Indian Spiced Mushrooms and Spinach Sauce in Lettuce Wraps

Last night I wanted to make something Indian inspired for dinner. Mushrooms are something I like to use as a stand in for meat. I decided to marinate the mushrooms similarly to how I would treat tofu. The lemon juice and spices add nice flavor to the mushrooms. The sauce is thickened and richened with nut better. Instead of whole wheat wraps I used romaine leaves as the food delivery system. You could also use collard leaves if you prefer. Additionally you can serve this as a salad. Here is what I did:

Indian Spiced Mushrooms and Spinach Sauce in Lettuce Wraps
serves 2

Mushroom Ingredients:

1 ½ pounds crimini mushrooms
½ lemon, juiced
½ teaspoon cumin seeds, toasted and ground
¼ teaspoons coriander seeds, toasted and ground
¼ teaspoon black mustard seeds, toasted and ground
½ teaspoon turmeric
freshly ground black pepper to taste (the piperine improves the absorption of the turmeric so be generous)

Sauce Ingredients:

1/4 pound raw baby spinach
2 tablespoons reduced fat peanut butter
½ cup cilantro
2 cloves smoked garlic (or one small raw garlic clove)
¼ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon black mustard seems
¼ teaspoon coriander seed
freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Additional Ingredients:

1 head romaine
1 cup cherry tomatoes cut into bite size pieces

Directions:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Combine the ingredients and toss to coat all the mushrooms. Bake the mushrooms for 20 minutes.

To make the sauce, combine everything in your blender and process until completely smooth. Taste for seasoning and adjust the spices to your taste.

To serve top the romaine leaf with the Indian mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, and the spinach sauce.

Nutritional Information:

Amount Per Serving
Calories - 266.9
Calories From Fat (26%) - 69.55

Total Fat - 7.91g
Saturated Fat - 1.13g
Cholesterol - 0mg
Sodium - 128.35mg
Potassium - 3003.6mg
Total Carbohydrates - 36.62g
Fiber - 12.48g
Sugar - 11.34g
Protein - 18.23g

Comments:

This is in essence a salad you pick up to eat. We eat salad so often I like to change how we eat it. For some reason I like being able to pick up salad and that changes it for me. The smaller center romaine leaves I cut into small pieces and we had our second helping as salad to be eaten with a fork. The only change I would make would be to add some whole cilantro leaves to this. While the sauce had cilantro flavor I think the pops of flavor from the whole leaves would have been nice.

The peanut butter was added to the sauce for richness and to thicken it a little. If I had not made this sauce I would not have known it contained peanut butter. Now I did use the reduced fat peanut butter which has less peanut flavor. If you are using regular peanut butter I would use no more than 1 1/3 tablespoons of it.

Each serving of this recipe contains approximately 24,700IU of vitamin A, 120mg of vitamin C, 260mg of calcium, 7.5mg of iron, 615mcg of folate, 595mcg of vitamin K, 590mg of phosphorus, 150mg of magnesium, and 93mcg of selenium. Who wouldn’t like that nutrition?

Unrelated Note:

Today is Friday which means I have errands to run. I made some seitan sausages yesterday and plan to use two or those in a bean stew for dinner tonight. The sausages contain whole quinoa so they are a bit of an experiment which I hope worked. I will let you know if I have a winner.

For now I need to get moving so I can get some things accomplished. Talk to you all later today. I hope everyone I having a great Friday.