This post is going to be mean. Mean because I’m using an ingredient that’s very hard to come by fresh: morels. Morels are a type of mushroom usually sold dried or canned, and when sold fresh they are ridiculously expensive (kinda like the elusive truffle). Luckily my mother found a patch of morels near her allotment, decided to tell absolutely nobody about it and brought the stash home. It was then up to me to come up with a recipe which would put the morels to good use. After a little googling I decided to make fresh pasta with a morel-parsley cream sauce, and it turned out pretty great, if I say so myself. (I had to check a couple of times with my mother to find out if there where absoloutely no identical mushrooms which would turn out to be poisonous so we would die a horrible death, but nope. No evil twins!)

I don’t really want to call this a recipe because it is so easy and I didn’t really use measurements, but this is what I used (for 4 persons):

-  about 200 grams of morels, fresh & cleaned (check for insects hiding under the hoods, you don’t want that much extra protein)

- 400 grams of fresh pasta

- 1 onion, diced

- 2 cloves of garlic, chopped

- parsley (I think I used about a quarter of a cup here)

- cream (I’m guessing about 100-150 ml.)

First, make sure you boil the water for the pasta. I used shop-bought fresh pasta, but if you want to go whole hog you can make your own. (And now I find out I haven’t put my own recipe for fresh pasta on this site. Great. I’ll make sure to add it later!) Chop the morels, make sure you get quite chucky bits. That sounds rather dirty, but still. Gently fry the onion and garlic for about 5 minutes, then add the morels. After 2 more minutes, add the parsley and cream. Season with salt and pepper, and heat the cream through. Meanwhile, put the pasta in the boiling water. Drain the pasta when it is al dente, and add the morel-cream sauce. Tadaa! Easy-peasy!

I don’t think this is a great picture of the resulting sauce, but it still makes me hungry:

Update:

This is why you shouldn’t trust me on poisonous mushrooms: (from Wikipedia)

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Early Morels

Verpa Bohemica are also called wrinkled thimble cap, or early morel, and Ptychoverpa Bohemica. Although the early false morels are sometimes eaten without ill effect, they can cause severe gastrointestinal upset and loss of muscular coordination (including cardiac muscle) if eaten in large quantities or over several days in a row. They should be parboiled and dried before use in cooking to break down a gyromitrin-like toxin (an organic, carcinogenic poison) that is produced by the mushroom.

The early false morels can be told apart from the true morels by careful study of how the cap is attached to the stalk. The edge of true morels’ (morchella) caps are intergrown with the stalk, but early morels’ (verpas) caps hang over like a thimble, for which they are sometimes referred to as “thimble morel”. Early false morels are the first morels to fruit in the spring, shortly after leaves begin to form on deciduous trees. Narrow-head morels (morchella angusticeps) fruit next, around May. The last morels to fruit are the yellow or white morels (Morchella esculenta), then crassipes.

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Ok, so the bottom line is that I would probably be dead if I was left to fend for my own in nature, and that you shouldn’t eat morels raw. Other than that, you should probably be fine, but you might want to check if your morels are really morels with someone who knows their mushrooms. Like my mother, for instance…

In my family, we take Easter seriously. This means that no less than 40 eggs are boiled and painted each year, while usually only 5 or 6 people take part in our Easter breakfast. The week after Easter the leftover eggs will seem to glare at you accusingly, daring you to eat them. However, after the egg-extravaganza of Easter Sunday, you’d rather…ehm…not.

In the past, it was my task to hide the eggs in the garden for my siblings to find. It took us a few years before we realised it was smarter to count the eggs before hiding them, because we never knew exactly when we were done with the hunt. Therefore, it was entirely possible to move a wheelbarrow in, say, November, and hear the telltale *splat* of an Easter egg falling down from its hiding place. This was followed by a manic scramble to get away from the offending object as soon as possible, because that egg would resemble a stink bomb very closely. Of course, the first year we did count the eggs beforehand, we ended up with one extra egg anyway, meaning we had to screen each one to see which one looked like it had spent a year in the garden, opposed to half an hour or so. Good times.

This year I decided to try my hand at a traditional crème brulée for dessert on Easter Sunday, to use eggs in a different incarnation. And it was a very good excuse to whip out my fancy crème brulée-torch. Seeing as I like to play with fire, it was a good day all around.

For 4 crème brulées, you’ll need:

• 1 vanilla pod, sliced open
• 200 ml. cream
• 200 ml full fat milk
• 4 egg yolks
• 80 grams of sugar
• white caster sugar, to sprinkle on top
• 4 ramekins

Preheat the oven to 125 degrees Celcius. 

Heat the cream and milk, together with the vanilla pod. When it is boiling, turn the heat low and simmer for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the sugar until it resembles a thick pale cream. Remove the vanilla pod from the milk and cream, and add the mixture together with the eggs and sugar. Beat until it thickens a little. Pour the resulting mixture in the ramekins. Place the ramekins in the oven and cook for about 45-50 minutes, until the mixture is fully set. Remove from oven and let them cool. Sprinkle the crème brulée with a generous layer of sugar, and turn on your torch. Burn the top layer until the sugar caramelizes (be careful not to scorch the layer) and turns brown. The sugar will form a hard crust on top, and it is very satisfying to tap that crust with your spoon! Serve immediately. If you don’t have a fancy torch, you can also place the ramekins under a very hot grill in the oven for a few minutes.