This is probably my biggest morel score ever, discovered on a warm and muggy morning following a nice rainstorm the previous day - perfect mushroom growing weather. I actually bestowed this entire bounty upon a foodie friend in the city who was blown away by my willingness to part with them.
"Tell me you saved some for yourself," he said.
"Actually, no."
"What?!"
"It's okay. It's the beginning of the season - I might find some more. And besides, it's not like they're chanterelles." If they were chanterelles - which I've only found a few times in all my 13 years of living in Missouri - I wouldn't have even told him about them. Yes, I can really be that selfish when it comes to hard-to-find food that I love.
Small Morel Mushroom Just Waiting to Be Picked
In this case, though, my generosity was rewarded because a few days later Joe (who had never tasted a morel in his life but now loves them because I foolishly forced some on him several years ago) and I happened upon several giant specimens in a spot on the farm we'd never checked before. It was as if somebody had sprinkled steroids on the soil; some of them were an astonishing 5 or 6 inches long, not including the stems. We feasted.
One of these years I should probably try doing something a little more imaginative with my morels, but I always end up just cutting them into pieces (after soaking them in salted water to remove the dirt and any bugs lurking inside) and sautéeing them in butter with a sprinkling of salt. This time we enjoyed the simple preparation alongside grilled, grass-fed steaks from our own farm-raised beef, plenty of pain au levain to sop up all that marvelous juice, and glasses of a nice cabernet. Wow.
My city friend made his morels last for two meals, one shared with his foodie girlfriend (sautéed with butter and a little white wine and served over ribeye steaks) and the other with a mutual foodie friend of ours who was recovering from knee surgery. In a thank you e-mail he reported that the mushrooms were "Fabulous! Fabulous! Fabulous! And that was three separate opinions."
Our morel season consisted of just those two days this year - it was very short but very delicious. I recently read that morel mushrooms were selling for $48 per pound at a Chicago farmers' market, which made me even more appreciative of our elusive gourmet gathering.
Have you ever found morels in your kitchen, by way of a walk through the forest or the farmers' market? What did you do with them?
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Farmgirl Susan, Food Correspondent:
Susan's column, "In The Kitchen With Farmgirl Susan," is featured on GatherEssentials:Food and takes a Less Fuss, More Flavor approach to comfort food, seasonal eating, & organic kitchen gardening. Susan was a cultured California chick who happily turned manure mucking farmgirl and now lives on a 240-acre remote Missouri farm with several dozen sheep, a flock of crazy chickens, four dogs, eight cats, four very entertaining donkeys & one really well fed farmguy. She shares stories and photos of her crazy country life with 60,000 visitors a month at her award-winning blog, FarmgirlFare.com.
Click here to find all of Susan's "In The Kitchen With Farmgirl Susan" articles, and click here to join her Gather network or subscribe to her Gather postings. You'll find Susan and other Food Correspondents plus celebrity chef contentand plenty of other foodies at Food.gather.com.
Contents © copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com.
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