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| Photo by Lars Blankers on Unsplash |
It was an Estonian dish called "seened ja kartulid" or "seened karulitega". This dish literally translates to "mushrooms and potatoes" or "mushrooms with potatoes", and consists of mushrooms, potatoes and onions. Many versions also add bacon (because Estonians add bacon – or "salted pork" – to everything), but you can just have it as a vegetarian dish.
Basically, you boiled a couple of potatoes until just tender (like for a potato salad) and then cut them into bite-sized slices, then you fried up some sliced onion (about half a smallish onion per serving) and as many different types of mushrooms as you could get your hands on (sliced), along with the potatoes. Rapeseed/canola oil was standard, but some nice olive oil would work if you were fancy. Fry the lot until they lose all the excess moisture and start to crisp. Then you just added some salt and cracked pepper.
No sauce or anything like that, just a good oil, good salt and good pepper (along with good mushrooms and potatoes [and onions]). It's one of those dishes where you get the best quality ingredients you can get your hands on and make some magic with only a handful of "basic" things.
I tell you, this was the simplest meal on the face of the earth, but just good wholesome comfort food. The more varieties of mushrooms you could get your hands on, the better, but even if you could only get one type of mushroom it was still Good Foods. Have a slice of good rye bread with it, and you've got yourself a decent meal.
And then, of course, I went on that dratted FODMAP diet where I wasn't supposed to eat onions, mushrooms or rye bread. That pretty well knocked this one off the roster. I've since discovered that rye bread and mushrooms are okay in small doses, but onion is actually something likely to give me grief...
Man I miss onions. They're just so tasty, and so central to all of the good dishes.
Someone somewhere made a comment that white people start any given meal with cutting an onion, and they're right. You know, when you come from a climate where pretty much the only vegetables you can eat for most of the year are root vegetables, onions become the star of the show. I used to know I was about to make something really enjoyable when I started with cutting an onion.
For some reason, a lot of the dishes I used to make all of the time before the FODMAP thing have completely disappeared from my repertoire, even though I'd probably be able to work out a few substitutions (or just put up with a bit of discomfort). It's like something interrupted the usual transmission and now I've forgotten what I eat.
But I think I'll revisit seened ja kartulid and see whether or not I can get away with it, without too much drama. Good Foods is Good Foods, after all.
Ooh, let's do the recipe blogger thing and add a recipe to the bottom of this post, so you can skip reading the whole dang thing and get a recipe, even though the rambling story about my relationship with onions was the whole point of the post!
Seened ja Kartulid
Ingredients:
- Mushrooms - sliced. As many as you like and as many different kinds as you can find.
- Potatoes - cooked until just tender and sliced. Approximately one small-medium potato per person.
- 1 medium onion - sliced.
- Oil for pan frying (no I'm not going to give you proper amounts - just wing the darn thing).
Method:
To drink? Beer. This is a good meal to have with a good farmhouse ale.
(1) For anyone who is new here, I spent a couple of years cooking and eating vegan food - more or less for the heck of it - but wasn't actually vegan as I ate everything on offer when someone else served it to me. Hence, "schmegan".
