Category: recipes

Categories
chitchat links lunch recipes

Lunch and linkitude

I just ate an awesome lunch of broccoli rabe and sourdough with grilled goats cheese. Let me tell you about it!

I’ve been going to one or other of the farmers’ markets around town every weekend for the last couple of months, having rediscovered how much happiness they bring me. My instinctive Saturday morning laziness has so far been regularly trumped by getting all enthused about vegetables and getting a bit of fresh air. At the West End markets yesterday I gathered a back-strainingly heavy load of fresh vegetables, including this bunch of I-think-it’s-broccoli-rabe. Not sure of the ID as the seller didn’t have a lot of English, but it looked and tasted like the internet tells me broccoli rabe should.

To cook it, I first cut off the leaves and chopped the stems into 2 cm pieces. I simmered the stems for a couple of minutes, added the leaves and continued cooking for another two minutes, then drained it all and set aside. In a separate pan, I slow-cooked a quartered and finely sliced onion in a dash of olive oil until soft and silky; added 4 jarred anchovies and cooked until they dissolved; then added 5 finely minced cloves of garlic and a teaspoon of chili flakes, gave them a minute, and finally threw in the drained broccoli rabe. I let it cook down on the stove for another five minutes or so, until everything was combined and the stems were tender. While that was happening, I toasted a couple of slices of sourdough, then topped them with thin slices of aged goat cheese (from the Gympie cheese stall at the markets) and toasted under the grill until the cheese was slightly melty and touched with gold. I ate a pile of the broccoli with the cheesy toast on the side.

Oh yeah. Man, what a delicious combination. The slow-cooked onions and anchovies added a sweetness to the very slight remaining bitterness of the leaves, with the goat cheese giving a bit of savoury bite. I’m so glad I stopped and bought the mystery broccoli-like greens even though my bags were already bulging.
And now, a few other fascinating food-related things!

◊  Why were my market bags so heavy? Because I have a stack of recipes lined up to try this week, including savoury pumpkin cake,  farro salad with roasted red grapes and greens, and beetroot and lime soup.

◊  I am also planning a scientific assault on the question of why my poached quinces sometimes turn pink and sometimes stay the colour of bandaids. My current theory is that a squeeze of lemon juice is required for the colour change, and I will be testing this (and if necessary other theories) by cooking halves of single quinces in different ways and observing the outcomes. Yeah science.

◊  I have been totally rocking the cooking recently, at least in terms of variety and enjoyment. Check out the Eating notes for details. Recent highlights: Molly Wizenberg’s leek confit, which is spectacularly good when slightly warm and eaten piled onto toasted sourdough spread with soft goat cheese; a parsnip, pear and thyme soup; boudin noir with apples; pear and gruyere toasted sandwiches; lentil, roast tomato and rosemary soup; and smoked salmon with roasted potato, parsnip, shallots and horseradish.

◊  The boudin noir of the previous paragraph came from the Eumundi Smokehouse, which has a stall at the West End market and Powerhouse market. It’s been too long since I ate a proper French boudin to be able to say exactly how authentic it was, but it tasted pretty damn good to me. Air-dried saucisson from there was also good.

◊  We’ve had a couple of great dinners recently with Ian and Lisa at China Kitchen (High St Toowong) – the chili soup, dry-fried intestines, and chili and sour potato have been standouts. Recommended.

Categories
dinner recipes vegetarian

Ricotta baked in situ

How can I tell that Matt and Leonie came to stay with me for a few days? Well, my kitchen is full of tropical fruit direct from the farmers, I’ve got the memories of many fantastic recent meals, I’m newly re-inspired about wine and food, and I am smiling a lot. That covers most of it.

I met Leonie in an undergraduate entomology course in 1997, and Matt shortly afterwards, when I went out to their place at Brookfield for a meal. Ever since, both of them have been incredible food inspirations for me. When I worked at the CRC, Matt and I used to talk food all the time – I have vivid memories of comments about morning tea cakes, him showing me a tupperware of excellent left-over minestrone with fresh borlotti beans he was eating for lunch, Alistair Little’s pasta recipes, what we’d each had for dinner the night before. During my Honours year, Leonie used to sometimes drop in to the lab when I was working late, for a chat and to share food with me. I still have the pieces of paper on which she wrote recipes for marmalade (complete with drawings!) and potato salad, some of those evenings. We went to many wine tastings at the UQ Staff Club together. They came over to our place in Kent St for new year’s eve – in 2000, I think? can that be right? – with a truffle, pasta dough, and a container of King Island cream, and made fresh pasta with truffles and home-shaken butter.

