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Recently, I wrote about Foodie Fast Food - what you cook when you don't necessarily feel like cooking. Today, I'm good to raise the bar a bit from packaged Macaroni & Cheese, pizza, and grilled sausages to something more substantial - Fast Gourmet Food. Each month, Gourmet Magazine has recipes listed under the section "Ten-Minute Mains" which begs the question is it really possible to make gourmet food quickly? And if so how fast? Ten minutes is really fast, I'd be happy with under twenty minutes if the result was something gourmet. I have to admit I was a bit of a skeptic. Certainly not every recipe in the Gourmet "Ten-Minute Mains" can be that fast, or be that gourmet tasting. But, the "Ten-Minute Main" we made this week, Four-cheese Ravioli with Mushrooms , was fast and it did taste gourmet; leading me to say that yes it is possible to make fast gourmet food.
No matter how fast the food is to prepare, however, gourmet food requires choosing the appropriate high quality ingredients or the resulting creation will suffer. In the case of Four-cheese Ravioli with Mushrooms, the essential ingredients are fresh raviolis, shiitake mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, and a nice dry wine. We were fortunate that we had recently gotten our first, eagerly anticipated , Esterlina Wine Club shipment with a bottle of Dry Riesling which perfectly suited this recipe. The other ingredients were readily available at the local market -- even the fresh ravioli. Preparation was quick but it did take more than the 10 minutes the recipe claims because I cut my own mushrooms. I'm not sure where Gourmet expected me to find pre-cut shiitake mushrooms but my market doesn't sell them, does yours? Perhaps they intended that I would cut them at an earlier time but I would still count that towards the overall prep time. At any rate, cooking only took moments and voila the meal was done in about twenty minutes total time. We served the dish with the remainder of the Dry Riesling. The mushrooms were amazing with the ravioli. The combination of the two types of mushrooms, shallots, and wine made a very complex mixture that varied with every bite. Although, next time, I will probably double the amount of mushrooms to make more sauce. Overall, this was a quick, easy and excellent dish we will definitely have again - it is Gourmet Fast Food at its best. In fact, this dish didn't take any longer than our Foodie Fast Food pizza and may have even been faster! I'm now converted and will strive to find more Gourmet Fast Food recipes so that I can abolish those boxes of mac-and-cheese from my pantry...
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