Category Archives: recipes

Spring Lamb with Morel Wine & Herb Sauce

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While porcini hunting recently, I had good luck finding some exceptionally large morels in one drainage, with several larger than my hand. I found most of them near the elevation limit of the fruiting porcini, and I suppose if I had kept going up I might have found a bunch more, but my heart was set on porcini, so I picked these as a satisfying bonus—and made sure to mark my maps with notes for further investigation another time.

I got three meals out of these collateral morels, including this lamb dinner for six paired with large squares of semolina and chive gnocchi. For the gnocchi recipe, click here. A ladle of morel sauce finished the dish.

Lamb Marinade

6 Lamb chops, French-cut
3 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tbsp sage, chopped
1 tbsp thyme, chopped
1 tbsp rosemary, chopped
salt and pepper, to taste

Season lamb with salt and pepper. Whisk together remaining ingredients and brush on both sides of lamb. Marinate 2 hours, then grill.

Morel Wine & Herb Sauce

1 lb morels, halved (or quartered if large)
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter, divided
1 large shallot, diced
1 cup red wine
1 oz porcini, pulverized
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 heaping tbsp mascarpone (or 1/4 cup heavy cream)
splash Madeira, to taste (optional)
salt and pepper

Reconstitute porcini ahead of time in warm water and set aside for 30 minutes. Heat olive oil and 1 tbsp butter in skillet, then add diced shallot and morels. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes over medium-high heat before pouring in red wine. Reduce by two-thirds, then add porcini stock, herbs, and a splash of Madeira. Lower heat to medium and cook several more minutes to reduce by half or so. Just before serving, stir in remaining butter and mascarpone. The sauce should thicken nicely and the butter will lend it an attractive sheen. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with that red wine you’ve been saving for a special meal. Serves 4-6.

Spring Porcini Salad

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PERHAPS THE MOST enduring way to eat spring porcini is grilled. Unlike fall porcini, which herald the coming of winter and hearty meals cooked indoors, the spring porcini of the West Coast fruits just in time for the kick-off of the barbecue season.

Arranged on a bed of fresh spring greens picked moments earlier, this porcini salad was the perfect accompaniment to a dinner of grilled Copper River sockeye and local Washington asparagus. To prepare the mushrooms for grilling, I brushed on a marinade of olive oil, garlic, and chopped herbs from the garden (thyme, oregano, parsley), then set them immediately on the hot grill, cooking over medium heat until the porcini were lightly browned on both sides. A dressing of olive oil, cider vinegar, and honey finished the salad.

This is a similar presentation to chef Keith Luce’s recipe for Roasted Porcini with Honey & Thyme in my article on “The Poor Man’s Steak” in the October ’08 issue of Seattle Metropolitan magazine, except rather than cooking the porcini in a stuffy kitchen you can hang outside with friends by the barbecue drinking a beer and admiring the porcini as it browns up.

Mushrooms & Marinade

1/2 lb fresh medium-sized porcini buttons, sliced 1/4 inch thick
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp fresh thyme, chopped
1 tbsp fresh oregano, chopped
1 tbsp fresh parsley choped
salt and pepper, to taste

Whisk together marinade ingredients. Slice porcini, brush on marinade, and immediately place on hot grill over medium heat, turning periodically and brushing on more marinade to keep moist. Grill until nicely golden brown, but not dark brown. With tongs, remove from grill and arrange over tender spring greens

Dressing

Equal parts olive oil and cider vinegar. Season with salt and pepper. Add honey to taste. Drizzle over porcini and greens. Finish with a few shavings of romano. The sweetness of honey combined with the sharpness of romano makes for an ideal pairing for the meaty porcini mushrooms, and the warmth of the porcini contrasted with the cool, crispy salad greens is a match for the season. Enjoy outside with a glass of rosé and good friends, as we did.

