In a food processor, combine the soy sauce, white wine, ginger paste, sesame oil, sesame seeds, parsley, green onions, and garlic and process until smooth. Place the mushrooms gill-side up in a shallow dish and pour the soy and sesame marinade over the top. Move the mushrooms around a little so they are covered in the marinade, but do not flip them. Set aside to marinate for 1 hour.

Spray your favorite cast-iron skillet with a heavy coating of olive oil cooking spray and set it over medium heat. We recommend using a cast-iron grill pan to get clean sear lines; this will also keep the mushrooms from absorbing too much oil while cooking. Carefully place the mushrooms gill-side up in the skillet and brown them for 5 minutes. Then very carefully flip them with a spatula and brown the second side for 3 minutes. Flip them again and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes. If you’re using a grill pan, rotate the mushrooms 90 degrees before placing the mushroom caps back on the grill, to get nice crisscrossed grill marks.

Use a fork to gently poke the center of the mushroom to see if it’s tender. Once it is, you’re good to go. Remove from the heat and place on a dish. Don’t leave the mushrooms in the pan; they’ll burn or get oily.

Serve hot with lime wedges.

You can use any leftover ginger paste to make:

Meatless Mondays

These days, when we think of Meatless Mondays, we think of Paul McCartney and Gwyneth Paltrow talking about the health benefits and environmental impact of eating less meat. But there was a time when going meatless wasn’t just a choice—it was our patriotic duty.
In 1917, Woodrow Wilson and the United States Food Administration (USFA) first launched Meatless Mondays as a way to help the World War I war effort and send food to parts of France and Belgium where people were starving due to shipping disruptions. With the slogan “Food Will Win This War!” they were hoping to inspire the home front to reduce the amount of meat in their meals so resources like gasoline, water, and labor used to produce meat and dairy products could be used to the benefit of the war effort instead. USFA printed thousands of recipe books and promotional materials to get the population on board—with, sadly, only mild success.
Voluntary rationing just didn’t work during World War I. So when, on the morning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, people flooded their grocers to buy up staples, Washington realized they needed a national institutionalized rationing system. Meat wasn’t the only item to be rationed—sugar, gasoline, and even panty hose would be itemized and dispersed to the public in limited quantities. The water and fuel used to produce these items was a drain on an economy that now had to build airplanes and tanks to fight the fascists. Homemakers had no choice but to embrace these new limitations, and cookbooks that illustrated creative ways to make more from less were bestsellers.
These books included some of the very first recipes for veggie burgers, lentil meatloafs, and garbanzo bean cutlets. They proudly sung the virtues of “mock meats” while acknowledging that their audience was learning a whole new way of looking at their kitchens. Honestly, a lot of these recipes sound pretty terrible, and most require an egg or cheese to bind them. There’s one in particular that claims you can make a “steak” using just cornflakes, an egg, and some ketchup.
Betty Crocker had already established “herself” as being a reliable source for homemaking tips, having held our hands through the Great Depression. As World War II began, Betty’s radio shows became more patriotic and embraced this new rationing system as not just a duty, but as a fun challenge. Her book/leaflet Your Share, published in 1943, contains numerous recipes for vegetable-focused casseroles and vegetarian meals featuring homemade mock meats. They still relied heavily on dairy products and eggs, but what else can you expect from a book that outlines seven food groups… the seventh being butter. Not kidding.
These days, Meatless Mondays is an international public health awareness program that strives to educate the public on the links between factory farming, meat production, and climate change, as well as the numerous health benefits that come from adopting a meat-free diet. Everyone from Al Gore to numerous celebrity chefs have endorsed this program as a positive force for good and a huge step in the right direction in fighting obesity, heart disease, and apocalyptic environmental destruction.