Fresh shiitakes add meatiness without meat. This quick and easy shiitake and zucchini sauté can stand on its own, as well as being a side dish for a larger meal.

Time: 2/5
45 minutes, including the protein and carbs

Effort: 2/5
There’s cutting and stirring to do but not much else

Shake Shake Shiitake

You should always eat your veggies, and making your veggies taste good is a great way to get into the habit! I know, because I taught myself how to like vegetables when I got into cooking in my late teens to support my fitness goals.

One way to do it is by cooking them alongside something with great flavour so they pick up some of the taste, like borrowing the intense umami from dried shrimp to season winter melon, or coating leeks in a rich beefy sauce. I’ve collected recipes using these tips and tricks into a series I call Carnivore Rehab.

Another way is to make dishes where you can alternate between bites of something you are sure you like, with bites of something you’re not sure you like (or want to learn to like). For example, having some shrimp to keep things interesting in between chowing down on chives.

This shiitake mushroom and zucchini sauté is in the latter camp. Dried shiitake mushrooms are great for flavouring soups and broths, but fresh shiitake are equally wonderful in stir fries and sautés for their chewy, meaty texture. They also become super savoury if you take the time to cook the water out of them, which is the first step of this recipe.

It’s the contrasting taste and texture that makes shiitakes a nice pairing with zucchini. While zucchini have a pleasant and refreshing crunch, I can’t help but feel like they’re underwhelming in the flavour department no matter how aggress I season them. They just don’t have the umami to carry the day, which is where the mushrooms come in.

Of course, the same trick would work for any thick, substantial fungus like button mushrooms or king oysters. It’s just that fresh shiitakes are available where I am, and I personally like how they taste. Feel free to make substitutions as you see fit.

To make this vegetable dish a meal, I’m serving it with rice and some chicken wings for protein (I am eating to get jacked, after all). I marinated these wings with a bunch of spices including cumin and coriander in emulation of a recipe called 土匪雞翼 （toe-fei gai-yik, or tu-fei ji-yi) – it means “bandit wings”, which I guess is because the black sesame seed garnish resemble the spots on the presumably windswept and sun-baked face of bandits living on the great Asian steppe. Alternatively, make your sauteed vegetables while some Mayo and Old Bay Crusted Cod is baking in the oven.

Maybe that’s just a myth and steppe bandits actually have a great skincare routine, but I’m here to make some vegetable sauté and not contemplate the historical veracity of the name of a chicken wing recipe.

PS: have you ever tried to sauté mushrooms in what you thought was a decent amount of oil, only to see the oil disappear as it gets sucked into the fungi, and end up having to add fat several times before you’re happy with their colour?

Well, one trick to get deliciously well-browned mushrooms without using copious amounts of fat is to cook them in water first. Once they have expelled most of their liquid and any additional water has evaporated, that’s when you add some oil to begin the browning process. Same results, less oil. There are good science reasons for why this is the case, which is much better explained by the god-king of nerdy yet pragmatic dad energy cooking than I ever can.

Dramatis Personae

Served 6.

Fresh shiitake mushrooms – about 3 cups

This might seem like a lot, but they shrink down by a lot too when you dehydrate them to concentrate their flavour. The longer you cook them the better they get, but you have to balance this against the volume loss and the time it takes.

Make sure to cut them nice and thick to account for the shrinkage (ladies ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ).

Zucchini – 2, washed and cubed

Zucchini is of the easiest vegetables to prepare for meal prep, because all you need is wash and cut them. No need to peel, and they’re easy to cut even if your knife isn’t the sharpest in the world.

But I hesitate to rank it too highly because while it has a great juicy crunch, the water content is so high that I have doubts about how much fiber I am getting per unit volume of zucchini. I’m also ashamed to admit that I struggle to make it taste exciting, which is why I want the shiitake here in this recipe.