All Hail the Spring King

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Some may call it heresy, but I’ll say it anyway: I sometimes prefer picking spring porcini to morels. Yes, finding morels is one of the great pleasures of foraging—and eating them is an unparalleled culinary treat. But hunting spring porcini means venturing deeper into more pristine wilderness at a time when the wildflowers are in full bloom and the songbirds in full throat.

As with morels, you need an understanding of habitat conditions, tree composition, slope aspect, and so on, making a porcini hunt a challenging puzzle to figure out. I like to spend a few days roaming on the sunny side of the mountains, camping and hiking while I load up on a supply of spring kings to last me through the year.

Usually I’ll start in the lower valleys and work my way up in elevation. Sometimes you don’t see the mushrooms at all; you need to look for a bump in the duff—affectionately known to hunters as a “mushrump”—that signals the growth of a bolete underneath. These are the ones you want, the firm young buttons. They’re also more likely to be bug-free than the older fully emerged mushrooms flapping in the breeze. Which brings me to one of the sad facts of porcini hunting: be prepared to toss a lot of mushrooms. Trim the end or slice in half and you’ll know right away: more than a few will be riddled with worm holes. I try to salvage what I can to dry for later; unblemished buttons get cooked fresh.

Until recently, picking spring porcini mushrooms was like waking up in the morning next to a stranger. A beautiful, nameless stranger. How embarrassing not to know a name! A few proposed appellations floated around the mushroom scene, with none sticking. Some called the mushroom a spring variant of Boletus edulis, others Boletus pinophilus. But the latter was a European species that didn’t seem to fit, and the former is only the most famous bolete of them all, the king bolete, a fall species that differs from its vernal cousin in a few dramatic ways. So most of us just referred to them as “spring kings” and left it at that.

Now David Arora, of Mushrooms Demystified fame, has offered a new name to put an end to the confusion. Boletus rex-veris (from the Latin, meaning “spring king”) would give the mushroom new species status.

Spring kings differ from true king boletes (B. edulis) in a few striking ways. Most obvious is the timing; spring kings usually start fruiting on the east slopes of the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains a few weeks after the morels have started. In my area this means mid-June most years. They fruit underground and often don’t burst through the duff until fully mature, and they can also be found in clusters, sometimes with several specimens fruiting together from the same clump.

Some might argue that the spring king is not quite the equal of Boletus edulis, but it has good porcino flavor and can be quite firm and crunchy in the button stage. A few buttons can transform a simple camp dinner into something worthy of the best restaurants.

Camper’s Special Pig & Porcini Feast

3-4 porcini buttons, trimmed and sliced 1/4 -inch thick
5-6 fresh morels, halved
1/2 lb Italian sausage, sliced
2 slices quality bacon, diced
1/2 lb asparagus, cut into thirds
1 cup rice
butter
cream
parmesan cheese
fresh herbs
wild violets for garnish

1. Make rice (or noodles). When done, add butter, cream, parmesan, and fresh herbs to taste for creamy texture. Keep covered.

2. While rice is cooking, saute diced bacon in a dab of butter until crispy. Set aside, leaving bacon fat in pan. Saute mushrooms, turning periodically, until browned. Set aside with bacon. Add sausage to pan and brown, then add asparagus and cook a few more minutes. Return bacon and mushrooms to pan for another minute or two. Serve over rice, then repair to cozy camp chair with a cold, hearty brew and a blazing fire to keep the wild animals at bay.

Pineapple Weed Express

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IN ANOTER LIFETIME I might have been a treasure seeker. 

Like some of the great explorers of yesterday, I went in search of the lowly pineapple weed (Matricaria discoidea). You’ve probably never noticed it before. It grows low to the ground, usually just a few inches tall, sometimes more than a foot in good conditions, with feathery leaves reminiscent of a carrot top and little greenish-yellow flowerheads.

Like the sunflower, it is a composite, a member of the Asteraceae family, and is related to chamomile. Pineapple weeds flourish in marginal habitats: compacted soil, sidewalks, gravel beds, old lots. Their tap roots cling to the most hardscrabble of surfaces. Crush a flowerhead between your fingers and you’ll know right away if your identification is correct. A distinct smell of pineapple. 

