The Red Dragon cooks around her nausea

I used to hate the very sight of mushrooms and would not eat them for the greater part of my life to date. Choked down a couple at the behest of my family as a child and then objected to it ever after; I didn't grow up in an indulgent household but I managed to put my foot down about not eating mushrooms, not eating zucchini, and not playing the bloody fucking violin anymore after puberty.

What changed all that was the F-word and not wanting to look like a pansy in front of him when he cooked mushrooms for dinner on our first 'date', I suppose you'd call it. So I ate them and they were good, and was the start of my love affair with non-magic mushrooms. The F-word and I have had rather more dramatic ups and downs than two fundamentally good hearted guinea kids deserve, but through all of the downs I nevertheless retained some tenderness for him by remembering he was the creature that had made mushrooms palatable to me.

The oyster mushrooms I picked this weekend, however, are all in the bin. I had got greedy and picked as many as I could carry, including some that were past their prime. So last night, when I was preparing about half of them for a Hungarian mushroom pie - a lovely-looking recipe from a book by wunderkind Arto der Haroutunian (fuck, Armenians have the coolest names) - I realized that there were some maggots in them. I'm not the sort of cool nature girl who can look at maggots and think 'ooo, extra protein, and anyways once it's all cooked up it'll be sterile.' No. I'm the sort of middle-class cold-climate girl who wants to puke when she even thinks about maggots. Maybe someday I won't be such a fucking pussy but last night was not that day.

So crash went my tummy and slop went the mushrooms into the bin. Lesson learned. Hunt and pick early, don't pick anything past its prime, and most of all DO NOT fucking go to church in the morning while insects reproduce in your fucking mushrooms and then come back in the fucking afternoon. Carpe diem. Carpe fungiem. Honour God by not being a bonehead.

My appetite was gone but I still needed to prepare dinner for the F-word, who was at French class, and myself, who bears too much responsibility on her stately shoulders to go as anorexic as she'd like to whenever she thinks about maggots. Also I had started preparations for the mushroom pie. I needed something that would use what I had prepared, that would tempt my appetite enough to overwhelm my nausea, and that didn't use mushrooms at all, as besides the maggoty oysters all we had in the house was a big bag of dehydrated Chinese I didn't have time to rehydrate. So I rolled myself a big fat joint, ignored my churning tummy, and did this:

1.
1 Splash milk
2 eggs
dollop olive oil

2.
2 tomatoes, seeded, cored and diced
1 cup baby spinach, minced
1 little can albacore tuna
10 anchovy-stuffed olives, halved
1 teaspoon minced basil
1 teaspoon minced oregano
1 teaspoon dried red chili
Touch of salt
Some black pepper

3.
3 slices of old multigrain bread
1/2 cup milk

3 tablespoons cornbread breadcrumbs

Leave the slices of bread to soak up the milk. In a large seperate container, beat the eggs with the splash of milk and dollop of olive oil. Add Group 2 ingredients to the eggs and mix. After, break up the slices of bread that have soaked up the milk. Mix the little peices into the egg mixture. Evenly spread out the mixture in a pie pan that you've lined with greaseproof paper, because of course you're a lazy fuck like me and don't want to do any scrubbing when you wash up. And cover it evenly with the breadcrumbs, then cook at high-ish heat for 20 minutes until it's lovely and golden brown on top. And then eat it.

It's not the most exciting dish in the world, but it was really tasty and I ate a fair amount of it despite having desperately wanted to vomit a mere half hour earlier. I reccommend it for those days when you or your general household is recovering from some sort of stomach complaint, with a world of variations possible in the Group 2 ingredients. Eschewing a crust in favour of milk-soaked bread gives the thing a really light, special texture that's somehow friendly. With the combination I used for Group 2, it came out as a delightful sort of savoury summer pudding, but I imagine by adding an extra egg or using heavier vegetables - or even, god forbid, meat - you could make it quite substantial.