Morels with Fiddleheads

Call me crazy, but I started a Master of Science degree in Forestry and Mycology because I love wild mushroom hunting. Ok, its not really a 'mycology' degree, departments like that don't exist anymore. It seems like universities are amalgamating disciplines into broad categories like "Organismal Science" like my alma mater (U of G). At UNBC, its "Natural Resource and Environmental Studies". So broad it means almost nothing (or everything). Just because I will convocate (tomorrow!) with a degree in Forestry, doesn't mean I don't know a thing or two about mushrooms. I wanted to get the science background in order to understand mysterious fungi. They do so many things in the environment and in so many ways, it blows my mind.

BUT, this blog is not about my Master's thesis.

It's about food.

And it was food that inspired my interest in mushrooms (however misguidedly expressed in my scientific tendancies). One of my first memories as a child is of a street food vendor selling fried mushrooms in a bun (were they wild? I really don't recall) . My mom used to say that mushrooms are hard to digest and I shouldn't eat them. It took me considerable begging and pleading to get one of these delightful sandwiches. It was an incredible nutty salty full flavoured sweetness that is forever seared into my memory. I have been searching for and trying to find that particular taste ever since. It is this memory that has motivated me to look for wild mushrooms and try any new ones I could successfuly identify. I suppose that being Polish helps to stimulate my fungo-philia. I have wonderful memories of mushroom hunting with my grandfather. I am not scared of wild mushrooms and I want to eat them all.

Picking wild mushrooms couldn't be safer than when it comes to morels. They fruit in the spring when most other mushrooms are not fruiting. They are easy to identify if not easy to find. Here in northern BC, I like to look for them in the most prevelant disturbance sites: clearcuts. They love to pop up after a fire. Or wherever they feel like. Some were found in my backyard, some behind the school in the forest. They can be anywhere, so keep your eyes open in the spring. Pine cones and shriveled leaves might fool you. They fool me everytime I go out hunting.

I used to always cut them open to make sure they are hollow (a practice adopted early in my hunting career when I actually feared mistaking them for the false morels), but I chose to not do so for most of the mushrooms in this dish, the clear signal of spring: Morels with Fiddleheads. I suppose that cutting them open also helps you inspect them for trespassing bugs which often find the shape suitable for an edible home. I'm less afraid of that now too. If there are bugs, great. These things are fried to crispness, so forget the bonus protein and enjoy! But of course, if they are fresh and show no bore holes, odds are good you are the first to find and feast upon them.

Finally, a sad note: it seems to be a less-than-great year for morels this year in Prince George. The snow lasted too long, the spring is/was cold. I'm not sure they have been convinved to bear fruit in high numbers this year. I will be hunting again this weekend, so I will add more data to this conclusion. I must continue to believe in the harvest. They will come...

My favourite way to eat morels is Morel Chicken, but I had made a giant batch of that for a potluck not so long ago, so I wanted to do something different with my first harvest of the year. I found fresh fiddleheads, sadly, not in the wild, but in the fish store. My was instantly solved: Morels and Fiddleheads, fried with shallots and garlic.

Morels and Fiddleheads

Fresh Morels (however many you have, shake the dirt off, shoo the bugs)
Fresh fiddleheads
couple of shallots, chopped
a few garlic cloves, minced.
Butter for frying.
Salt and pepper to taste.

Soften the shallots and garlic. Add morels. Fry for a few minutes. Add the fiddleheads. Add 3 tablespoons water to the pan, cover and let them steam for 5 minutes. Remove cover and let them fry and get crispy for 10-15 minutes. You can add a bit more butter at this stage. The water should evaporate off quickly. I like to get the morels a bit crispy. Season with salt and pepper.




Morels have a mild flavour. You don't want to overpower it. Thus simple dishes are key to getting the most out of your forest treasures.

If trying them for the first time, I always recommend frying them with butter and salt, just to get the taste. Then experiment. Cream soups, cream sauces, eggs are all good ideas.

Please, for heaven's sake: USE BUTTER. The flavour is unmatched by synthesized overproduced margarines and boring vegetable oils. They have their place (maybe not the margarines), but it's not in the frying pan with mushrooms. I really like to use full fat in everything that I do. It just tastes so much better. I try to eat less to compensate for the extra calories (I'm not sure that the tactic works all time...but its the thought that counts, right?)

Happy Hunting.

Spicy Roasted Carrot-Ginger Soup

I used these delightful purple carrots. I managed to order them through P&R Organics, but sadly, they don't seem to have them anymore.

