On February 15 at The North Fork Table & Inn we (we being me and my friend Gerry Hayden) talked mushrooms. This was The Cooking Sessions: Session 7. Mushrooms are an awesome winter thing…comforting, rich and diverse in flavor and texture. Today we handed out four recipes and demonstrated more than twice that many mushrooms and how they can add flavor to this cold and crisp time of the year. We also tossed around some ideas about combining them with another winter treat that we always seem to find in our coolers. Today, fresh from the Man Cave, we also had tuber melanosporum or the Perigord truffle. We live well and it’s not like we have a choice. We just deal with it.

Anyway…we also had some suckling Berkshire pigs hanging around and we decided that the pigs and the mushrooms deserve to spend some quality time together on this snowy day. Mushrooms always lead to other things. Mushrooms and pigs. Mushrooms and rice. Mushrooms and cheese. Mushrooms and fish. Mushrooms as pickles. It never seems to end.

So….mushrooms and pigs. How does that marriage work? Very well as it turns out. We carefully butchered a 51 pound Berkshire suckling pig “middle” and we stuffed it with a mixture of freshly toasted bread crumbs, roasted shallots, roasted garlic, black trumpet, trumpet royalle, hedgehog, yellowfoot, shiitake, chanterelle, beech and portobello mushrooms. And porcini mushroom stock. We added fresh thyme, rosemary and tarragon. The stuffing tasted awesome on its own. So we added some Perigord black truffles and a splash of black truffle vinegar. Boink. See what mushrooms lead to?

I published another version of this story on my website which can be viewed at www.chefkevinpenner.com.