Button Mushroom

With its Old World flavors and tempting aroma, this versatile dish is a big hit at potluck suppers. Depending on whether you use the main recipe or one of the variations, you can create an entrée, a one-dish meal, or a side dish from the same basic ingredients

Pita bread is the perfect starter for a healthful thin-crust pizza. Then use the toppings listed here or substitute other vegetables, such as broccoli, artichokes, and spinach. It’s as much fun to put the pizzas together as it is to eat them.

Crunchy pine nuts enhance this side dish with their distinctive flavor.

With their assertive flavors, the dried cherries, pecans, and mushrooms in this dish pair well with poultry or game. You can also use this recipe to make a vegetarian stuffing for baked winter squash, such as butternut.

As an accompaniment for anything from roasted turkey at a holiday feast to grilled burgers on the patio, this side dish is hard to beat.

For a light entrée, serve this richly flavored mixture over brown rice.

You can make this robust soup in less time than it takes to have a pizza delivered. The soup is a lot more nutritious—and costs less, too.

Using presliced fresh mushrooms and frozen chopped onions will hurry things along in this recipe.

These nachos use mushrooms instead of high-fat fried chips as their base. Plan on having plenty around—they disappear quickly!

You’ll notice the cooking time of the mushrooms may be as short as 5 minutes or as long as 10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the sliced mushrooms you buy. If your mushrooms are thinner, they’ll take less time. Thicker slices will obviously take a bit longer. However, thick or thin, this recipe will cooperate nicely. Just make sure to pay attention to the cooking time.

The caccia in cacciatore means “hunt,” so I guess this is chicken hunter’s-style. Somewhere along the line—probably on its trip from Italy to America—the hunter’s pheasant or guinea hen in this dish was replaced by chicken. If you don’t want to cut up a whole chicken, you can buy pieces—get all legs and thighs, if that’s what you like; they are very good in this dish. It can be made using only chicken breasts, if that’s your preference, but to keep the chicken from drying out, you should cut the cooking time in half, and reduce the wine to 1/4 cup and the tomatoes to 3 cups. Best of all, though, is to make this dish with an older hen. In that case, increase the cooking time by 20 minutes, adding more water or stock as needed to keep the hen pieces covered as they cook. When you cut up chicken, or anything for that matter, your knife should glide along. If you’re struggling, stop for a second and take a look at what you’re cutting; you should be cutting between the bones at the joints, not actually cutting through the bones. If you’re off target, just wiggle the blade of the knife to get a feel for where the joint is, then make another cut. With practice, you’ll get a sense for where the joints lie.

This is the way we first served spinach salad at Ristorante Buonavia—and the way it was served in a lot of other Italian-American restaurants at the time. I love it just as much with sliced, roasted or boiled beets in place of the mushrooms. If you don’t have bacon, or don’t want to use it, make a spinach-and-mushroom salad with an oil-and-vinegar dressing (using about 1/4 cup olive oil to 3 tablespoons of vinegar). With a vegetable peeler, shave 1 cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and toss it in at the end.

If you like, trim the stems of the mushrooms even with the caps—they will look neater that way. Save the stems for vegetable stock or chop them for a vegetable soup. The mushrooms keep for a few days in the refrigerator. If you want to keep them longer, top them off with enough oil and vinegar to cover them completely. The oil will float to the top and seal out air. They’ll keep a couple of weeks like this.

There’s a reason why this creamy concoction of beef, mushrooms, and onions in a sour cream sauce is a classic. What’s not to like? Well, 31 grams of fat, for starters. The original has nothing on this slimmed-down version—except for about 20 grams of fat.

This puff pastry-wrapped and pâté-packed dish is de rigueur for any character in a book, movie, or television show who is trying to impress someone with an über-elegant meal. The classic is rich beyond measure and fussy as hell. I’ve minimized its artery-clogging character—by about 77 grams of fat and 777 calories—and the fuss factor, too. It remains über-elegant.

Many cooks overload Italian-American-style red sauce with olive oil. While it is a healthy fat, it’s still a fat. At 120 calories per tablespoon, that’s a lot of leeway in the hands of a liberal cook. In this version, the olive oil has been reduced to 1/2 tablespoon for all 4 portions and it still tastes great. If you use chicken thighs, you’ll end up with a little more cholesterol but a lot more flavor. (If your diet requires very small amounts of cholesterol, use boneless, skinless chicken breast instead of the chicken thighs, and simmer them for only 10 to 12 minutes to prevent their drying out.

Classic Chicken Marsala calls for Marsala wine (of course), a fortified wine from Sicily, white flour, and butter. In this modified Chicken Marsala, the white flour and the butter had to go, but the rest was retained—especially its namesake. The combination of mushrooms, garlic, herbs, and chicken broth is as delicious as the butter-laden original.

Comfort food like chicken pot pie may lift your spirits, but it will weigh your body down. I know—there are few things more satisfying than biting through a super-flaky, buttery crust into a creamy, savory filling of chicken and vegetables. Pie dough is essentially flour used as a vehicle for fat. The filling can also be a fat land mine if you’re not careful. Eat this. It will make you feel good in every way.

The highest form of “cream of” soup starts out with cooked, pureed vegetables and pure, fresh cream. The second-best incarnation of that same soup winds up being pastier, with cornstarch as a thickener and the fresh cream replaced with cheaper fats, like vegetable oils. There’s one more way to make cream soup, though—a way in which you get the freshest, purest, least diluted taste of the vegetables. There’s no cream in this recipe—and no cornstarch, either. You still get a great creamy texture by using a lot of mushrooms and chicken broth. The key is to not let the mushroom liquor (the juice expressed by the mushrooms as they cook) evaporate, and to use a good blender to create a luxurious puree.