I've been getting their home delivery for 2 weeks now and its been great. I normally like to touch and squeeze and select produce in a store thereby ensuring freshness; I wasn't sure I would take kindly to having veggies selected for me. I must say that the quality has been good I haven't minded handing over some control in exchange for the convenience.

This weekend, I've been fussing over food photography and wishing to make the dishes I write about look as appetizing as they actually are. It's not easy, but I'm excited to try to make beautiful pictures on a shoestring. I have a DSLR, but alas! crummy lighting. I'm trying to work with backlighting and bouncing with *ehem* affordable alternatives (bed sheets, salvalged skid wood and a super cheap portable work light). It's been fun to explore but I've got a long way to go. I'm loving the challenge.

And to practice my techniques, I made Spicy Roasted Carrot-Ginger Soup with fresh baked bread. Soup and bread are the ultimate comfort food (and I'm still fighting a bit of a cold...mostly it's just the snot in my head that won't go away. But I so rarely get sick that when I get sick, I complain and whine in the fashion of a "man-cold")

The spice in the soup comes from the ginger. I coat the carrots with a little oil and salt and pepper and bake at 400F for 30 min. They should carmelize somewhat (you can flip them over mid-way for more even cooking). This step intensifies the carrot flavour.

It is composed of:

2lbs of carrots (10-15 medium carrots), roasted as above and coarsely chopped (it's all pureed in the end!)
1 onion, coarsely chopped.
5 cloves of garlic (or a few more if you feel like it)
Ginger, chopped. Amount will vary with taste. Today, I used a peice half the size of my (girly) hand. And that was a lot. It came out very intensely ginger flavoured. You could easily use half of that.

Soften onion, garlic and ginger in a couple Tablespoons of oil over medium heat in a soup pot with a heavy bottom. 5-10minutes. Add carrots, and cover with about 6 cups of water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for a minimum of 20 minutes (I suggest 40min if you have the time). Puree in a blender. Add a little cream if desired. I garnished with fried carrot slices (because the purple ring made it look great) and served it with super soft crusty bread that I had rising since the morning and baked while making the soup.



I really like this soup with old fashioned orange carrots. This particular permutation wasn't the prettiest. The orange and purple blended to a lovely reddish prune colour. Well, it was still tasty and will make for an amazing lunch tomorrow!

Kale dressed in Bacon

Leave it to bacon to improve any meal!

This time last year, I was nearing the end of a month long vacation in Morocco. Morroco is mostly Muslim. Muslims, as a rule, don't eat pork. I found myself, about one year ago, desperate for a pizza with mushrooms (I always want mushrooms) AND bacon AND ham. Did I get it? Nope. Was it the first meal I had when I got back to North America? almost...(first, I had pork chops!), but my pork desires in their many wonderful forms were foremost in my mind for a good while thereafter. I had many pizzas overflowing with ham and bacon. And it was good.

It still is good.

Bacon is always good. What better way to dress healthful greens, such as kale. I ordered kale in my organic box last week and dressed it my favourite manner, but with a twist: maple syrup!

Kale dressed in Maple Bacon

1 bunch of kale, chopped, coarse stems removed
2 Tablespoons maple syrup
4 strips bacon
1/4 lemon, juiced



Chop bacon and pan fry til almost crisp. Drain some of the fat (you don't need ALL that fat!), reserve about half of it. Add the chopped kale, maple syrup and lemon, stir and cover. Cook 10 minutes covered. Check tenderness, it may take another 5 minutes to get the kale soft. It will start to carmelize...mmm.

I served it with mashed potatos. You don't need much more to get a filling meal.

Pesto Pasta as the wonder food of car camping

The second blog post of my life was unfairly snatched from its birthplace and effectively permanently deleted from existance by a fluke computer hiccup. Never to be dissuaded, I forge ahead, fearless and now creating a backup. Cuz you never know.

The post on Sweet and Sour Pork will hopefully be rewritten someday. I make that dish often enough and so it will come back...just in a different guise. The dish I made last week was from frozen pork and adding it to my vegetables caused it to ooze this greyish watery crap that couldn't be completely eliminated even after I drained and drained and replaced all of my flavourings. It made a crappy picture, so perhaps it is best not to mourn its disappearance.

Not that I have a picture of today's recipe. What can I say? It was the end of a long and wonderful day at Marble Canyon. It was getting dark. I had climbed the second climb of my life, rappelled from a 2 pitch 5.8 (let's say 5.9 so I can appear more bad-ass) and felt lucky to not have irreperably screwed up the rope-work. The important point is that it was getting dark. You sure can't take a good photo with a headlamp light.

