Lengua con champignon

Bought beef tongue, boiled it till it was soft, sliced it up, and froze it in its cooking broth while I thought over what I was going to do with it.

So I dug up an old recipe book (looked online, and there isn't anything exactly like this out there except on Filipino websites).

The recipe called for half a cup of butter and a fourth cup of olive oil; I assumed that was because I was supposed to brown a whole tongue (the damned thing was around a foot long and weighed around two pounds).

I melted the butter and oil in a bowl, spooned a bit into a pot, and browned the sliced tongue in medium heat, salt-n-peppering it along the way, and then set it aside; I put in the rest of the butter-and-oil combo, tossed in a large chopped onion, two chopped tomatoes, and five chopped cloves of garlic, sauteed till soft.

Dropped in the browned tongue; added bay leaves, whole peppercorns, three tablespoons of soy sauce, the juice of half a lemon, and a fourth of a cup of white wine. Lowered the heat and simmered till it thickened, then added a cupful of broth and stirred some more. After forty minutes of simmering and adding broth when necessary, drained the tongue and arranged it on a serving plate.

Took the biggest frying pan I had and sauted several slices of mushrooms in a few tablespoons of butter over medium high heat. Took out the mushrooms, lowered the heat to medium, added half a cup of butter (does it show that I'm not on any diet?) added a fourth cup of flour, stirred till mixed. Poured in the drippings from the tongue stew, added back the mushroms, mixed until thickened, then poured over the tongue.

Lengua con champignon--only a Filipino would have thought up of this heart-stopper. The tongue meat is buttery soft, the mushroom gravy buttery rich (hell, it was half butter anyway); the tomatoes, lemon juice and white wine add just enough tartness to cut through the fat. Not too bad, considering.