Friday's Freebies: Mushroom and Pears

Autumn is a great time of year for food.  Since we had such a wet summer in coastal BC the wild mushrooms are abundant.  One of our friends who loves to search for wild edibles found a humongous Cauliflower mushroom for us in the woods behind our house!

I had no idea what to do with it, so made up my own recipe called "Oven-fried Panko Mushroom."  I ripped the mushroom up into bite-sized pieces, dredged the pieces in egg, salt, pepper and sage, rolled them in Panko crumbs and baked them on high heat for about 20 minutes.  I served it with a garlic dipping sauce.  Yum!  Sorry there is no 'after' picture.


We also received a bag of pears from a friend's tree.  They were already soft in the middle, so I needed to slice off the good, outside, bits.  I wanted to make a pear and blue cheese tart, so I modelled it loosely on this one from myrecipes.com.  I had never worked with puff pastry before, so it was a fun experience, and I thought the end result looked (and tasted) delicious.

The original recipe called for onions, but I'm not a real onion fan.  So I added pecan pieces and a balsamic-maple syrup drizzle half-way through cooking instead.  Free produce is great!