Since we moved back to Australia, Matt and Leonie have come down to stay with us a few times, always leading to amazing cooking and eating. And last year Ted and I went to visit them in Mareeba and were shown the absolute best of the tablelands, both in and out of their own kitchen. It was a spectacular experience that I can hardly hope to equal again.

On this last visit, we went out for Indian, Italian (at Enoteca – so good) and Moroccan, and ate at home only a couple of nights. On one of those nights I came home from pilates to find Matt making pasta with roast veggies and garlic – yes, these houseguests can stay as long as they like!

On Sunday, I was suffering from a hangover brought on more by lack of sleep (got home from Jean and Edwige’s at 3 a.m. and woke up at 6.30) rather than alcohol, though I’m sure the wine and cognac of the previous night had contributed very slightly. Knowing I needed to buy groceries and make something for M&L when they returned from visiting family that evening, I walked slowly and carefully down to Merthyr village, had lunch at the deli, and then went and stared bovine-ishly at vegetables. I was incapable of forming coherent plans, so just bought what looked good with a belief that things would come together later. The linchpin of these unformed plans was two bunches of springily fresh rainbow chard, which I found at the local hippy shop amongst the limp basil and somewhat withered carrots. From the green grocer I bought amongst other things some squat, heavy red peppers, and from the deli, fresh ricotta cut from a new round.

I had grand plans for multiple dishes, but when it came down to it, I made just a single dish, simple and plain, but very good. I was inspired by recipes I’ve seen recently for eggs, cracked into dimples in a pot of beans or vegetables, baked until just set (like this, or this, for example), but wanted something a bit less egg-focussed. I blanched the chard and roasted the peppers, mixed them with whisked eggs to make a tian, then pressed golfball size balls of fresh ricotta into the mixuture, and baked until just set. The ricotta baked to be crispy on top, still soft in the middle, and absorbing the flavours of chard on the sides. As Leonie said, it was “like Matt’s baked ricotta, but baked in situ”. And Matt’s “It’s good, Mego” was every bit of praise I required. We went to bed early but, at least in my case, well satisfied by dinner.

Ricotta baked in chard and peppers

2 large red peppers/capsicums
2 large bunches of rainbow chard, stemmed
1 onion, peeled and chopped
olive oil
4 eggs
2 heaped dessert spoons natural yoghurt
salt and pepper
a wedge of fresh ricotta about 3x2x1 inch

First roast the peppers. Turn the grill/broiler in the oven on. Place the peppers underneath, close to the grill, and turn them every 5 minutes or so, until they are blackened all over. Remove and place them in a bowl and cover to steam, for about 10-20 minutes. Cut out the stem, remove the seeds and membranes, and peel off all the skin. Cut or pull into pieces a few centimetres square.

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Blanch the chard leaves for about 3 minutes, then drain well. Squeeze out as much water as possible – I put them between two teatowels and twist and squeeze. Tip the leaves onto a cutting board, separate them out a bit, and chop.

Fry the onion in olive oil until soft, translucent, and lightly golden.

Whisk together eggs, yoghurt, salt and pepper. Mix in the chard, peppers and onion. There should be enough egg to hold it together with a bit of a liquidy look, while still being more vegetable than egg. Tip the mixture into a tian – I used a round earthenware casserole about 25 cm in diameter, which made the mixture about 2-3 cm deep.

With your fingers, make holes in the mixture large enough to drop in chunks of ricotta about 2-3 cm in diameter. Use your fingers to push the chard mixture back around to embrace the ricotta. The ricotta shouldn’t stick up higher than the chard – it should all be level.

Bake at 180 for about 20 minutes, or until the eggs are just set. The precise timing will depend on the size of your cooking vessel. Check on it now and then, don’t overcook it. Remove from the oven and let rest for a couple of minutes before eating. Serves 3-4 as a light meal.