My journey took me past homes and businesses to a gravelly lot at the bottom of a hill. Bingo.

Back home, it didn’t take long to dry the flowerheads in the hot June sun. I spread them on a black plate outside our front door. An hour later I scooped up two teaspoon’s worth and steeped them in two cups of hot water for 10 minutes. Then I added a touch of honey and ice, sat back in the rocking chair on the front porch, and remembered my days as an intrepid explorer while afternoon commuters fought their way home in the baking sun.

Pickled Fiddleheads

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IF YOU LIVE IN the Seattle area, next time you’re at a farmers market look for the Foraged and Found Edibles booth and pick up a copy of Christina Choi’s Wild Foods Recipe Calendar, with illustrations by Emily Counts. This month-by-month catalog of the Pacific Northwest’s wild cornucopia is a treasure trove of recipes and information. 

I tried the Pickled Fiddleheads recipe first.

The biggest challenge of fiddleheads isn’t finding and picking them—that’s relatively easy once you have an understanding of their habitat (moist woodlands, stream banks, swampy areas). No, the hardest part is cleaning the curly little buggers. (Before and after photos below.) 

Here’s a cleaning tip: Use two large bowls filled with water. Soak your fiddleheads in one and use the other as a rinsing dish. The chaff will come off easily enough with a little rubbing. When chaff begins to accumulate in your rinsing bowl, strain it out. This tedious sink-side work will be paid off handsomely with a pickled batch of springtime fiddleheads.

1 lb fiddleheads, cleaned
2 lemons
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 cups wine vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
2 tbsp kosher salt
8-inch piece wild ginger (optional)
1 tsp whole black pepper
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp whole allspice
1/2 lb shallots, sliced 1/8 inch thick
4 pint jars with lids and screwcaps, sterilized

1. Remove strips of lemon zest with a peeler, then juice lemons.
2. Pack fiddleheads tightly into canning jars, layered with shallots and lemon zest.
3. Bring to boil water, vinegar, lemon juice, sugar, salt, spices, and optional ginger.
4. Pour over fiddleheads so that liquid reaches to within a 1/4 inch of rim, then secure lids and process in hot water bath for 10 minutes.

 

I went down to the crossroads: Devil’s Club Chocolate Sauce

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IMAGINE STUMBLING through a jungle of malicious trees. Brush up against one and it leaves a rash of spines. Its broad, prickly leaves hang like prehistoric green parasols, shutting out the light and obscuring your vision. You half expect to see a giant dragonfly buzz by.

Did you land in one of the nine circles of Hell? Nah, just another ill-advised attempt to bushwhack through a patch of devil’s club right here in the Pacific Northwest.

Devil’s club (Oplopanax horridus) is a shrub endemic to this region and a few other isolated pockets of North America. In rainforest conditions it can grow to a height of 15 feet but is more commonly three to five feet tall. The spines are no joke. They cause excruciating pain until you take the time to carefully tweezer them out like splinters.

With a cool, resiny, evergreen sort of flavor, the buds can be used to give woodsy depth to savory meat sauces and sweet desserts alike. You want to get them while between 1-2 inches in length, before the leaf has a chance to uncurl and its spines harden. Wear appropriate clothes and a thick pair of gloves.

Devil’s Club Chocolate Sauce

1 dozen small devil’s club buds, chopped
1/2 cup half and half, plus extra just in case
1/4 sugar
4-8 oz bar baker’s chocolate*, chopped
1 tbsp butter

* I used a 4 oz Ghirardelli 100% cacao unsweetened baking bar. If using a bar with, say, half the percentage of cacao you’ll want to double the amount to 8 oz.

1. Infuse the half and half with devil’s club by covering the buds in a bowl with the cream and refrigerating for at least an hour.

2. Strain half and half into saucepan. Add sugar and bring to gentle boil, stirring. Remove from heat.

3. Off heat, mix in chocolate and butter and stir vigorously. Keep a 1/2 cup or so of warm milk or cream on hand for thinning.

