My not-quite vegan lunch
Among the subs I follow on Reddit is the one for vegetarian/vegan cooking. Somebody posted a recipe there the other day for a vegan BLT sandwich that looked really good - and simple to make too, other than trying to track down the fresh king oyster mushrooms.
Technically you need lettuce to make it a BLT, but none of our garden lettuce is ready to pick yet, but when I was growing up, we typically made bacon and tomato, sans lettuce anyway.
The only mushrooms we have at the moment are some dried shitakes that I bought last year. I figured that I could use some of those as a replacement for the ones in the recipe.
I reconstituted four of them in a mixture of water and mirin (using the microwave to speed along the process), then carved off the stems and cut the thickest one into two slices.
I put them in a marinade of soy sauce, maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, and smoked paprika. Then I varied from the recipe a bit by adding a pinch of msg and a few drops of liquid smoke.
I let those all get acquainted in the fridge for about half an hour, then put them in the toaster oven at 400F convection.
I halved the cooking time from the recipe since it was made for much larger mushrooms than these. I took them out, and as they cooled enough to eat I toasted a couple slices of Canadian style rye, slathered it with mayo, and laid out slices of one of the heritage tomatoes from our garden.
Finally, I added the mushrooms and finished it all with some sodium-free salt and a good shake of black pepper.
Three things I will change next time: 1) let the mushrooms marinade a bit longer. 2) Cook them at a lower temperature for longer, and 3) slice them into strips when I put them on the sandwich since they were a little tough to bite through.
Otherwise, this was crazy good, and I will definitely do it again. It would be nice to have lettuce and/or avocado as well next time (maybe using the latter in place of the mayo).