Categories
recipes salad vegetarian

Kipfler and green vegetable salad with yoghurt and mustard dressing

I normally eat potatoes about five or six times a year – they don’t fit in with the kind of food I cook, and I’m never really sure what to do with them. But three times this year I’ve found myself craving, and making, a version of this salad. I like it because it uses kipflers, amongst the tastier of the potatoes, and because its green vegetable-to-potato ratio is about 3:1. And then there’s the whole yoghurt and mustard thing which cleaves fairly closely to my notion of bliss.

It’s based, with minor modification, on this recipe from Martha Rose Shulman, which I first came across linked in Kathryn Elliot‘s twitter feed. I add peas, use plain yoghurt rather than low-fat (Jalna biodynamic organic is good), go overboard on mustard, wilt the spinach slightly – they’re the main differences, I think.

Salad
about 10 kipflers of medium size
several large handfuls of baby spinach
2 solid fistfuls of green beans, topped and snapped in half
a cup or two of frozen peas, defrosted in hot water
a generous cup of finely chopped herbs (chives, parsley, mint, dill are good)
half a red onion, sliced paper-thin and soaked in sherry vinegar for 10 minutes

Optional: feta cheese or hot-smoked salmon

Dressing
1/4 cup of plain yoghurt
3 teaspoons garlic-infused olive oil
2 ludicrously heaped teaspoons of seed mustard
juice of half a lemon
a good glug of sherry vinegar
sea salt and black pepper

Scrub the kipflers, halve lengthwise, then cut into 2 cm chunks. Steam them for 10 mins (Shulman) to 25 mins (my experience, using bamboo steamers), or until they are tender.

While the potatoes are cooking, place the spinach in the bottom of a large salad bowl. Make the dressing by whisking together the yoghurt, olive oil, sherry vinegar, lemon juice, mustard, salt and pepper.

When the potatoes are done, remove them from the heat and dump them on top of the spinach. Add enough of the dressing to coat, and toss. The spinach should wilt slightly with the heat of the potatoes.

Cook the green beans in boiling water for 3 minutes. Add the peas for the last minute. Drain and refresh under cold water, then add to the salad bowl and toss again.

Add the finely chopped herbs, red onion, and more dressing if you think it is needed, and season well with salt and pepper. Eat warm or at room temperature. If you would like some more protein in it (very sensible), toss through some crumbled feta cheese or flaked hot-smoked salmon.

Makes about 4 largish servings.

Categories
fish recipes salad

Fresh sardines with zucchini, herb and caper salad

Tonight’s dinner was the delightful product of serendipity and greed. I was feeling restless when I woke up this morning, so headed out for a jaunt on the bike, planning to follow the river around New Farm and out to Newstead House. I footled over there (via various detours), lazed about on the hilly lawns for a while watching the calm river and the less calm sporty people dashing along its banks, then got back as far as the Powerhouse, where I found the path blocked off for the weekend markets.

I totally intended to wheel my way around the edge of the markets and get home for a shower, when my eye was caught by a stall selling early cherries. Stonefruit is the one thing – the only thing – I like about Brisbane summers, and the good stuff is just starting to show up now. I was caught in the cherries’ tractor beam and found myself buying half a kilo before I was fully aware of what I was doing. Once having pushed into the crowd while wheeling my bike, I figured I might as well press on through, and manfully (ha!) resisted buying the several dozen other delicious but unnecessary things that caught my eye… until I got to the fishmonger. I’ve been craving sardines for weeks. Screw the meals I’d planned for the weekend, those sardines were coming home with me. And they did. I escaped without further purchases (except for two small buffalo mozarella, which can be squeezed into the planned meals quite nicely, alright?), and spent an enjoyable afternoon planning how I was going to eat the first few fillets.

In the end I decided to make something almost precisely like this salad of Helen’s, sans anchovies. I love julienned zucchini (especially since Matt and Leonie gave me a julienne peeler so I no longer need to brave the terrifying mandoline) and this combination is crispy, fresh, and sharp, the perfect complement to some quickly panfried sardines.


Sardine dinner for one

1 medium zucchini, julienned finely
1 handful parsley leaves, torn
1 handful mint leaves, torn
2 teaspoons salted capers, soaked and drained
8 tiny cornichons, cut into slices

1 small clove garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon or so seed mustard
juice of half a small lemon
top quality olive oil

fresh butterflied sardines (I ate 6 small and thin ones)
good bread (a ficelle from Chouquette in this case)

Toss the zucchini, herbs, capers and cornichons together in a bowl. Make the dressing by combining the garlic, mustard and lemon juice, then whisking in olive oil to emulsify. Combine salad and dressing well.