Folks who are into volume eating may find this a virtue, though. Like if you are trying to be in a caloric deficit, and want to give your stomach something to keep itself busy with. That’s when something like zucchini would really shine.

It’s still a perfectly fine vegetable even if you don’t need it to pad out the volume of a meal, and I’m sure it has plenty of micronutrients too. So here it is as part of my (hopefully) well balanced diet.

Salt and pepper – to taste

No reason to make things complicated when you do the basics well <link>. Good old salt and pepper is good enough if you brown the shiitakes thoroughly. I do tend to go heavy on the black pepper though, because I like living life on the edge. Highway to the Danger Zone!

Garlic – 3 cloves, minced

What’s a savoury sauté without garlic? A less delicious sauté. Add garlic. Lately, I’ve been saving my garlic for towards the end, to avoid them from burning to the bottom and to preserve their fresh pungency.

Olive oil – about 3 tablespoons

Look mom, I’m cooking like a white person! Jokes aside, I rarely cook with olive oil because it doesn’t go well with the Asian flavours that dominate my repertoire. This recipe really reminds me how much I like the taste of olive oil. I really gotta cook Western more often!

Chicken wings – 2lbs

Every time I make this I fiddle with the spice mix to try and approximate the restaurant version, but every time I do I never remember to write down the amounts and proportions! So while I can’t tell you exactly how much of each ingredient I put in, I can tell you what went into it. It’s close enough to the real deal that I’m not going to try harder.

Begin with salt, plenty of pepper, and a lot of cumin powder. Follow that with a smaller amount of Szechuan peppercorn powder, coriander powder, garlic powder and MSG. Also give it a light sprinkle of sugar and a dash of sesame oil. You can mix that up with the wings and cook immediately, but it’s much better with an overnight marinade.

Executive summary

1. Marinade chicken wings on the day before.
2. On day of, roast chicken wings for 30 minutes at 180c/350f and make the rice.
3. While waiting for chicken and rice, wash and cut vegetables.
4. Cook shiitake mushrooms on medium heat with salt, pepper and a splash of water. Add water every now and then as the pan dries up.
5. Once shiitakes have reduced to your liking, add olive oil and zucchini. Add some seasoning for the zucchini at this point.
6. When zucchini are done to your liking, stir in garlic and kill the heat.
7. Taste and adjust for seasoning, assemble and serve.

Play by Play

Last things first. The wings are going to take the longest, so let’s get them in the oven. Even if they are done before the vegetables, they can hang out in the oven with little degradation in quality. Notice how I laid them out in one layer, skin side up to let it crisp up.

Thanks to the oven being set-and-forget, my hands are now free to make the vegetable sauté. I’m really loving this tandem oven set up I have going, which really embodies the urban spirit: when you can’t spread out, build up!

How I break down the zucchini: tops and tails off, slice into sections, then strips, then dice. I didn’t show myself cut the shiitake, but let me tell you that I left them in pretty meaty slices because they will shrink down considerably.

A reminder to always wash your vegetables. This came off of the shiitake, and I’m not comfortable with that going down my throat. I’m going to cook all the water out of the mushrooms anyway, so I’m not worried about them getting waterlogged.

Cooking the shiitake mushrooms down with some salt and pepper. You can go a lot further than this and cook them down to almost nothing, but I was getting impatient and called it a day.

Time to zucchini! These will also cook down by about half. This is where I added olive oil, and I also took the opportunity to season the zucchini.

A perfect opportunity to deglaze the pan with some of the water coming out of the zucchini. You can cook this as much or as little as you want, but I like my vegetables on the soft side. The picture on the left is when I stirred the garlic in and almost immediately switched off the heat.

The wings were done a bit earlier, but now that everything is ready we can assemble and serve. Nice colour going on some of the pieces, but my oven doesn’t heat up as evenly as I would like. Oh well.

Obligatory dinner table spread. This is going to be a decent week, judging from the lunches we got lined up.

Enjoy!

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