Morel Adventures

I love to stumble across a morel on a spring morning as my less than focused gaze glides along the base of ash trees--a sort of soft radar, a non-evasive foray into the mystery of brown and golden soldiers scattered across land, convincing me that any rational or scientific approach to determine their whereabouts will be dismissed by them as not an arcane enough approach and therefore one not to be rewarded. The harder you look the less you see. You look and rant and try to control the universe in which they belong, and then suddenly, they are there at your feet saying, “I’ve been here all along.”

Everyone has their favorite morel recipe, which more often is a morel story, as the adventure is half the prize. Recently someone dumped some dirt into a mound on a hill top road, where walking, not stalking to forage, is the rule. But there they were, popping out of the top of a small heap. The perfunctory ash tree stood watching me snap a blondie just inches away.

I prefer to cut out the bottoms, get a pastry bag, fill it with some rabbit mousse and shoot it into the hollow cavity of the morel. Bake in the oven not too hotly with some stock in the bottom of the pan until the mousse firms up, gets warm, and the morel starts giving off its woody tobacco sweetness without drying out.

Add some butter at the end into the pan with stock and there’s your sauce. Haunting textures, aromas, and flavors never forgotten.

Aside from sautéing them in butter with a drop of lemon, I also like to dry out the morels and grind them into a powder that can be used as a seasoning--or better yet as a coating, like breadcrumbs, on a piece of lamb or chicken. Great nose on that one coming off the stove.

Fiddlehead fern

Fiddlehead refers not to a specific plant but to the general aspect of young, green, unfurled fronds of ferns looking like the curled head of a fiddle, thus circinate vernation.

Also known as the shuttlecock fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, the Ostrich fern is the most edible species of the fern family. It can grow up to six feet tall and likes to live in places that offer constantly moist soil, such as flood plains. It has a papery sheath around the frond which needs to be peeled before cooking, and it has no fibrous hairs like some other ferns.

Chef Ted makes a soup of fiddleheads puréed with shallots, (chicken) stock, and an herb such as tarragon. At our spring foraging supper he served it with a small Maine crab cake, and garnished it with a few Canadian white violet flowers.

The easiest way for me to find the correct fern is at winter's end or in early spring. I look for the dried, leftover frond that looks like a feather, and I sometimes mark the spot. The Ostrich fern can grow beside other inedible ferns, but the smooth fiddlehead with paper sheath is tell tale. Do not confuse it with the frequently found dried frond of the Sensitive Fern, Onoclea sensibilis, that has little beads running it's length.

ABOUT FIDDLEHEAD PICKING:
There are some who say do not pick a crown clean, rather only 2-3 fiddles from a crown. (The crown is the largish mass protruding from the ground from which the fiddle heads sprout and the underside from which the roots are attached.) They say if you do, the plant will die and/or there will be less fiddle heads the following year. Some old timers say fiddleheads are not as big as they used to be because of over picking.

Consider fiddleheads an endangered delicacy and only pick a few. Be sure to cook them throughly, as they are not ingested well when undercooked, and may even be toxic to some when raw.

"...the world's mine oyster."

Pleurotus ostreatus hit me in the face. We were driving home a couple of nights ago when the high beams pointing uphill flashed on a tree sprouting billows of pillows of oyster mushrooms. "Stop! There's some oysters!" I yelled. Ted squeaks the brakes and pulls over nearly into the ditch on this cloud covered night. I pull a folding scissor from the "glove" compartment. (When was the last time you had gloves in yours?) There were pounds of these overlapping oysters, but most were too high as is often the case, unless you are lucky enough to find them on a fallen tree. They grow on deciduous live, dying, and already dead trunks. Oyster mushrooms do not have serrated or saw tooth edges and they have a stem, known as a stipe in the mycological world. More common are inedible polypores which also grow on dead trees, but they are hard and have no stipe. The next day we took our pole saw and lopped off the remaining bounty. This summer I could write a foodie poem about why I love the rain. Meanwhile, scan the wooded roadside and you may find a pearl in your own little world.