Heat a frypan over moderate heat, and add a little olive oil. Fry the sardine fillets until just done – mine took 2 minutes on the skin side followed by about 40 seconds on the other side.

Plate up the sardines, salad and bread, and eat at once. Divine. Fresh cherries for dessert just make it even better.

Categories
indian recipes vegetarian

South Indian cabbage with yoghurt

It’s November, and I think this year I must have eaten close to 50 meals of dal. Curried pulses, how I love you. I often make a giant pot on a Sunday and freeze portions to take for lunches, and it also gets eaten now and then for dinner too. I think of it as lazy-girl dal – lazy because I end up eating the same thing for lunch 3+ days a week; lazy because it means I don’t have to plan dinners with leftovers in mind; lazy because I can rarely be bothered cooking a second curry to get my veggie quota so always just chuck loads of vegetables (sweet potato, spinach and zucchini in the most recent pot) into the dal.

This, however, could be a game-changing vegetable curry. It’s easy and quick, but very tasty and hits my palate’s current (and recurrent) obsessions of cabbage, yoghurt and spice. The cabbage is cooked till it’s just tender, but still has a bit of crispness to the tooth. It’s sweated down in a flavourful mix of spices and onions, then dressed with coconut and the slight sourness of yoghurt. (Don’t, despite what Marth Rose Shulman says in the original recipe, use low-fat yoghurt for this – apart from the fact that you’d just be eating a bunch of stabilisers, low-fat is much more likely to curdle in the heat.)

This quantity is supposed to serve 6 just with rice, but it was so good that I ate about a quarter of  it with both a little brown rice and a serving of that lazy-girl dal. I think I have found a perfect lunchtime match.


2 teaspoons cumin seeds
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
3-4 tablespoons grated coconut (fresh or dried)
peanut oil
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
2 teaspoons urad dal
1 teaspoon ground or flaked chili
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 medium onion, halved and very finely sliced
1 small cabbage, cored and finely shredded
salt
1 cup plain yoghurt, at room temperature


Toast the cumin and coriander seeds lightly, then grind them with a mortar and pestle.

If you are using dried coconut, put it in a little bowl covered with warm water to rehydrate.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of peanut oil in a large saucepan. Add the mustard seeds and urad dal. As soon as you hear a few pops from the mustard seeds, add the ground cumin and coriander, the chili and the turmeric. Stir together then add the onion and cook 3-4 minutes, stirring, until it is softening. Add the cabbage and a good teaspoon of salt, and cook, stirring, for another minute until it begins to wilt and everything is well mixed. You can deglaze the pan with a tiny dash of water at this stage if necessary.

Cover the pan, turn the heat to low, and cook for about 8 minutes, until the cabbage is just tender. Drain the coconut and stir through the cabbage. Taste for seasoning. Remove from heat.

Stir the yoghurt through the cabbage. Serve warm.

Categories
asian recipes vegetarian

Kimchi bokumbap with sesame-fried egg

This afternoon I went to the first grant-writing workshop of the season, and with it came the usual stomach-churning sense of dreadful intellectual inferiority and self-chastisement for wasted time throughout the year. I know from experience that this will only last a few days, but it’s nasty while it does. Works well to get your productivity skyrocketing, though. I’d felt like I’d already been running on all cylinders for the last few weeks, but the grant panic kept me going for a 13 hour day at uni today, setting analyses running on all cores of my computer and half a dozen nodes of the new cluster as well. It’ll snap my eyes open at 5.30 tomorrow morning too, and have me back on my bike to work by 6.

Anyway, I finally cycled home tonight and made this in about 15 minutes, and god it was satisfying. Crispy and chewy and squishy by turns; sour and hot yet mellow. I’ve got about a kilo of kimchi in the fridge and I can see many variations of this dish in the offing.


