Strike while the iron is hot

It occurred to me while eating dinner tonight that the recipe, which called for both ramps and morels, could really only be made during a two- or three-week timeframe each spring when the seasons for those two ephemeral foraging favorites coincide. Nothing like hanging onto a recipe that's essentially useless 50 weeks out of every year!

I made the recipe to use some of my CSA bag's prolific portion of ramps. But I don't particularly like morels, especially at $60 for a large paper plate full of them from the farmers' market, so I replaced them with some white oyster mushrooms ($10 a pound at the farmers' market).  Other modifications to the recipe were based on laziness - I didn't have mascarpone cheese, so I left that out and subbed Parmesan for the Pecorino cheese called for in the recipe.  And I didn't have orecchiette, either, so we used cheese ravioli from Ohio City Pasta.  I think the creaminess from the ravioli filling helped make up for the lack of mascarpone ... or at least that's what I'm telling myself, that and "Hey, at least you didn't have to make a special trip to the grocery store on a weekend just for one container of cheese and a bag of pasta!"

One thing I learned while making this recipe is that the leaves of the ramps really are very mild in flavor.  The recipe has you separate them from the bulbs, cook the bulbs as you would onions or garlic, and add the roughly chopped leaves at the end as you would spinach or other tender greens.  The cooked leaves had a delicate onion/garlic flavor, much lighter and less in-your-face than that of the bulbs.  I'll definitely keep that in mind, because this time of year it's nice to have some interesting greens to throw into soup or salads.

In other news, IT'S ASPARAGUS SEASON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I seriously have to stop typing so I have time to drive up to Avon to buy some local asparagus, which I will store in a vase of water at work until I can come home and totally eat an entire bunch myself because Jason isn't coming home for dinner tonight .... bwahahahahahahahaha!

This is what $20 looks like

When I got my morels ready to cook, I was very surprised to find that they're hollow inside - I guess I expected the part that looks like a brain to be solid inside, like a button or portobello.  It's more like a gnarly-looking balloon.

This was spring experiment number 2 (last year we tried ramps, which we liked enough to play with again this year), and again it involved lots of bacon.  Basically, I fried up some bacon pieces and ramps, pulled out the bacon and used the grease to fry the morels, which I cut into wedges so they'd end up being bite-sized when they were done.  When the morels were mostly done I added some salt and pepper, and some milk that I thickened with flour (because I was out of cream).  Served it over some fettuccine with the bacon sprinkled over the top and liberal amounts of Parmesan cheese.

It was good, but honestly you couldn't really taste the mushrooms that much - it would have been as good (and much cheaper) with any of the regular varieties of mushrooms you can buy at the grocery store.

And then we tried fiddleheads.  This was much less of a success, due in large part to the fact that when boiled they're fuzzy and curled up and have little leaves that look like feet and it's very hard to get over the "Ack!  I'm eating caterpillars!" factor.  Jason and I each had one bite and threw the rest away.  Luckily, those were only a $5 investment ... it would have killed me to have to do that with the Solid Gold Fungi.

So now we've tried the three most common wild-harvested spring vegetables!  Yay!