Mushroom

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

A radicchio and fennel salad with red wine vinaigrette adds color and crunch, and warm focaccia rounds out the entrée. End the meal with poached pears and biscotti.

The truffle oil is not essential, but it's a nice indulgent touch. Since the oil's flavor dissipates with heat, add the oil to this first-course soup just before serving.

Daphne serves the <epi:recipeLink id="5452"Rice with Spinach and Feta Cheese</epi:recipeLink> alongside this flavorful chicken dish.

My Grammie Ethel was best known for her cookies and fudge. But she also made a mean chopped liver. What was remarkable about Grammie Ethel's chopped liver was how mild, light and fluffy it was—it didn't taste too much like liver. (This is important when you're eight years old and a finicky eater.) Her secret was the high proportion of hard-boiled egg whites to liver. And the hand-cranked metal meat grinder my grandmother used her whole life to grind the ingredients into a chunky purée. Low-fat chopped liver might seem like an oxymoron. After all, liver is one of the fattiest and most cholesterol-laden substances known to man. By replacing most of the liver with mushrooms (keeping just enough liver for flavor) and by roasting the ingredients in a hot oven instead of sautéeing them, we create a chopped liver that explodes with flavor and is mercifully light on fat. I'm sure my grandmother would have approved. Note: To be in strict accordance with the kashrut, you would boil, not roast, the chicken liver. (This is considered a more effective way to remove the blood.) Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes

We adapted this recipe from Big Bowl Noodles and Rice, by Bruce Cost with Matt McMillin (HarperCollins). Cost likes to stuff dried black Asian"flower" mushrooms. Because these can be expensive and hard to find, we asked if we could try fresh shiitake mushrooms instead. Cost agreed, and we loved the results. Look for shiitakes with caps that have rounded edges to better hold the stuffing. Active time: 25 min Start to finish: 1 hr

As Gourmet wrote in 1959: "Long ago...it did occur to some blithe spirit, a poet of the kitchen to be sure, that when these little veal rolls were arranged on a platter they looked like a flock of headless birds. And oiseaux sans têtes, or veal birds, they remain to this day in the cuisines of such diverse countries as Belgium, Italy, and France.

A light, low-calorie one-dish supper.

Active time: 20 min Start to finish: 20 min

New herbed chicken broth is used in this soup; adding the cheese-garlic bread makes it a filling entrée. Serve with a salad of chopped tomato and herbed olives tossed in bottled or fresh balsamic vinaigrette with chopped fresh marjoram. End with slices of pound cake spread with bottled lemon curd and surrounded by tangerine sections.

Cele Bullis of Gainesville, Georgia, writes: "My husband and I recently went to a restaurant in Alpharetta, Georgia, called Vinny's on Windward. He ordered a pasta entrée with lobster and cream sauce and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd love to make the dish for him. Can you get the recipe?" This can be prepared with 20 ounces of large raw shrimp instead of lobster, if you like. Peel and devein the shrimp, then sauté uncovered in butter until opaque in center, about three minutes. Cut each shrimp lengthwise in half.

These hearty mushrooms, from Il Radicchio in Washington, D.C., are a stellar start to the meal.