They say it's spring. But of course you can't believe them. Cause this is Boston, where winter can last through May. So despite a few days of lovely sunshine and warmth, all was erased on Wednesday when it snowed- in April. So in honor of this wintry spring day, I decided to make a dinner which was suited to the cold weather- a potato mushroom casserole and Ina Garten's 40 clove garlic chicken.
Now I knew of Ina Garten's 40 clove garlic chicken cause the Amateur Gourmet made it in February for his Oscar's party. Which was great cause I had lots of heads of garlic after Boston Organics sent me 2 heads along with what I already had at home. So I'm not going to photograph and repeat the exact same steps when you can just go to the Amateur Gourmet's site and follow along. Suffice it to say, yes, garlic is super easy to peel when you flash boil it, but you still gotta stand there and peel it. And this is a lovely recipe, with the flavors of the garlic mellowing out as it cooks, but the best chicken ever? I don't think so. It is really easy to make, though, and I'll certainly be doing it again. Actually I brought it for lunch today and eat it as soon as this post is up.
So onto the potato mushroom casserole. For my birthday, my little sister got me the Silver Spoon cookbook, which I had asked for. It was on backorder on Amazon and didn't arrive until March (my bday was in January), so I hadn't gotten around to using it yet. If you haven't heard of the Silver Spoon, it's this massive Italian cookbook. Like slightly over 1,000 pages and it's super heavy. It was started in the 1950s, when the publishers had all these home cooks in Italy send in their favorite recipes. So remembering that it's the 50s, things were starting to be cooked a lot more quickly and convenience was really important. It's been updated since, but it's still super cool and contains recipes for almost everything you can think of. Really. It's kinda funny just flipping through it for exotic fish recipes and various parts of the cow and such.
At any rate, I decided to make a potato (again from Boston Organics) and mushroom casserole. The hardest part about this recipe was slicing the potatoes and mushrooms and grating the cheese. So here are my ingredients all ready to go (remember mis en place?)
The sliced mini portobella mushrooms and the greated parmigiano reggiano cheese:
And the potatoes along with some dried porcinis that are rehydrating:
The recipe had asked for porcini mushrooms. But we're in the U.S. and those beautiful, fresh porcinis which are everywhere in Italian markets are very difficult to find here and if you do find them, they're gonna cost a ton. So I went for the mini portabellos instead. However, I did have some dried porcincis left from my last trip to Italy, so I decided to use some of those just for added flavor.
Next you melt 3 tablespoons of butter in an oven proof dish. When it's melted, remove that from the heat and start layering.
Here's my first layer of potatoes. 
I seasoned with salt and pepper between each layer and sprinkled generously with cheese and mushrooms. Here it is below:
Then you just repeat until you run out of ingredients. I finished it off with a layer of cheese on top, add 5 tablespoons of water, and it goes into the oven at 350F for 1 hour. Now, I knew that this would take more than an hour, having cooked potatoes before, but I did end up over cooking them. So watch your time and check often. It still came out tasty though, albeit a bit watery. I think that had to do this the type of mushrooms i ended up using, since different mushrooms have different water contents.I would've taken a pic of everything for you guys, but my little camera is unhappy right now. I think i set it down in a little puddle of water while i was cooking and it hasn't turned on since. I'll get it checked out soon. But in the meantime, even though the cold weather gave me a chance to cook some yummy wintry food, i still hope it'll warm up soon so we can have lovely green veggies and produce for me to cook with.
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