Savage Soupage

I also like the sound of potage sauvage, but I'm trying to wean myself from always running to the French.  That one will go in the title pantry, though, and I'm sure it will find its way out.  This is one of the most foraged dishes I've ever made, although, wild as it is, it did not require a lot of foraging far afield.  Indeed, much of it--morels, nettles, dandelion greens--came from our yard or near outskirts.

We had a nice, surprising fruiting of morels twenty feet from the house, near some cottonwoods.  Stinging nettles encroach at every edge of the yard, and our dandelion crop is amazing--not just the sheer number of plants, but the size of the leaves, and their mildness.  I haven't done enough with them this year.

As I was putting this soup together I worried that it might turn out to be a bit challenging, might lean toward the medicinal or excessively "healthy" side.  Ramps, nettles, dandelion greens, and fiddleheads all have distinctive flavors, which I had never tried to incorporate in one recipe before.  The morels were there to lend their musky mellowness, modulate the highs (bitter dandelions) and lows (earthy fiddleheads); and then, there's just the magic of soup--and of cream (which I may have mentioned recently...).  I needn't have worried, not a bit.  This weedy wild soupage was far more comforting than challenging, though the textures of all the wild greens still intrigued.  A garnish of dandelion petals brightened things up and removed at least one of those darned weeds from my yard.   One down, 600 trillion to go....

Stinging nettle tips left, wood nettles right.

A big part of the greenery in the soup was wood nettles, the lesser known cousin (sort of) of stinging nettles. These are at a lovely size in our woods now, and not terribly threatening, yet.  I'll have more to say about these in my next dispatch.

I had some cress I could have thrown in, but with four kinds of greens already, I refrained.  I cooked up some wild rice, thinking I might need something to give the soup more body, but there was no room for it, and it would have diluted this full-on forager's feast.

Savage Soupage
serves four

6 ostrich fern fiddleheads, each with about 6 inches of stalk, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 good handful of nice big dandelion greens, coarsely chopped
3/4 cup chopped ramp bulbs and stems
Greens from the ramps, sliced
3 ounces fresh morels
1 1/2 tablespoons cooking fat--butter, bacon or duck fat, or olive oil
4 cups (loosely packed) young wood nettles
1 1/2 cups (loosely packed) stinging nettle tips
3 1/2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
1/2 cup heavy cream
salt

Blanch the fiddleheads in salted boiling water for 5 minutes.  Drain and refresh in ice water.  If your dandelion greens seem quite bitter, blanch them for 1 minute, drain and refresh, and drain well.

Chop most of the morels, reserving a couple of caps to cut in rings and fry for garnish.  In a large saucepan or dutch oven, heat the cooking fat and add the ramp bulbs and stems.  Sauté for a minute or two, until they start to shrink a bit, then add the morels and a good pinch of salt.  Cook until the morels shrink and start to brown a bit, 3 to 4 minutes.  Add the dandelion greens and stir them in for a minute.  Add the wood nettles and ramp tops (save a bit of the greens for garnish) and stir to wilt them.  Add the stock and a couple of pinches of salt.   Add the stinging nettle tips and fiddleheads.  Bring to a boil and turn down to a simmer.  Simmer, partly covered, for 20 minutes.  Add the cream and taste for salt.  Simmer for 10 minutes.

Just before serving, fry the reserved rings of morel caps in a bit of butter until browned.  Garnish the soup with these, a few bits of ramp greens, and some dandelion petals, if you like.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Cream of the Cream of the Trout of the 'Shrooms

Not to say that stream-caught brown trout, foraged morels, and farmers market asparagus couldn't have held their own quite ably on the dinner plate, but what took our Sunday night supper over the top was the cream.  Some of you are smacking your lips and murmuring, Amen, brother, amen, solemnly, and to you I need say no more than, "Bon appétit."  Others of you are cringing a little, but still eager to hear more, repelled by all that fat, cholesterol, artery-clogging stuff, and yet mmmm that does really look pretty good, but no, I couldn't....  To you people, let me me say a few words.

Cream is beautiful.  Do not fear it.  The reflexive revulsion that many people experience when they hear the words "cream sauce" is, for the most part, quite justifiable.  Whether it has its source in the gut-busting, gaggingly rich sauces that used to characterize classic French cooking, or their abominable ersatzes made with canned "cream of..." soups, the aversion to cream sauce often has a real and understandable basis.  But please note that I am not talking about cream sauce, a heavily reduced, butter-laden concoction that leaves you feeling bloated after just a couple of teaspoons.  No, I am talking cream, sweet gold from green meadows, the pure essence of pristine pastures, a gift from our gracious grazers.... Eh.  Right.  Sorry.  Let's try that again.

Cream is beautiful.  It is a wonderful ingredient, and when used properly--which usually means sparingly--it brings a quality to cooking that can be achieved in no other way.  Sure, you can blend some potato into your lo-cal soup, or achieve a creamish texture to a sauce via a flour roux or cornstarch, but in no case will the result be creamy.  For that, you need cream. (Cedar Summit cream is the best around, though available only in the Twin Cities area.  But the small-scale dairy movement is growing (is that an oxymoron?), so perhaps there's an excellent small dairy in your area.)

