mushrooms and blue cheese.

Lately I have been loving the mushroom/blue cheese combo. Both are really strong flavours that I used to avoid, but now love them both, and love them together. I’m not sure why they’re so good together, but especially with shiitakes. SO GOOD!

The mushroom and blue cheese pizza is pretty self explanatory. I like to buy pizza dough from My Market Bakery – making pizza is an easy way to clean out the fridge. I almost always use pesto as a base, since my mother makes it in amazing bulk quantities and always sends me home with so much. She only grows basil in her garden and makes a tonne of pesto at the end of every summer. Her very straightforward pesto recipe calls for basil, olive oil, parmesan cheese and pinenuts if you want. No salt, but it comes with the constant reminder that “it needs salt!” Anyway, we just threw on some sautéed portabellos and shiitakes along with some blue cheese that melted perfectly, and this pizza was an unexpected hit. We made it for Ashley’s birthday, when everyone just brought ingredients that might work, and it was so good!

And then yesterday, again, shiitake and blue cheese came through again. It was Jen’s last night before leaving for Zambia, and the girl loves cheese in all forms, so people just brought cheese, fruit, and veggies and we picked up some oysters from Oyster Boy, which I totally recommend because shucking is fun and oysters are fun, especially oyster toasts, of which there were many. Though oysters are delicious, I would say that the recipe Paige brought in for shiitake mushroom and blue cheese crostini was the hero of the night! They were amazingly rich and so delicious, and they didn’t take very long at all, especially given how much we loved them.

And! Can you tell that I am proud of my newly-acquired linking to other websites ability?