#6 Spicy Vegetarian Meat with Mushroom

Hello again! I love trying dishes with new ingredients; it's highly rewarding because a new ingredient can end up being really tasty. But it can also be really disappointing when it tastes like crap. This time it tastes like crap. Tonight I made vegetarian meat with mushroom. If there is one thing I learned from this adventure, it's that monkeyhead mushrooms do not taste good!

The recipe is pretty simple if you skip the deep frying part. Like I said in my first blog post, there's no way I'm going to deep fry. I just can't get myself to do it. Once you start deep frying one thing, other things won't sound as bad and before you know it you just dropped a batter-covered Twinkie into a sizzling bath of oil. 

Easiness: 4/5 (although in reality, it felt like 2/5)
Tastiness: 1/5 
Verdict: I wouldn't make this dish ever again. Granted, anything deep fried usually tastes better, so I didn't stay true to the recipe. But monkeyhead mushrooms taste terrible! Maybe it's the fact that the monkeyhead mushrooms weren't fresh (as they were dried and needed to be rehydrated). If I had to make it again I would just substitute the monkeyheads for any kind of mushroom that is available fresh. Also taking a stab at the right proportion of sauce/paste/sugar/vinegar etc ended in failure. I just couldn't get the right proportion for this one. If anyone can help me make this better, I'd appreciate it. Here's what I did:

Ingredients:
6oz Vegetarian meat in cubes
10 monkeyhead mushrooms  
2 medium zucchinis, cut into cubes and blanched 
1 tspn ginger
1/2 tspn black bean sauce
1/2 tspn hot chili oil
1/2 tspn chili pepper flakes
1 tbspn black vinegar
two pinches of sugar

Here is the dried monkeyhead mushroom. To rehydrate, immerse the furry mushroom masses into water for about 30 minutes. After the mushrooms are rehydrated, cut into chunks of similar size to the veggie meat. After tasting one of the chucks I realized it was ickily bitter. I tried to  blanch it to get rid of all the bitterness but failed. Fresh shitake mushrooms would have made an excellent substitute.


The mushroom packaging had lots of words. Maybe somewhere there was a warning about the taste. Or advice to improve the taste. I really ought to learn Chinese again.


Add the oil and ginger and stir fry. Add the black bean paste, vinegar,  and sugar. Here instead of hot bean paste, I used these two:


Stir fry in the zucchini, veggie meat, and mushroom. I decided in eating this to just avoid the mushrooms.


Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 3, 2013 at 12:16 PM

    I just cook some monkey head mushroom for the first time. I microwaved the dry mushroom in a glass of water for about 2 or 3 minutes, then squeezed some of the water out, cut it up, fried it in butter, garlic and onion. There was no bitterness at all I think it's due to the microwaving rehydration process. You should give it a try it was delicious!!!!

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