Because my cookbook doesn't shirk from employing cream, cheese, and excellent bacon in its recipes, I think some people have assumed that I'm a proponent of what we might call "The New Gluttony."  That's the approach to food that champions low-brow, high-fat eating as exemplified by "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives," "Man V. Food", and the like.  I'm brand new to pay TV, since we had to get a dish to get any television at all out here in the country, and I'm finding what passes for food programming, well, pretty appalling.  Why people keep tuning in to watch Guy Fieri shove yet another burger or piece of fried chicken into his plump, shiny face is beyond me, but there you go.  Obviously it sells, and I'm just an unknown food blogger with an oddball cookbook, so I should just shut up about it.  I won't even mention Paula Deen or Sandra Lee (whoops...), but the non-stop glorification of two-pound bacon cheeseburgers, doormat-sized pizzas, grease-soaked breakfast platters that would feed a Chinese family of eight for a week, at a time when roughly a third of the American public is clinically obese, that percentage expected to rise to over 40 percent in the next few years, well, where is your shame, you peddlers of slow, oily death, where, I ask is...your...shame?

Uh, so, where was I?  Oh yeah, I was telling  you to eat more cream.  Well, the point I was weaving towards was that while a lot of my recipes do call for cream, they rarely use more than a half a cup, nor do I reach for that bottle of liquid deliciousness more than once or twice a week.  Same thing with the bacon.  I smoke bacon three or four times a year, and do four pounds or so each time, but let's estimate on the high side and say that this household of two consumes 20 pounds of bacon a year.  That's ten pounds per person per year, or 13.33 ounces per month, or 3.33 ounces per week, less than a quarter pound--on the very high end.  I had bacon for breakfast this morning, by the way, from a batch I smoked up yesterday.  My day is off to a good start.

But I wonder if home-smoked bacon on sourdough wheatberry bread for breakfast can be linked to high levels of digressiveness.  What is wonderful about cream is that is makes dishes taste, yes, creamy.  But also, it brings flavors together in marvelous ways.  Using a couple examples from my book:  in Summer Lake Trout Chowder the cream--all of three tablespoons for two generous servings--marries the flavors of fresh and smoked trout and aromatic herbs and vegetables, and gives the broth a hint of richness that makes the dish; in Farmers Market Confetti Vegetable Sauce for pasta, a quarter-cup of cream in a dish that serves four enriches the broth that coats a market vegetable medley that would just be too...vegetal without it, and then brings together sauce and pasta, as well (yes, there's a little cheese on top, but cheese is another super flavor carrier that I use often and sparingly).

The trout dish served up here as an example of how large a flavor impact a little cream can have was inspired by one of Jacques Pépin's lesser known books, but one I reach for all the time: A French Chef Cooks at Home.  A French chef cooks at home rather differently from how you and I do, unless your daily menus run to dishes like Canard Montmorency or Cervelles de Veau Provencale, but it also has simpler dishes, such as Truites Grillées à la Crème--broiled trout with cream.

I usually do this on the grill, as Jacques suggests, but Sunday evening was rainy and blustery, and the broiler had to stand in for the grill.  Thanks to a little cream and a few morels, it did so admirably (and it kind of took me back a few years--why stop the digressions now?--because when I was a kid, broiling was one of my family's main ways of cooking.  We broiled everything, chicken, steaks, pork chops, bacon--those two aluminum broiler pans, one big, one small, scorched and dented from years of service, would go in a shrine if I had them here today.  My mom would broil chicken wings so hard, you could eat the whole thing, bones and all...).

Looking more closely at Jacques's recipe, I see that what I did was quite different from the original, where the trout is grilled over charcoal (back in 1975 Jacques was advocating for real wood charcoal over briquets), then placed "in a nice row in a gratin dish," the cream poured over, brought to a simmer, then served.  I did mine entirely under the broiler.  In the hopes of heading off further deviations, I revert to recipe style:

Broiled Trout and Morels in Cream
serves two

2  10-11" trout, brown, brook, or rainbow, bone in
2 tablespoons butter, divided
3 ounces fresh morels, quartered the long way (oysters, chanterelles, or hedgehogs would also be good)
1/4 cup dry white wine or dry vermouth
1/3 to 1/2 cup cream
salt and pepper

Make a couple of diagonal slashes in each side of the trout to help them cook more evenly and take up more of the sauce.  Season the trout with salt and pepper inside and out.  Heat your broiler with the rack six inches or so below the heat source--not too close.  Place 1 tablespoon of butter in a gratin or baking dish, and place this in the oven just long enough to melt the butter.  Remove the pan from the oven and add the trout to it, turning them to coat with butter.  Place the pan under the broiler and cook for 2 minutes on each side, until the skin starts to blister.

