Cream Cheese Stuffed Mushrooms

I love stuffed mushrooms. I could happily eat them with every meal, because there is a pretty much endless variety of things you can stuff them with. I was particularly intrigued by these because of their almost nil carbohydrate count, and also because I have a weakness for both cream cheese and blue cheese. Put that all together, and it's a match made in heaven.

Not my recipe... This one was posted by kberry at Recipezazz.com.

See how nice and big the mushrooms in the picture are? It's really too bad I didn't use that particular package when I actually made these. But I was making them at the same time I made the Where's the Crust Pizza I posted the other day, and I was using mushrooms for both. And since I wasn't paying attention, I sliced the nice big ones and left the tiny ones whole. Don't be like me.

Other than that, cream cheese (I used Neufchatel), blue cheese, onion, and butter. Which I also ended up not using. I had just fried bacon for the pizza, so instead of butter I just used the bacon grease. Everything is better with bacon grease. Everything.

The first step is to clean the mushrooms and pull out their stems, then saute them in butter (or bacon grease, whatever) for a few minutes until they're not exactly cooked, but starting to get golden brown. If you're making as many as the recipe calls for you'll want to do this in two batches. Me, I was making it for two people, so I cut it down to four servings instead of 15. The entire 8-ounce package of mushrooms fit quite nicely in my skillet, as you can see.

While the mushrooms are cooking (or while they drain on paper towels, however it works out for you), mix together the cream cheese and blue cheese. The blue cheese almost disappears into the cream cheese, but it's definitely there. Then you finely mince the stems until you have 1/2 cup and stir them into the cream cheese mixture along with the finely minced onion.

The recipe says to place the mushroom caps on a cookie sheet. I had a vision of them all flying off when I moved the pan, so I went safe and put them in a shallow baking dish instead. I've met me.

Here's where the larger mushrooms would have been handy! When you're filling the caps, larger ones will hold about a teaspoon of the cream cheese mixture. The tiny ones I ended up using hold a ridiculous little amount that's really hard to keep in there because it sticks to the spoon and your fingers. I persevered, though, and got them all filled.

But because I had tiny mushrooms, I ended up with at least twice as much filling as I needed. It's pretty good if you spread it on a toasted English muffin and then broil it, also. Just so you know.

Under the broiler they go for just a few minutes. You want the cheese to be soft and the tops to be starting to brown, but you don't want to burn them. It seems like this took about 4 minutes under my broiler.

I'm definitely making these again, but I'll pay more attention to the size of my mushrooms. Although since they were so little I could totally justify the fact that even though I made four servings the two of us polished them off for dinner with our pizza.

Philly Cream Cheese Stuffed Mushrooms

Serves 15

2 pounds fresh mushrooms (medium size)
6 tablespoons margarine (or butter)
1 package (8 ounce) cream cheese (softened)
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese (natural blue cheese)
2 tablespoons minced yellow onion

Serving Size: 1 (87 g)

Calories 261.1

Total Fat - 23.1 g

Saturated Fat - 9.5 g

Cholesterol - 63.6 mg

Sodium - 175.2 mg

Total Carbohydrate - 0.9 g

Dietary Fiber - 0 g

Sugars - 0.6 g

Protein - 12.1 g

Again, not my recipe. It was posted at Recipezazz.com by kberry.