Recipe of the Month: White Bean and Mushroom Stew with Dumplings

Brian and I are currently visiting my in-laws in Indianapolis for the solar eclipse. We'll be away a total of five days, so one of the things we had to do before leaving was to eat up all the leftovers in the fridge. We managed to do this by lunchtime on Friday, which left us with a slight dilemma about what to have for dinner. Whatever we made needed to use up a container of mushrooms we had in the fridge, since we weren't sure they would survive until next Thursday. But all our existing mushroom-based recipes—mushroom-barley soup, pizza, stir-fry—made large batches that would create new leftovers. And we couldn't just use the shrooms in an omelet, because we had only two eggs in the fridge. (For the past several weeks, Lidl has been all out of Certified Humane eggs, and we haven't been desperate enough to pay $8 a dozen for them at the farmers' market.)

To resolve this problem, Brian decided to improvise a mushroom stew. He sauteed the mushrooms first to release their juice, then sauteed some onion and garlic as well. Then he added the mushrooms back in, along with a can of cannellini beans for a protein source. He thickened the liquid from the beans and veggies with a little flour to make a gravy and flavored it with nutritional yeast, salt, and fresh thyme. And then, rather than serve it over pasta or rice, he whipped up some dumplings to go on top.

This thrown-together dish worked surprisingly well. It wasn't much to look at, being a sort of uniform beige color with a lumpy consistency. But the mushrooms and nutritional yeast provided plenty of umami, and the white beans and dumplings made it hearty enough to stick to our ribs. The texture was a bit stodgy, but still, for a totally ad-hoc recipe, it was remarkably satisfying.

That said, I'm not sure this stew will become a regular addition to our dinner repertoire. As I noted before, we already have quite a few other recipes that use mushrooms, most of which we like better than this one. And under normal circumstances, a recipe that makes lots of leftovers is a feature, not a bug. We'll file this dish away in the memory banks in case there's any future occasion when we need a quick, one-night-only dinner with no leftovers, but we probably won't haul it out very often.