While the trout is cooking, prepare the morels:  heat the remaining 1 tablespoon of butter in a small sauté pan and when it is hot add the morels and a pinch of salt.  Cook over medium high for a couple of minutes, until the morels give off some liquid, shrink, and just start to brown.  Remove them from the pan and set aside.  Deglaze the pan with the white wine or vermouth.

Remove the trout pan from the oven once the trout are brown on both sides.  Add the morels and deglazing liquid.  Pour about half the cream over the trout, and toss the morels in it.  Place the pan back under the broiler and cook for a minute, bring it out, turn the fish and stir the morels.  Add a bit more cream to the trout and broil for one more minute.  Remove the trout from the oven.  Serve the trout and morels over noodles or rice.  Add a little more cream to the pan sauce, if you like, and nap it over the fish and morels.

We broiled some pencil-thin asparagus and boiled up some excellent thick Mennonite noodles, both from the  Menomonie-Farmer's Market.  We felt blessed by the abundance of this place.

______________________________________

I was thinking about veganism recently (in a purely academic way, don't worry), and while I don't dispute the validity of anyone's personal dietary choices, and while I could consider a return to the vegetarian life I practiced as a young man, I realized that the vegan life would never work for me, not least because of its banishing of dairy.  Beyond that, looking at veganism as a movement, eliminating dairy from one's diet for arbitrary reasons seems to me not a terribly defensible position, in terms of sustainability of our food supply.  Living out here in America's Dairyland, it is clear that the earth is very, very good at making grass, and while we can't eat grass (leaving aside the current high-end trend for cooking with hay, which I'm eager to learn more about), cows can, and they can turn grass into rich, wonderful milk that gives us cream, cheese, yogurt, sour cream--splendid products on their own, and part of a culture that has linked humans to the earth for as long as, well, as long as there have been people and cows, I guess.  I could imagine the world without slaughterhouses.  Without dairies? No.

Cream is beautiful.  Therefore: you should eat more cream.  Just, not too much.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Mighty Morchella

It is a mighty mushroom indeed that compels the sort of fanatical pursuit that morchella esculenta inspires. It's a rite of spring that sends hordes out into the ticky woods to scour the underbrush for the chance to spy that unique honeycomb cap in the moss or pushing through brown leaves.  A lot of morel hunters don't bother to hit the woods for any other mushroom, or any other wild food.  The spring pursuit is their only foraging interest.  I attribute this to the fact that 1) It is a rite of spring, a ceremony of the season, 2) Morels can be fairly predictable, 3) Morels can be extremely abundant, 4) Morels are easily preserved by drying, and 5) They are easily identified, with no really harmful look-alikes.  I don't think that it's because they are fantastically delicious.  They're good, sure, but on my list they fall below chanterelles, black trumpets, and hen of the woods.  For me, the hunt is the thing, and it is incredibly thrilling to slog over steep terrain, poke under currant bushes, probe beneath peeled bark, and finally be rewarded with the sight of that unique shape.  I keep going back, even though I rarely have much success.

This year is looking like a very good one for morels here in Minne'Sconsin (I may have to edit that moniker somehow, now that I live in Wisconsin full-time--Wis'Sota?).  I know it's a good year, because even I am finding them.  I've brought home a couple of pounds from the Bide-A-Wee woods so far.  My main haul came from a dead elm on a south-facing slope.  I look for trees that have been dead long enough that the bark is starting to peel quite a bit.  If I do spot a morel, then I step very carefully, and scan the ground assiduously, for a morel can seem to disappear from view even as you are looking at it.  From the base of the tree out to the edge of the dripline is where the morels will sprout; this Bide-A-Wee tree was a good example of that.  They were mostly downhill from the tree.  I went back a couple of times after my first find, and continued to find morels.  In fact, I managed to find a couple that I apparently had stepped on without noticing it on a previous foray:

And one that was completely hidden under a slab of bark:

I have always heard that morels are often found near apple trees, which I consider very good news indeed, because there are apple trees all over the Bide-A-Wee land; the bad news was that I had never once found a morel anywhere near an apple tree.  Until yesterday.  I was on my way back to the cabin, sweaty on an unexpectedly hot afternoon, prickly ash- and bramble-scratched, and I turned up that particular hillside just to stay in the shade.  Luckily I was still in ground-scanning mode, and the morels were quite conspicuous.  I wasn't really consciously looking and I stepped right over a couple of large morels, before noticing a couple of nice ones in the moss near the trunk.

Then I went and checked under the other apple trees in the area. Nada. Morels are just that way.

Collateral benefits to the morel hunt include spotting the first showy trilliums blooming on our land:

And a nice stand of wood nettles, one of my favorite greens of the spring.  Delicious and non-stinging at this size, though when mature, they sting worse than stinging nettles, go figure:

The entire young plant, stem and all, is delicious simply steamed  and  tossed with  butter.

One thing we have done with this spring's finds, a rabbit and morel hash on fried polenta:

The recent warm wet weather will add an air of urgency to the hunt.  Conditions for morel emergence are perfect, but in the hot and damp they won't last long out there.  Get 'em while you can.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw