Doubletree Hotel Portland

So on one of my trips out and about I ran into Peak Forest Fruit, a mushroom foraging business out of Banks. They brought us some beautiful chanterelles and WOW they are nice!!!. As a culinary team we will use them in all kinds of different ways. They will be fantastic in a sauce to top beef or chicken. They will be great in a risotto or sauteed with a blend of other seasonal vegetables. One way I love them is sauteed with onions and put on top of a chicken breast with cheese, YUMMY —-Just dice up your onion and saute in olive oil until they are clear, add the chanterelles and saute for just another minute. Deglaze with a little bit of white wine. Pour over your grilled or baked chicken breast and top with a sprinkle of a nice Swiss or pecorino Romano. One of my favorite is a local cheese called Trailhead, a nice semi hard cheese from Mt. Townsend Washington. It always adds a nice nutty flavor to my dishes when I use it.

This is Mahendra Prasad, one of our line cooks, taking some of the just delivered chanterelles to work with on the line. He uses them in a Marsala sauce on top of a beautiful airline chicken breast in the Multnomah Grille. We also love to use them in our butternut squash ravioli.

One can find chanterelle mushrooms in some grocery stores but they are best and freshest when you get them fresh from a forager. You could find one at a farmers market.

Don’t forget to not submerge your mushrooms in water to clean, you just wipe them off with a damp cloth. The act like a sponge and you will have soggy mushrooms when you cook them.

Enjoy them while they’re in season!! They aren’t available for very long………..

If you need somebody to cook ‘em up for you let us know!!!!

One of the fantastic sustainable practices is buying produce at the height of the season and processing it to meet our needs. As well as being sustainable it gives us the ability to offer the best possible tasting products to our guests which is what it is all about. This allows us to pick the produce we think is best.

We get quite a bit of produce from Deep Roots farm, a great organic farm that grows beautiful produce. They have been growing roma tomatoes in a green house that are fantastic. So we have been able to buy them about 100 pounds at a time to roast. We just toss them with a little olive oil and garlic and leave them in a low oven for a few hours. They come out fantastic! We use them in dishes such as pastas, salads, and sauces.

This is Anastasia Puzur one of our fantastic cooks. Here she is tossing the romas in the olive oil mix. She cut up 100 pounds of tomatoes and the finished product we ended with put only 10 quarts in the freezer. Not a lot of yield but, worth every bit of work we all put into it.