Spinach and Cheese Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms

These spinach and cheese stuffed portobello mushrooms are a decadent meatless meal everyone will love.

Alternately titled, “creamy delicious bites of heaven”. Seriously, this dish came out way better than anticipated. Make it.

In Florida we had this horribly phallic mushroom, apparently called a “stinkhorn” according to Wikipedia, that would occasionally grow in our front yard. As if it’s shape wasn’t bad enough, the smell it would give off was, let’s just say “appropriate” for it’s appearance. If that doesn’t make sense, google it.

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How something like this can be related to the amazingness of an edible mushroom like a portobello baffles me. Fungus is a weird one.

I love mushrooms, at least edible ones. When I see grocery stores with a section for all types of wild mushrooms I can’t help myself. This is why it’s probably a good thing that there is no whole foods even remotely close to my house. Mushrooms aren’t cheap and I have no self control.

I’ve been craving a calzone lately and that gave me the idea to basically use the stuffing of a calzone but in a mushroom cap instead when I saw these at the store.

The thing is, I’ve made plenty of calzones at home before and they usually come out disappointingly bland, so I didn’t have incredibly high hopes for this. I shouldn’t doubt myself so much, these were amazing.

First, I just cleaned off the mushrooms and removed the stems. Drizzled them with some extra virgin olive oil and seasoned with salt & pepper.

Portobellos remind me of eggplant. They soak up a ton of olive oil. I was pretty generous with it because of this and I think all that olive oil gave it great flavor when roasting. I roasted them for about 20 minutes at 450°F.

In the meantime I got the filling together.

Added all these goodies plus some sautéed onion and garlic to about one and a half cups of ricotta.

I used whole milk ricotta. Could you use part-skim? Yes. Do I recommend it? No.

Ricotta is one of those things that I don’t think the “low fat” version tastes nearly as good. Mayo is another. There’s only one and a half cups of it, split among six mushroom caps it’s one-quarter cup per serving. That’s not enough to worry about in my opinion. Whole milk ricotta is so incredibly creamy and almost “sweet”. Part skim just doesn’t live up.

By this time the mushrooms should be all roasted and shriveled up.

They lose a lot of water while roasting. If there is any excess water in the pan, drain it out before stuffing them.

Want to know about the perils of food blogging? An ant climbed into the tray while I was taking these pictures outside! I’m a firm believer in the 5 second rule. I figured it was about to get roasted at 450°F for another 10 minutes anyway.

During the last minute or so, I sprinkled some bread crumbs on top to give it a little crunch. And voila!

I think the sautéed onion and garlic really helped bring out the flavors in the filling. And let’s be honest, when there are three cheeses involved it’s hard to taste bad.

This would be a great side to some grilled chicken or eat two and call it a day like we did!

Fungi lover? Yes or no?