How could I not buy these pink oyster mushrooms from Laura’s Locals at the Rillito Farmer’s Market in Tucson, Arizona? I’ve never eaten pink ones before, and though I was promised (presumably by Laura) that they taste the same as white…well, they’re pink!
Now, I’ve never bought a super trendy pink latte in my life. I’ve never eaten the newly commercialized naturally pink chocolate. I avoided rosé wines for ages because the wines I’d seen were too sweet and low quality.
I refused to even wear pink until around the 25th year of my life (maybe not outright refusal; more so disinterest), but those mushrooms, they were just so pretty.
To be fair, had they been lime green or sapphire blue I would also have bought them.
And what did I do with them? Made enchiladas, because that’s what you do in Tucson (and I had another recipe in Savvy Southwest Cooking that I wanted to try). And then my family and I drank some wonderfully dry, aged rosé from Bandol with it (queueing the first time I fell in love with rosé, which inspired me to hunt it down at my next private import wine salon in Montreal).
How were the oyster mushroom enchiladas? Better with chicken (though my vegan friends would undoubtedly disagree) and simple because I bought a giant bag of chargrilled, pre-peeled tomatoes, onions and poblano and red bell peppers at the same organic market, which saved me from having to roast and peel pounds of Peter Piper’s faves myself.
My dad even liked the enchiladas, because we did it as a DIY-enchilada party where we each got our own 8″ baking dish and rolled corn tortillas around whatever fillings we wanted.
So I heartily recommend having a ton of ingredients prepped, like shredded chicken, chopped tomatoes, green onions, chives, cilantro, pomegranate seeds (pomegranates grow well in the southwest, which is why the book uses them in a lot of recipes), avocado slices, beans – whatever you like.
The recipe says to soak the tortillas in the enchilada sauce before filling them, but this got messy and the tortillas were flexible enough to roll without soaking. So we just ladled the sauce over top after wrapping them. Add cheese or sour cream if you eat dairy (or use a non-dairy alternative if you like). I skipped it, and the enchilada sauce was plenty good on its own.
To pre-cook the mushrooms a bit (otherwise they’ll probably end up undercooked), just chop them up into bitesize pieces and sauté them in a tiny bit of olive oil with a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Good luck not eating them all before you roll them into the tortillas…
And good luck not drinking the whole bottle of dry rosé with this. It’s low acid with just a mild natural sweetness, so it’s not too acidic or astringent or puckering for the enchiladas, and it cuts through the spiciness really well.
The danger is you might never want another margarita or jalapeño lemonade again.
No, that’s probably not going to happen.
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