Vegan Dinner Recipe: Mushroom and mash stack with a red wine reduction

Dinner time! It's Friday, I've attended a tutorial, mastered MLA referencing, finished a fifteen hundred word critique, and experimented with cheesecake (stay tuned for the results!)

So tonight we have dinner guests who have just moved house, so I want to do something nice because I reckon those guys have probably been living on take away. I'm cooking for himself (obviously), Jen Raccoon (enthusiast of vegan food) and Paul (steak lover). It's a challenging combo, so I've chosen to make a roast veg salad and a beautiful looking mushroom and mash stack.

So my whole house smells like wine, everybody wins.



I'm dividing up the ingredients list thusly:

Mushrooms:
Four big ole field mushrooms (the thick ones at least 10cm diametre)
Forty grams of vegan butter or oil (I used an organic spread)
Two chopped cloves of garlic

Mash:
One large potato
One 400 gram can of Canellini beans
Two cloves of garlic
Two tablespoons of oil
One tablespoon of liquid veggie stock

Puy lentils:
About a tablespoon of olive oil
A shallot, chopped
A clove of garlic, sliced thin
One and three quarter cups of veggie stock
Three quarters of a cup of red wine (I used a cheap pinot)
A cup of puy lentils
A tablespoon of parsley

Red wine reduction:
Two thirds of a cup of red wine
One and a half cups of veggie stock
One tablespoon of brown sugar
Two tablespoons of tomato paste

Making mash:

First, peel and chop the potato into cubes. Put on a small saucepan of water and bring it to the boil, then add the potato and cook for ten minutes or until the potato is cooked. Drain the potato.

Place the canellini beans, garlic and stock in your food processor.

Process, adding the olive oil while the processor is on. The mix should be pretty smooth but it doesn't have to be completely smooth. Drop the potato in and mix thoroughly.

Put the potato canellini mash aside and try to keep it warm.

Making puy lentils:

Heat the tablespoon of oil in a pan over a low to medium heat. Add the shallot and cook for a couple of minutes until it softens.

Pull the stalks out of the mushrooms and chop them up. I like to peel the skin of the mushrooms at this point also and throw them out (because himself is particular) but that is entirely optional.

Add the chopped stalks and the garlic to the shallot and cook for a couple of minutes.

Add the stock, puy lentils, and wine. Stir it well and raise the heat until the mix is boiling.

Then lower the heat, put a lid on it, and simmer for between half an hour and forty minutes until the lentils are cooked and all the liquid has been soaked up.

Stir in the parsley and put somewhere to keep warm.

Mushrooms:

Melt the oil/vegan butter in a large pan and add the garlic. Because the spread had such a low cooking point and you don't want to burn the garlic, keep the heat low.

Spread the butter and garlic over the whole pan bottom. Arrange the mushrooms and cover, and cook low on both sides, between five and eight minutes per side depending how low your hotplate is.

Once they're cooked, put the mushrooms on a foil lined tray and keep them warm in a low temperature oven.

We're almost there!

Red wine reduction:

Using the same pan as you've just cooked the mushrooms in, without rinsing it first or even taking it off the heat, add the red wine. Give it a stir and pick up all the garlicky bits on the bottom.

Now add the stock, tomato paste and sugar. Stir it to break up any tomato paste-y lumps or sugar, and bring to a nice boil.

Cook it at a medium heat for fifteen minutes until thoroughly reduced.

Okay. Now you need to assemble the whole business.

First, the mushroom

Then, some mash

Then, the lentils

Then, a couple of spoonfuls of reduction.

Eat! Okay so firstly, this tasted AMAZING. Secondly, next time we make this we will up the amount of potato so there's more mash, because the mash is really the star here and visually, the dish would be more appealing with additional mash.

GO MASH.