Overcomplicated dishes, wacky flavour pairings, and yet my favourite food experiment thus far

It is the 6th of October, and I'm about to enter a VERY busy week. I've been pushing this post for the last 2 weeks, but I finally decided to stop with the excuses and just get to writing. 

I've always been an experimental foodie, and this one's no different. The idea came from a dish I saw online...mushrooms in the soil, and I decided I might as well try to make an interesting take on that! Also, my mum bought me a really cool book on food pairings, and I absolutely HAD to try out some of the ideas in there and see if they really worked (spoiler alert...they 100% did).

What's in it? Mushrooms done 3 (maybe 4) ways (Portobello, cremini, button), braised greens, beetroots done differently, my take on a grilled carrot, all placed atop nutty breadcrumb soil.

Here's the notes file I used for the dish, it's got all of the major ingredients I used in each one.

The portobello was sliced into thin rectangular pieces. I coated it in cinnamon and gave it a light grill before then brushing it in miso-soy glaze and giving it a much longer, slower grill till it was soft and juicy. 

The button was marinated in the brown sugar, balsamic, saffron mixture for a few hours before then being pan cooked in the same flavourings until nice and brown.

The cremini were a bit more interesting. I first peeled them to get rid of the top layer of brown (so they could resemble a small rock/boulder in the soil) before putting them into a bath of jasmine tea, lemon and honey and letting them slowly cook to about 80%. Then, I got rid of the jasmine tea mix, heated up some butter, rosemary and sage in a pan and finished the mushrooms off in that pan to give them a nice, rounded, savoury flavour. 

The carrots were done the way you'd normally grill them, but I made sure to use ginger, thyme and sesame oil in the pan that I grilled them (I did actually skip the bay leaf cause I forgot but it would've been good to have)

As for the beets, the earthiness was highlighted by the cocoa powder, fig jam (swapped dates for figs) and cashew powder I grilled them (using sesame oil instead of olive). I did also flambe them in a bit of vodka to found off the earthiness and add an interesting, novel flavour to the mix.

As for the soil itself, it was a mix of toasted bread, dry crackers, roasted walnuts, a tiny bit of unsweetened walnut butter, some of the grilled mushroom shavings from the portobello, a tiny bit of each of the liquid mixtures for the mushrooms and a little bit of softened butter. It allowed me to have one element that tied them all together. And yeah, it was a very interesting, lowkey delicious meal!

This post isn't supposed to be a "make this dish" post or a recipe post, rather I wanted to share an experiment I did with flavourings and encourage you, reader, to try cooking like this. I know this dish may have been a bit overcomplicated, and didn't actually highlight any of the flavours for more than 1 bite, but it gave me a lot of useful information about what flavours go together. For example, I'm 100% sure I'll be doing the beetroots and portobello combo again, and the cocoa and vodka with the beets was a brilliant touch. And sometimes, that's what you need to do with your food! Just experiment, try out flavour combinations and figure out what works and doesn't. And if the result is an overcomplicated, confusing meal, embrace that!