Cooking Palooza: Wilted Greens and Egg-Stuffed Portabello Mushrooms On a Bed of Cauliflower Rice

It has been ages since I've done a full blown Cooking Palooza. And ~ dang it! ~ we were long overdue for one!

Folks who know me know that I am not a typical one to follow instructions (at least not until after I have nailed down the fundamentals). In this case, I not only did not follow instructions, I also took two recipes from Dr Will Cole's book ~ Ketotarian: The (Mostly) Plant-Based Plan to Burn Fat, Boost Your Energy, Crush Your Cravings, And Calm Inflammation ~ and combined them to create a new hybrid recipe. 

The two recipes that I've used for inspiration were the Greens Frittata and the Italian Egg-Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms. Mind you, each recipe called for a different cooking approach. But I wanted to play with the ingredients.

The very first thing I did, before I even set up my mise en place, was to take a container of grape tomatoes (plus some extras that I had left over), a chopped up red bell pepper, half a chopped up red onion, and a couple of cloves of minced garlic, and throw everything into a three-quart baking pan. I drizzled some extra virgin olive oil, and gave several cranks of the coarse pink Himalayan garlic seasoned salt and some Vietnamese black pepper.

 

Next, I threw that dish in a 425-degree preheated oven and let it roast for half an hour, so that it came out looking like this.

I let the dish cool while I chopped and prepped the rest of the ingredients.

What I did next was to chop up a head of cauliflower and give the florets a spin in the food processor so that the result was cauliflower rice.

Once the entire head of cauliflower was riced, I divided it up into six portions. (You see, this meal was going to serve as lunches for work, and I wanted to see how it would work to cook each meal portion in its own Pyrex bowl.)

Once the bed of cauliflower rice was laid down, the next step was to take each portobello mushroom cap, remove the stem, and clean out the gills. After that was done, I sat each cap on its own individual bed of cauliflower rice.

Now we're going to get to the wilted greens part. While I did use the vegetables that were listed on both recipes (for the most part, as I could not find any eggplant at H-E-B), I also added some ingredients. (This is also a great recipe for when you're cleaning out the fridge and need to use up ingredients.)

For my wilted greens mix, I used the following:

• a bunch of organic Lacinto kale
• a bunch of organic red Swiss chard
• a bunch of spinach
• a couple of baby bok choy

The chard was not in any of the original two recipes that I used for inspiration. However, I wanted to include it in order to add some bright red color to the mix.

Because this was a considerably large amount of greens, I had to pull out Big Bertha, my fifteen-inch cast iron skillet.

First I got Big Bertha all nice and hot on medium high heat. I threw in about half a cup of water, and then added the greens bit by bit, cooking them down until they were all wilted. Once all the greens were cooked, I threw them into a paper towel lined colander that was sitting in the sink.

I then wiped down Big Bertha, added some extra virgin olive oil, and let it heat up for the next assault, which consisted of the following:

• the other half of the red onion, chopped up
• four cloves of garlic
• a chopped up shallot
• a couple of leeks that I forgot I had sitting in the veggie bin in the fridge, sliced thin
• a couple of huge-ass jalapeño peppers, chopped up
• a bunch of fresh oregano, chopped up

 

I sautéed those suckers until they were soft.

Once the Allium cousins and jalapeños were all sautéed up, I transferred them into a large bowl, where I also added the drained wilted greens, and then mixed up everything thoroughly.

At this point, I set my oven to 350 degrees. Then I grabbed the greens mix and placed it inside (and around) the upturned giant mushroom caps like this.

I made an indented nest in each bowl, in which I had placed a cracked egg.

The whole kit and kaboodle went into the hot, which I checked every ten minutes or so. (The goal was to get the egg whites to congeal.)

While the bowls were in the oven, I took the contents from that pan of roasted grape tomatoes and red bell pepper, and placed them in a bowl, where I then proceeded to mash them with a potato masher.

After they were mashed, I added some chopped up Kalamata olives, along with some marinated artichoke hearts that were hiding in the nether reaches of the fridge. And I threw in some balsamic vinegar for good measure as well.

While twenty minutes of baking time would have been enough, I gave it come more time as I didn't want the yolks too runny while the dishes sat in the fridge for a week. (Had I been serving the dish right away, I would have opted to keep the runny yolks.)

After I pulled the pan with the bowls out of the oven, I ringed the egg yolks with that grape tomato and red bell pepper sauce, sprinkled the top of each dish with vegan shredded mozzarella cheese, and then topped everything with some cut fresh basil.

I wish I could taste this dish and let all y'all know what it tastes like, but at the present moment I am stuffed to the gills with a bowl of the wilted greens mix that was left over from the assembly line.

But in the meantime, I'm sure that I will like this dish. And if not, I have plenty of dogs who won't complain!