SUNCHOKE STUFFED MUSHROOMS

The recipe

A mushroom recipe. Another one for the dads in the household only I'm afraid. This recipe took the longest time, two trips to the store, a laceration, and some stomach distress.

Sunchokes as it turns out are not artichokes, which somehow I knew after I bought the artichoke but before preparing it. I suddenly started thinking about grating the outside of an artichoke and how ridiculous that would be.

So after buying the mushrooms and delaying I went to Whole Foods to find sunchoke. Wikipedia says:

"The Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), also called sunroot, sunchoke, earth apple, or topinambour, is a species of sunflower native to eastern North America, and found from eastern Canada and Maine west to North Dakota, and south to northern Florida and Texas. It is also cultivated widely across the temperate zone for its tuber, which is used as a root vegetable."

Sunchokes

Funky! And the name "sunchoke" is pretty solid, as is "topinambour!" And why Jerusalem? Well, apparently it has nothing to do with the Middle East and actually has something to do with a misunderstanding of language.

So the preparation of this ending up taking longer than expected -- I prepped it one night and put together the next day. It was at this point I grated my finger.

And it turned out great! Too good in fact, as I immediately ate nine. About this time I saw that someone posted on my facebook that sunchoke can cause gastric distress. From my vegetarian days I learned that there's a seaweed called Kombu which is tasteless that you can add to beans or whatever to reduce the "gas content." I don't really know what it does, but it actually works!

Plated mushrooms

But I didn't put any Kombu in these so I'll spare you the details. I would suggest you add some! The truth is, these are probably appetizers that you maybe eat one or two of, not nine. It's possible I didn't cook the sunchoke well enough, but I really don't know. Also I had wondered recently if I had developed an allergy to sunflower seeds so I wonder if there is a connection.

Anway this was very good and my friend even tried one cautiously and said it was tasty.

Oh here's another pithy statement from my son: "If words like octopus and cactus become octopi and cacti, doesn't that mean that the plural of "us" is "I"?

The results: 5 out of 5 apart from the side effects.

Kids rating: yeah, right.

The food, close up

Wife rating: again.

Do I remember this from childhood? Probably, I don't remember being very scared of mushrooms.