My partner and her son are both tech savvy, and both regard the fact that I’m a Luddite with amusement. They try to help me see the light but it rarely works. I won’t upgrade my 9-year-old flip-phone, despite the fact that a new phone would allow me to check my email in the woods. (That’s precisely why I won’t upgrade.) A Facebook to me is still the term my parents used to refer to their high school yearbook. When people talk about cool Apple products, I think cider and baked goods.
What all this has to do with the scrumptious looking food you’re seeing at right is that both my partner and her son were there when I was taking those pictures, and both were protesting mightily that I was walking blindly into a faux pas.
“Don’t be the guy who takes pictures of his dinner and posts them on the Internet,” they implored.
“Why?”
“Because it’s obnoxious. It’s like selfies.”
“What’s a selfy?”
“Those pictures you take of yourself and then post on Facebook” – this is the 13-year-old talking now. “They make me want to become Amish.”
And so I’m using this introduction as a shield. Apparently people like to take pictures of themselves and their dinners and post them on The Facebook. And the cumulative effect serves to annoy other Facebook users. If your first thought is annoyance at reading this, understand that I’m from a different time – like your grandfather. I’m not giving you an orange for Christmas because I’m trying to be a lame gift-giver or deprive you of junk food; I just legitimately like oranges, and when I was a boy, an orange in the stocking was a rare, wonderful treat.
Anyway, the dinner pictured here consists of the revered trinity of springtime ephemerals – fiddleheads, ramps, morels – plus fresh-caught trout. I’m sharing it both to make you hungry and because I thought it would be cool to swap recipes. I’ll bet most of you reading this have had some version of this meal this spring, and it would be cool to trade tricks.
I basically cook trout like I did when I was 9, but with a few adult flourishes at the end. I start by frying some bacon in a cast iron pan, then remove and reserve the bacon but keep the grease. I season the trout with coarse black pepper, then fry them in the grease. When the trout are about half-way cooked, I remove them and filet them – the cooking loosens the meat from the bones, and you should be able to run the dull side of a butter knife between the spinal cord and the flank with ease. Then pick the stray rib bones out of the fillets. Then sprinkle the filet with a flour/Old Bay seasoning mixture, daub with egg white, and coat with Panko bread crumbs – they’re Japanese bread crumbs, so look for them in the ethnic food section of the supermarket. I then return the seasoned fillets to the pan for a final sear. I crumble the cooked bacon and sprinkle on as a garnish at the end.
I should note that this recipe is intended for stocked trout, which have a somewhat dull flavor. If you were cooking wild brook trout, this method would be overkill – gilding the lily, as they say. For wild fish, I’d say a little canola oil, little salt and pepper, done.
Butter, salt, pepper is all I do for morels, and I go light with all three. They’re sponges, and readily suck up everything you put on them. I cut lengthwise, season, and fry on cast iron. The liquid will come out of the morels, and they’ll flatten. Flip them. Just about the time the liquid disappears in the pan they’re done.
I boil my fiddleheads for two or three minutes – supposedly you do this to leech them of something that causes some people to get upset stomachs, though I’ve never felt the need to experiment and prove the validity of the claim – then blanch them in an ice bath. I coated these with a mango vinaigrette I had kicking around the fridge and served cold.
For the potato leek soup, I used last fall’s Yukon Gold potatoes from the garden. I harvested them in September and let them cauterize in the sun for a day. I then put them in an unheated, dark part of the basement. In late March, they were just starting to develop eyes, so I took the ones that remained up and put them in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator. I’m astounded that they’re still clear and perfectly good nine months later. I’ve never had potatoes last so long. But back to the recipe – I simply cubed the spuds and put them in roughly 6 cups of a chicken broth/water mixture. I chopped the leaks and sautéed them in olive oil in a frying pan, then added them to the broth. Threw in some fresh thyme I had in the fridge. Peppered the pot. Cooked it. Blended it at the end. One thing I’ve noticed in online recipes for leeks is that some tell you to use only the white part, but I think that’s bum advice. I use every bit of the plant, and especially like the green, leafy wisps in the soup, both the look and the taste.
So there you have it. Hopefully some of this is helpful to those of you who are new to cooking foraged food. And I do hope you experienced gastronomes chime in and tell us how you do things. Someone out there has to have a more creative way to cook fiddleheads, or a secret ingredient that they put in their potato leek soup.
Discussion *