to "Greeter Glen"
who had the walkie talkie and access to the telephone. A
few calls later and we find out, no, indeed, there are no
more Crimini in the back but we could certainly order
them, if we wanted. Poor Glen was a bit taken aback when
I told him that unless he could get them in the next two
hours, it wouldn't do me any good. I tried to briefly explain
about the feast, but the poor man looked confused. We
thanked him kindly and trundled back to the mushrooms.

Bogdan, bless his soul, asked a few very to the point
questions about the recipe, and we decided that the
Portobelo's would work just fine for the dish I had
planned. They were HUGE mushrooms. Some of the
largest I've seen, and they were in great condition.
But there weren't enough for 160 people. We came
pretty close, but not quite. So we decided that in addition
to the Portobelo's, we use a handful of lighter-colored
gourmet mushrooms and contrast the two in the dish
for visual texture, counting on the fact that the dish
would only be used as a taste of something rather than
a good portion of a meal (thank you for teaching me
this, Bogdan).

The real fun of the evening came when we went to check
out. All of the self-checkout lanes had closed, to my
dismay. Technically, we only had four items, just lots
and lots of them. So we patiently stood in line with the
hordes of others who somehow had managed to pick just
then to check out when we were both starving and a little
loopy from mushroom talk.

As it came to our turn in line, Bogdan took the front of the
cart and started unloading mushrooms. The woman who
was checking out our purchases just stood there in awe.
I think he might have sensed her confusion ahead of time
when he handed her one of the bags and said "These are
Portobelo's."

She nodded her head, stood there for a moment, and then
asked the cashier across from her "What are Portobelo's?"

"They're mushrooms," her compatriot answered. Bogdan
was a saint for not laughing.

Mushrooms rung up, we moved on to the green things.
Some items had PLU tags for their scanners, but on the
whole, these were hidden among the greenery and
obscured by the plastic bags we had it all in. To avoid
any further confusion, I handed the cashier the smallest
of the remaining bags and said "This one's mint."

Again, a small nod. Then a brief flurry through the PLU code
book and she looked back at me.

"How do you spell that?" she finally asked.

It took me a moment to get over my shock. "M-I-N-T"
I replied with as straight a face as I could muster.

I was stunned. Honestly, it didn't occur to me that this
would be the question. Usually when a cashier can't
find something on their chart, they either call for
help or ask you how much the product is and calmly continue
ringing things up.

The cashier gave that odd little nod again, went back to her
code list, and almost immediately turned back to me and
said "No, that's not it."

I suppose I was a tad impatient when  I retorted "Oh, I'm
sure that's it. Positive, in fact. Did you look under
peppermint?"

And her response was "No, that's not it either."

By this point, the combination of mushrooms, Glen the
Greeter, my lack of sleep, and my need to eat must have
all coalesced into one particularly nasty look because she
took a step away and bravely turned her back on me to ask
the cashier behind her how to ring up mint. It ended up that
we paged through the computer listings together to find it.

By 2 am or so, Bogdan and I were out of the store and on
our way back to my car laughing our silly behinds off. The
next day during the cooking I couldn't look at that mint
without giggling like a fool. The kitchen staff finally
had to hide it on me.

And the mushrooms were the favorite dish of the whole
feast. We used the stems along with the gourmet bits,
roasted the lot with olive oil, and tossed them toasted
pine nuts and parsley. I'll be making the dish again,
but not if I have to go shopping at 1 am to finish the task.

Ever in Service to Our Dream,

Jasmine
Iasmin de Cordoba
iasmin at home.com
gwalli at infoengine.com