2 large golden shallots (or 1 small onion), chopped
sesame oil
2 scallions, green parts, chopped into 2 cm lengths
1 extremely large handful of kimchi, roughly chopped, plus its juice
1 handful cooked chopped silverbeet or other greens
1/2 cup cooked brown rice (leftover rice better than freshly cooked)
soy sauce
salt and pepper
1 egg

In a frypan, heat a dash of sesame oil over moderate heat and add the shallots (you can use peanut oil for this step if you prefer). Cook until softened and coloured, then add the scallions, kimchi and greens and cook another three minutes until the scallions are softened. Add the rice, a little dash of soy sauce, a good drizzle of sesame oil, salt and pepper, and stir to mix well. Spread the mixture over the bottom of the frypan and turn the heat up. Let it cook another few minutes, getting a little crispy, or at least toasty, on the bottom.

At the same time as you’re adding the rice, heat another dash of sesame oil in a small frypan over lowish heat. Crack an egg into the pan and fry it until the white is just cooked but the yolk is still runny.

Once the egg is cooked and the rice is toasted, tip the rice mixture into a bowl and slide the egg on top. Eat at once.

Categories
recipes vegetarian

Lemon-roasted chickpeas with silverbeet

I was taken by this recipe for lemon-roasted chickpea, silverbeet and red onion salad, but got home tonight to discover that my red onions were sprouting magnificently large green topknot-shoots and I’d also run out of cumin. Even modified, however, this was a good dinner. I particularly liked the chickpeas (though when do I not like chickpeas?) – roasting them makes them ever so slightly crisp and seems to infuse the flavour of the lemon and spices into them. I at this with a spoonful of yoghurt on top, and I bet it would be even better with the roast red onions as well.

1 tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
olive oil
juice of a lemon
1 heaped teaspoon cumin (I used garam masala, also good)
sea salt and black pepper
garlic-infused olive oil
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1 bunch silverbeet, stemmed and roughly chopped

Heat the oven to 180C. Line a baking tray with paper, and tip the chickpeas onto it. Drizzle with olive oil, lemon juice, spice, salt and pepper, and toss well. Roast for approx 15 minutes, until golden and slightly crispy. Remove from oven.

Heat the garlic-infused olive oil (or plain olive oil with some crushed garlic) in a pan, then add the fennel seeds and sizzle for a minute. Add the silverbeet, and cook until wilted and soft. Taste it to make sure – it wilts quite a bit before it becomes sufficiently soft.

Toss the chickpeas and any remaining roasting liquid through the silverbeet, and taste for seasoning or more lemon. Eat warm.

Serves one extremely hungry chickpea-and-silverbeet fiend to complete satiation.

Categories
fritters indian recipes vegetarian

Hell yes, madam (spring onion, coriander and besan flour fritters)

Who’s our first elected female prime minister? Julia Gillard, that’s who. Hell yes, madam.

Anyway, celebration in this household took the form of fried food and beer for dinner. I have complete blindness for recipes that call for deep-frying – it simply doesn’t occur to me that I could do it. So I am extremely grateful to Tiny Banquet Committee for posting about their fritterized, shallow-fried version of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s deep-fried spring onion bhajis. Deep-fried spheres, eh, whatever. But greens-packed, besan flour fritters: intriguing.

Despite my intention of fritterizing the results, I followed Hugh FW’s recipe to the dot up to the cooking stage. Mysteriously this produced not the “smoothish batter” promised, but instead a bowl full of chopped up spring onions lightly and unevenly coated with faint smears of batter. Seriously, it looked like there was about 5% batter to 95% onions by volume. I’m not sure if I used the wrong kind or quantity of spring onions (I used one full bunch of the long green onions sold as shallots in Australia), or perhaps cut them wrongly (into 1 cm rounds), or what. But there wasn’t quite enough batter to even stick the onions together for any kind of frying. So I dumped in another couple of tablespoons of besan flour, followed by another slosh of beer, and miraculously things came together.

My fritters were much more greens-heavy and therefore raggedy-looking than the ones on Tiny Banquet Committee, but man they tasted good. The besan flour gives a great savoury flavour, the spices perk things up just enough, and the fritters were crisp on the outside, and soft and green-oniony on the inside. The raita adds an essential sharp/sour/creamy complement – I made it with goats curd and yoghurt a la HFW, but tasted very little of the goatiness. You could probably up the goat cheese for more of a hit, or just use all Greek yoghurt instead if you want to keep things simple.

Cheers Julia! I raise my beer (and a fritter) to you.