4. While warm and viscous, pour over ice cream or fruit.

Here’s the thing about devil’s club: You want to be careful about heating it. Too much heat and it loses that remarkable aroma. Used properly, the devil’s club buds will add an extra dimension of flavor to the chocolate sauce, a piney flavor that deepens the sauce and imparts the mystery of the woods to whatever you’re serving.
Second photo from top by skagitstan.

Semolina Gnocchi with Wild Mushroom Sauce

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At the monthly meeting of the Puget Sound Mycological Society last Tuesday the chef of Serafina, a Seattle restaurant, gave a cooking demonstration using this recipe. I’ve tweaked it slightly to suit my needs, using chives instead of green onions because that’s what we’ve got in the garden, and pulverizing the porcini for a richer sauce.

Semolina Gnocchi

2 cups milk
2 tbsp butter
3/4 cup semolina flour
1/4 cup parmesan, grated
2 tbsp chives, chopped
1 egg yolk
salt and pepper to taste

1. Boil milk and butter over medium-high heat. Slowly whisk in semolina. Reduce heat to medium-low and stir a minute or two. Stir in parmesan, chives, and seasoning. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring. Remove from heat and stir in egg yolk.

2. Grease a baking tin and spread mixture on tin to cool for several minutes. Using a spatula, spread and flatten gnocchi evenly so it’s approximately 1/3 inch thick. Refrigerate. Trim edges and cut into 1-inch squares.

Wild Mushroom Sauce

1/2 oz dried porcini
1 medium leek, divided
1/2 lb fresh morels, sliced
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil, plus more if necessary
1 tbsp fresh sage, chopped
splash Madiera
1 heaping tbsp mascarpone cheese
salt and pepper to taste

1. Pulverize dried porcini and bring to boil in 2 cups water with 1/2 leek, trimmed and roughly chopped. Reduce heat and let simmer 5 minutes before removing from heat.

2. Saute morels in pan with butter and olive oil until browned, about 4 minutes. Season. Add remaining leek, cut into julienne, and cook another few minutes. When leek has softened, add sage and deglaze with Madiera. When Madiera has evaporated, add 1/2 cup of mushroom-leek broth and reduce by half.

3. Gently brown gnocchi in olive oil and butter in another pan, preferably nonstick. Cook in batches, removing to warm plate in oven when done. Finish mushroom sauce with mascarpone. Add more mushroom broth if necessary. (At this point I added a touch more Madiera.) Check seasoning and ladle over gnocchi.

Serves 4. Eat with good friends who bring good wine. A spinach salad with toasted nuts and cheese pairs nicely.

Forager walks into a bar…

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Q: HOW DO YOU eat a gigantic alien space egg?

A: Very carefully!

Da-dum-DUM! Thanks, I’ll be here all week.

But seriously, I’ve been nibbling on this giant western puffball for days and barely made a dent. I figure it was close to 10 pounds when I found it on an eroded slope above MLK Jr. Blvd in Seattle. By contrast, the puffball pictured here—a bit smaller than a bowling ball—is half the size of the one I picked.

Sliced, cubed, and pan-fried, fresh puffball is a dead ringer for tofu…

Puffball Miso Soup

1 cup cubed puffball mushroom
3 cups water
2 small carrots, peeled and sliced
2 green onions, thinly sliced
2 heaping tbsp miso
1 tbsp peanut oil
1 tbsp sesame oil
pinch wakame flakes
soy sauce to taste

1. Bring water to boil in pot and add carrots. Continue to simmer, covered.

2. Heat oil in pan over medium heat. Add mushrooms and carefully sauté to lightly brown. Lower heat.

3. When carrots are tender, stir in miso, then add wakame flakes, green onions, and contents of sauté pan to pot. Cook 2 more minutes and serve, seasoning with soy sauce.

Serves 2 as appetizer.

Fancy Foothill Treats

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No, I didn’t bag a succulent spring lamb in the foothills, just the fiddleheads and nettle sauce. The reawakening is moving steadily higher into the mountains, bringing with it culinary goodies that have mostly played out down here at sea level.

