HTCE 2: Sauteed Mushrooms

I am cooking basic crap: glazed carrots, sauteed mushrooms.

I bought a huge bag of dried and cut shiitake mushrooms from Kim's Oriental Market off Patton, near West Asheville, near Sam's Club. Kim makes and sells kimchi, and I'd imagine she's the only who does in Western North Carolina.

This brought my memories to East Lansing and MSU, where every block had an Asian grocer, and every Asian grocer made kimchi and most importantly, made gimbap, Korean sushi, which is sold to my surprise universe-wide for $3.00.

This recipe took fifteen minutes and led to me not eating chewy, sorta rubbery shiitakes since I bought the bag. I did the stupidly named "Asian flavors" variation which omitted the wine, because I had just cooked carrots in white wine. This variant added tons of black pepper, used water as the liquid, and used peanut oil (I used the almond oil I bought about a year ago, brought home to Michigan, brought to East Lansing, then brought back to WNC - it does still taste right) instead of butter, and added a tablespoon of soy right near the end.

Grade: A. I will make again and post up pics for ya. I now think that when there is a variation posted after the recipe, Bittman counts it separately, but the "Optional Additions" are just that, and don't count among the 2,000 recipes. I'm going to count each recipe as just that - no bothering with variants and additions, otherwise I'd not make it.