Magazine Mondays - Mushroom & Fontina Quesadillas

What do you do when you have a piece of Fontina cheese and some white and baby bella mushrooms in your fridge? You find your Spring 2008 issue of Fine Cooking magazine and see there's an easy dish to make for Magazine Mondays!  It's Mushroom and Fontina Quesadillas.  The directions are simple, the ingredients are in the fridge and there's fresh thyme in the herb garden. This won't take long!

 But wait!  There on page 101 is a recipe for making your own flour tortillas!  And, if there's a harder way to do something, I'll usually go for it.  Yep, I'm finding myself making my own flour tortillas.  Everything's going great during the mixing and resting.
After making some of Peter Reinhart's breads, this is a cinch.















 Until I get to the part where you have to roll out circles or amoebas.  Mine turned out to be amoebas.  I found that this dough was easy to stretch and roll after it had rested the required amount of time, but when I tried to make a circle by rekneading one of my distorted tortillas and rerolling it, it had become elastic again and was hard to roll back out.  I let the rest of them remain amoebas.  The other problem I had was I don't own an iron griddle or large iron pan so I had to fit my tortillas into  a somewhat smaller pan and my edges tended to bunch up some.  It worked well, otherwise, and they were good.

I chopped the mushrooms (I used some of each white and baby bella) and sauteed them in a pan with the garlic, thyme, salt and pepper.  This combination was delicious!  The aroma and flavor of mushrooms with thyme is one of my absolute favorites.

I added some of the Fontina on half of each of the tortillas and topped it with mushroom mixture--then folded them over.  They went into a pan, covered for a few minutes to heat up again, then

 I uncovered them and cooked them a little longer on the other side and served them with salad and a cool Ranch dressing.  This dish was really good.  The only change I would make next time is to use a little less salt.  The Fontina is salty so the 1/2 tsp. kosher salt was almost a little too much.  I'm going to try this again very soon, but with bought tortillas to see if I like it as well.  I think these tortillas would be worth making again if they make a noticeable difference, but I wouldn't try to do it in a smaller pan like mine again.  Below is the recipe with my slight changes.

Mushroom and Fontina Quesadillas

 1 Tblsp. olive oil

1/2 lb. coarsely chopped mushrooms

2 cloves garlic, minced

1-1/2 Tblsp. chopped fresh thyme

1/4 tsp. salt

freshly ground pepper

2 Tblsp. softened unsalted butter (if using bought tortillas)

4 9-10 inch flour tortillas (I used 5 homemade ones)

1/2 lb. Fontina, coarsely grated

Saute mushrooms in oil 5-7 minutes.  Add garlic, thyme, salt and about 1/4 tsp. pepper.  (Taste and add just a bit more salt, if needed).  If using bought tortillas brush surface very lightly with butter (the homemade ones seemed less dry and probably wouldn't need the butter).  Turn them over and cover half of each with the cheese up to 1 inch of edge.  Add mushroom mixture over the cheese.  Fold each in half to enclose the filling.  Put the quesadillas back into the wiped-out skillet (2 will fit at a time) and cover and heat about 4 minutes.  Uncover and turn over to heat 2 more minutes.  Keep warm in a low oven until all are heated.

If you want to try making the tortillas yourself, here's a link to the recipe at fine cooking.