For instance, stinging nettles are past their prime around Seattle now. Any taller than a foot or so and they become fibrous, with tougher stems and leaves that can be grainy. But in the foothills above 1,000 feet in elevation they’re young and tender. Of course, your mileage may vary. Further south in the Sierra you would need to go higher.

Same goes for the fiddleheads, and this topic deserves some further discussion. While I can’t speak to ostrich ferns of the eastern U.S., if you’re foraging lady fern fiddleheads, make sure you get them at the earliest possible stage, when they’ve just emerged from the root cluster and are no more than an inch or two above the ground (see image at right). Sometimes I’ll take them a little higher if the fiddleheads are still tightly coiled, but you want to avoid those specimens that have already started to unwind. The further along in the development, the more apt to be bitter. Also, it’s worth remembering that fully leafed-out fern fronds are actually toxic.

Here’s another tip when harvesting fiddleheads: Soak them in water back at home for a few minutes before removing the papery sheaf. The chaff is easier to rub off when wet.

For this meal I took advantage of a few rambles about town and in the woods. I got the lamb chops from a local butcher, who sources from a small-scale farm. The fiddleheads and nettles came from the foothills. Mint I found growing wild while walking around the neighborhood. I grilled the lamb chops and topped with a creamy nettle-mint sauce. The fiddleheads I boiled for 5 minutes and sauteed in butter. (The following night I sauteed the fiddleheads with chopped shallot and finished with cream and a splash of cognac.)

Nettle-Mint Sauce

Handful of blanched stinging nettles, roughly chopped
Handful of fresh mint, blanched 5 seconds and shocked in cold water
1 shallot, rough cut
3-4 heaping tbsp plain yogurt
lemon juice squeezed from 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup olive oil, more or less
salt

Process all these ingredients in a food processor. I don’t have exact measurements because I pretty much eyeballed it. You want the sauce to be creamy, not pasty like pesto. Hence the yogurt. You can adjust the strength of the mint or nettle flavor however you want. This is just a start; tweak the recipe to your forager’s heart’s content.

I also spied some oyster mushrooms feasting on a dead alder tree during my foothills ramble. Though too small to be harvested, I know their zip code and will be back.

Cooks & Clams

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I feel like I’ve just been run through an intensive 10-week cooking class condensed into a single night. My head hurts—and not just because of all those Grand Cru wines brought home by the House Sommelier. The lesson here: Take a couple professional gourmet chefs clamming and you’ll reap the rewards. Not that it felt like work to get to the meal. I’ll take this troop clamming any day.

My foraging pupils were Becky Selengut, aka Chef Reinvented, who teaches cooking classes at PCC, cooks for hire, and is co-author of the Washington Local and Seasonal Cookbook. Her old colleague from the Herbfarm restuarant, Jet Smith, joined us. And completing the trio was Amy Pennington, the gogogreengardener herself, a former lieutenant to Tom Douglas, creator of Urban Garden Share, and no slouch in the kitchen.

Don’t let the fem pink gloves fool you… Most of the conversation simply can’t be re-printed, as I’m trying to run a family-friendly blog here. I’ve been known to let loose some colorful language myself, but these three make drunken sailors sound prim and more than once did I blush in the hot sun.

We started with the oyster beds, which were fully exposed by a low tide that virtually emptied this small bay in south Puget Sound. A few down the hatch and the rest into the bag.

Did I mention the extraordinary sun? After a libation and bit of sunbathing in the beautiful sun, we attacked the clam beds. With one other clammer in sight, we had the pick of the litter. I don’t think I’ve ever raked up a limit in such record time. The clams were practically jumping out of the sand volunteering for Becky’s Grand Plan. Both native littlenecks and non-native Manila clams filled our buckets. The Manilas have short siphons and can be found just an inch or two below gravelly sand, while the natives are just a little deeper, usually three or four inches beneath the surface. On this day we found mostly Manilas—big ones too.

