Here comes football season- and we love a bunch of munchies with the game. Imagine serving fried zucchini, stuffed mushrooms and my lotsa stuff potato skins. That should fill ’em up and let you watch the game!!
Stuffed mushrooms are quick- clean your button or baby bellas and remove the stem. Chop the stem into fine 1/4 inch pieces. Chop one stick of celery and 1/2 white onion (or 2 green onions) equally fine.
Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a small skillet, add your celery, onion, stems and 2 tsp diced garlic. Flavor with salt/pepper to taste. In the meantime, if you are making bread crumbs, place your croutons in a blender or food processor, make into crumbs- you need about 1 cup. Add crumbs to butter mixture, 1/4 cup at a time until you have a nice moist stuffing. Add a little beef or chicken broth or more butter if it’s too dry. You can add some diced shrimp or cleaned crab meat if you have it. Fill each mushroom heaping and make sure stuffing is pressed on the mushroom. Line up on a cookie sheet or cake pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.
Whenever you near the end of a loaf of bread, or the bread gets stale on you- dry it in the oven or the toaster – and save in a zip lock bag. You can cube it so you have little croutons or just dry the slices. When you need crumbs, your bag of dried bread is ready. I like to blend up the dried bread, add garlic salt, oregano or Italian seasoning, a little black pepper and keep them in a cardboard carton- kinda like the store sells them in! Why not?