Mushroom Bourguignon

There are three reasons I have always stayed away from anything called a "bourguignon".
1) Isn't it obvious? The name is so intimidating, who would want to make it?
2) One of the main ingredients is wine...and I typically don't cook with wine.
3) It's traditionally a meat dish. We don't love lots of meat in our house, so I don't experiment as much as I should with it.
SO, this all added up to three bourguignon-free decades. They were happy decades, I might add. I didn't know what I was missing...until I found this. And this.
Oh. my.

It's official: I am smitten with Smitten Kitchen. I love the ingredients, I love the experimentation with food, I love the food. My goodness, this dish was simply amazing!It was a little more time intensive than I like to get on any given day, so I just made it a project with my son - we took turns dumping things into the pot together and and stirring, etc. We had a lot of fun together and it kept his attention for quite some time. It ended up taking probably 45 minutes total and it was worth it. Simply amazing. A beautiful blend of flavors, and I loved that it was a meat-free dish that didn't feel meat-free. I will definitely be serving this for years and years to come. A new staple in the house. My husband even thought that it was better than a beef bourguignon...now that is saying something.I looked up a few different substitutes for red wine and decided to go with red grape juice mixed with just a couple tablespoons of vinegar (I used rice vinegar, but I think because you reduce it so much that white vinegar would do the trick). I just filled it mostly full (as you can see in the picture) with the juice and then added the vinegar. I thought it tasted divine...it worked beautifully. What a pleasant surprise! I did simmer it a little long, to try and reduce some of the extra flavor and get a stronger flavor from the juice/vinegar mixture, and it was just heavenly.Here is a picture of reducing the grape juice - reducing is simply a technique where you let it steam off the liquid for a few minutes until you have a more concentrated form of the flavor from whatever liquid you started with. It's just a fancy word for "cooking off ".
Here's where you can find the recipe: http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/01/mushroom-bourguignon/.
I'll be making this again soon, I was just absolutely craving it the next day!
Oh, and my grocery store was out of thyme, so I used rosemary and I thought it worked out just fine.
What a relief to know that you can make an alcohol-meat-free bourguignon and just love it - just LOVE it!
Bon Apetite, if you will.
My very first 5-star dish.