A patch of sea beans (Salicornia sp.) provided the final treat. We munched on them through the day and took home enough for dinner.

Back at the ranch the cooks started working their magic. A few observations:

 

  • Pros work very quickly. I was still polishing off my second glass of rose champagne and the ladies already had three sauces ready to go.
  • Pros don’t get stressed out, certainly not when entertaining at home for such a small number of guests.
  • Pros make it look simple but their hamster-in-a-treadmill brains are forever concocting fiendish new designs to blow the minds of their hapless victims.

Though I’ll do my best to parse the recipes here, please understand that the chefs were working improvisationally throughout and I don’t think I saw a single measuring cup or spoon on the premises. What follows is an approximation, no doubt made murkier by the myriad wines and champagnes making the rounds. (The alcohol, I now realize, is the equivalent of a forager blindfolding his charges before entering a top secret hunting ground.)

Three Sauces

The first sauce was made by steaming a handful of clams in vermouth, shallot, parsley, and thyme. The clams were set aside for the first course and the broth strained into a blender along with some corn, blended, strained, and cooked down to a smooth sauce in a small pot, seasoned, and set aside.

The second sauce was composed simply of a small handful of parsley, blanched for 5 seconds and shocked with cold water, then blended with olive oil and salt into a cohesive oil which was strained and set aside.

The third sauce was made with a dried ancho pepper, reconstituted in warm water, seeded, and blended with tomato paste, olive oil, and salt.

First Course: Pan-Fried Pacific Oysters with Clams in Corn Sauce and Drizzled with Chili and Parsley Oils

That’s what I’m talking about. We’re not in Kansas anymore is right. The oysters were floured, dipped in egg, and dredged in homemade breadcrumbs, then pan-fried in a generous allowance of butter. These got plated in pyramid formations in shallow bowls ladled with the corn sauce, then topped with a garnish of thinly sliced olives and red onion bathed in red vinegar to turn a jaunty fuchsia. Steamed clams and drizzles of chili oil and parsley oil completed the sumptuous picture.

I mean, isn’t that what any of us would do with a few fresh oysters?

Second Course: Cambodian Shellfish Amok

I’ve actually made a dish similar to this, and the beauty is just how simple it is for us normal home cooks to make. My contribution on this night was to scrub the clams, which is kinda important since freshly foraged clams will have slimy stuff on their shells, while Amy scrubbed and de-bearded the mussels. Onions and kaffir lime leaves got sauteed in coconut oil in a big pot with amok powder and Thai bird chilies. Our pile of shellfish, about 140 clams and two-dozen mussels in all, was then dumped into the pot along with a can of coconut milk and steamed. The shellfish hotpot was finished with fresh lime and cilantro, and served with baguettes for dipping up the curry-like broth.

Third Course: Oyster and Sea Bean Succotash with Stir-fried Bok Choy

We finished off the meal with a southern twist, using the bok choy as a bridge from the previous course. Chopped bok choy and onions were stir-fried with diced bacon while the succotash was composed of corn, blanched sea beans, chopped oysters, steamed and chopped carrots, chopped shallots, blanched fava beans, and diced bacon, all of which got sauteed together in bacon grease and butter.

The succotash really got me. I’m rendered helpless in the presence of salty-sweet; a night at the ballpark can’t be fully consummated without a bag of kettle corn, and usually I’ll eat myself right into a barf bag, such is my weakness for salty-sweet. In this case, the sweetness of the corn and carrots married with the saltiness of the oysters and sea beans, while the crispy bacon and fava beans added textural complexity. It was a dish that, on the face of it, looked so easy, and yet its flavor was as good as anything I’ve ever eaten. I watched it happen right before my eyes and still can’t believe how good it was.

And I suppose that’s how I feel about the meal in general. Yeah, I was there to witness it but I couldn’t quite believe my senses. Our Wine Sommelier, April, who came home to this feast after a late night pre-opening party for the Grand Cru Wine Bar over in Bellevue, is one lucky lady.

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!