The beauty of a weekend climbing is that you get to car camp. This means, you can bring anything you want. Jars of stuff, bottles, extra back up food, you know, just in case! Having not been car camping in a few years, I felt like I rediscovered an old companion. Certainly not an old love. I've never LOVED car camping, rather, it always served a purpose: I car camped before a race (Emperor's Challenge in Tumbler Ridge...best half marathon EVER); when moving across the country (with a life's worth of junk in the car).

The dinner I made on this May-long trip was Pesto Pasta:

Bag of dried penne (I all about fresh pasta under normal circumstances)
Jar of pesto
Jar of sundried tomatos in oil
Feta cheese
Pine nuts

Cook the pasta until the desired tenderness. Al dente is just underdone, as the pasta will continue cooking after you drain the water thereby overcooking your pasta if past this underdone point. I guess you can rinse the pasta, but I think that's a big no-no. You want the starch that's hanging on to the outside of your pasta because it will help bind the sauce.

Then mix everything together. I chopped the sundried tomatoes and feta using a flattened beer box as a cutting board. I threw in some fresh tomatoes because we had them.

Don't skimp in the pine nuts. They provide a delightful counterpoint to the heavy 'sauce' ingredients. And I don't think you should substitute in this case.

Sweet and Sour Pork

I thought I lost this post, but it turns out I just don't know how to work the software yet!. So here it is:

Last night's dinner and today's lunch was Sweet and Sour Pork. I love pork tenderloin for this recipe because it can be cooked up to be so tender. Sadly, I did not achieve perfection last night because I was using frozen pork and apparently, frozen pork cooks differently.

Mental note: cook frozen meat seperately!

I like to add the pork directly to the stir-fry style wok of vegetables because I can turn the heat to low, cover and let the pork cook, but not overcook. If its frozen, it lets off water. And the water it let off was grey and disgusting. It looked horrible and I ended up draining it and adding my flavourings again (thereby wasting one lemon and depleting my stock).

That's why there are no pictures (I really want to start adding photos. It'll be a fun challenge to start to get them to look right. The light quality in that kitchen is crap. We get lots of daylight, but that, of course is variable and will be almost nonexistant in the winter.)

Mental note: get good lighting for the kitchen.

So my sweet and sour pork ended up tasting ok, but certainly not my best result.

Here's the recipe:

1 onion, thinly sliced
4-8 cloves chopped garlic
1/2 pound mushrooms (I like cremini, but it doesn't really matter, they'll take up the flavour of the sauce. The cremini seems a little more firm and stand up to a longer cooking time)

In a wok, stir fry the onions and garlic on low to medium heat, add mushrooms, turn up the heat.

1-2 Sweet peppers, different colours
2 carrots ( I had purple ones from my **first** organic box, they looked great), sliced
can of mandarins
3 green onions, chopped

Pork tenderloin, cut to medallions

Add carrots a few minutes after the mushrooms. Fry on high, carmelize the carrots slightly. 5 min.

Add the juice from the mandarin can (adds sweetness)
Add fish sauce to taste ( for saltiness)
Add juice of one lemon
Balance tartness by adding white sugar (couple of tablespoons will really round out the flavour)
Add chili flakes to taste (I love it hot!)

Balance Balance Balance. The final sauce should be sweet, sour, salty and hot. If its too salty, add lemon. If its too sweet, add fish sauce. If its too sour, add sugar. If its too hot, you're boned. I guess you can always add more water to try to dilute out the hot.

Cover and let carrots soften (about 5 minutes).

Add pork and peppers at the same time. Keep covered and cook 5-10 minutes until pork is barely done. I think pork gets tough at about 165F, try to keep it at 145F (safe, but not tough--meat thermometers are great!)

Serve over basmati rice (all other rice is inferior! not that I'm opinionated about it or anything), garnish with mandarins and green onions.

Bring on the beets

My first blog post! EVER! Yeah, that's right. I am popping my blogging cherry right now.

I am excited to start recording my adventures in food. That's really all this blog is. I wanted a place where I could write about my experiences and keep a journal of the recipes and techniques I have tried and loved.

The reference to beets in the title reflects my heritage (beets seem to me to be a very eastern european thing), my love of the vegetable itself (is there anything better than barszcz??),and a nod to my occupation (that is, my soil focused scientific life).

The beet is a red passionate vegetable, its colour spreads and sinks into the skin. Like my love of all things food...