 

For the raita
100 g fresh radishes, trimmed and washed
50 g soft goats cheese
150 ml whole milk yoghurt
3 teaspoons chopped fresh mint leaves
1 pinch salt

Slice the radishes very thinly (1 mm). Beat together the cheese and the yoghurt until smooth, then add the radishes, mint and salt and stir to combine.

 

For the fritters
90 g chickpea (a.k.a. gram or besan) flour
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 heaped teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large pinch cayenne pepper
1 large pinch black nigella seeds
4 tablespoons chopped coriander leaves
180 g spring onions, trimmed, cut into 1cm slices
100-120 ml beer or water
peanut oil

Sieve the besan flour, plain flour, coriander, cumin, salt and cayenne pepper into a bow. Add the onion seeds, coriander leaves and spring onions, and whisk together. Gradually add the beer or water, continually stirring, until you have a batter. If you find that this is not enough batter to hold things together, add a bit more besan flour and beer until it is. Mine was still very much spring onions only just held together with batter, and that worked great.

Heat a frypan over medium heat and add a slick of oil. Make each fritter by scooping up about a dessert-spoon of the mixture, dropping it into the pan, and pressing down with the back of the spoon to make a flattish circle (about 1.5 cm thick). Fry for a few minutes, until the bottom is browned. Flip and cook another couple of minutes until the other side is also browned and the middle is cooked. Drain on kitchen paper, repeat with the rest of the mixture. Eat hot, with raita and beer. Makes about 10 fritters.

Categories
pasta recipes vegetarian

Orecchiette with peas, zucchini and lemon

Greetings from the land of frantic work panic! This is my 15 minutes of web time between dinner and getting back to an analysis. But I still had time to make this extremely tasty (and simple) pasta tonight, which was so good I want to preserve it for future remaking. I bet it would be even better with a mixture of mint and parsley, rather than parsley alone.

150 g orecchiete
1.5 cups frozen peas
3 slender zucchini
garlic-infused olive oil
finely grated zest of one large lemon
2 dessert spoons of the best creme fraiche
a piece of feta about 10 x 5 x 1 cm , finely crumbled
leaves from a small bunch of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
sea salt and black pepper

Cook the orecchiete in boiling salted water.  Defrost the peas by putting them in a bowl with hot water.

Meanwhile, slice the zucchini finely with a mandolin or slicing side of a grater. Saute it with some garlic-infused olive oil for 5 or 6 minutes, till it is soft.

Three minutes before the pasta is done, add the peas to the saucepan in which the pasta is cooking. Once the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the frypan with the zucchini. Toss together for a minute over low heat with the lemon zest, creme fraiche, feta, parsley and salt and pepper.

Eat up. Serves 2.

Categories
pasta recipes vegetarian

Saturdays are not for work

No work today! None! And I feel I ought to record, for reminding myself later, how awesome a work-free Saturday can be. This morning Edwige and I went to a sewing class at Gardams, where we cut out our skirt patterns, adjusted them in tissue, and chose fabric. After a lot of dithering I went for an abstract red and black number that looks like a cross between curtains and QANTAS uniforms from the 1960s – it’s going to be either horrific or really great. Cutting out and sewing begins next Saturday!

Back to Edwige and Jean’s for lunch, which translated to 5 hours on the couches in front of the pot-bellied stove, eating pate and rillettes with good bread (delivered from Chouquette by Ted, along with pastries) and salad, drinking wine, and chatting.

And finally home in the twilight, and much later a dinner of pasta and mushrooms, as below. This is a wintery tangle of nutty spelt linguine, mushrooms with an edge of garlic, green herbs and slightly sweet comté cheese. I would happily make this many times again – hopefully always after such an enjoyable day.

Spelt linguine with mushrooms, herbs and comté

200 g spelt linguine
butter
a dozen or so swiss brown or other tasty mushrooms, sliced
a dash of garlic-infused olive oil
fresh thyme and flat-leaf parsley, chopped
100g comté cheese, coarsely grated

Cook the linguine in boiling water until al dente.

Meanwhile, heat the butter in a  pan and saute the mushrooms until brown and soft. Add a dash of the garlic-infused olive oil a bit before finishing. Season with salt and pepper.

When the pasta is done, drain and toss with the mushrooms, herbs and cheese. Eat at once.

Serves 2.