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Recipe: lobster morel agnolotti

It wasn’t long after finding my first blonde morel that I had collected enough to shoot a recipe. The temptation to simply flour and fry these morsels nags at me constantly because it’s easy and delicious and probably my favorite way to enjoy my favorite eating mushrooms (porcini remain my favorite “finding” mushrooms). However, the first freshly foraged morels are automatically designated for new recipes because one is never certain – but certainly hopeful – that there will be more.

two buddies emerging from the grass and leaf litter

mushrooms on mushrooms

I knew I wanted to involve lobster and then I threw asparagus in there because it’s spring and asparagus and morels typically appear on the plains around the same time. Why not stuff it all in some agnolotti, which is a pasta I was unaware of until a few months ago? Agnolotti is like an easier version of mini ravioli and I’m a little obsessed with it. The filling is dotted or piped in a line along a strip of pasta and then folded over and cut. Well, it’s more complicated than that, but you get the gist… or you will after you read the post!

Start by making the pasta dough. I don’t have any one definitive pasta dough recipe. They all seem to involve a combination of flour, eggs, and salt, and sometimes egg yolks and/or olive oil. It’s a mess of flour and flecks of dough that eventually come together into a nice ball if you are patient and stick with it. Don’t throw out that excess flour – sift out the chunky bits and use the rest for flouring your work surface.

the pasta dough: flour, eggs, salt, olive oil

stir the eggs, salt, and olive oil in a well in the flour

incorporate as much flour as the dough will absorb (you will have extra flour)

knead the dough

when the dough springs back from a poke, it’s ready to rest

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Recipe: seared duck breast with morels and asparagus

We are in the midst of a back and forth between snow and rain, cold and warm, clouds and sun. Our Rocky Mountain springtime is volatile and beautiful. It’s hard for me to decide which kind of weather I like best right now. But, I don’t have to choose because we get to sample all of it in a day or even in the span of a couple of hours. This year I feel I’m really embracing spring. Rather than finally getting around to our “spring cleaning” in September, we’ve been working on it since March.

sunny day in the high country

two days later we get a powder day

all this snow is good for mushrooms

If you know me, you know that what I’m really excited about is the start of mushroom season. Ellen hypothesized that mushroom foragers inhale a good bit of mushroom spores which take over our brains and make us obsess over mushroom hunting. [I dismissed her idea with a laugh while secretly relaying this information to the overlord of our fungal hive mind.] We are weeks away from the first mushrooms of the season in the Colorado high country, but that doesn’t keep me from monitoring mushroom activity around the country. It’s happening in Northern Georgia right now – morels. And soon it will be happening in more and more locations as we deep dive into spring. I made this dish last spring during my local morel season and cannot wait to make it again this year if I should be lucky enough to get my hands on more morels.

asparagus, snap peas, brandy, salt, butter, morels, vegetable oil, pepper, shallots, garlic, duck breasts

I have found the easiest way to clean fresh morels is to hold each one caged loosely in your hand, and swish it around in a bath of cold water to dislodge any sediment, bugs, and other things that aren’t morels. Then I lay them on paper towels to dry for an hour or so. And don’t pour that morel bath water down the drain! I recommend pouring it out in your yard or someplace where morel-friendly trees grow because that water is full of morel spores (they are teeny tiny, but they’re there). I can’t promise that morels will come up the following season, but it’s worth a try. Prep the duck breasts by scoring the skin, and chop the rest of the vegetables.

morels drying after a rinse

cut the skin in a 1-inch grid

mise en place

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Recipe: sous vide hamburgers

Looking at my calendar, I see the first day of Spring is next week and I have two thoughts: 1) Woohoo, SPRING! and 2) Where the hell was winter? Winter visited us for about a week or two in February, but overall I think it dissed us for the season. We didn’t even get our skis tuned, and I was happy about that every time I ran over a rock in the backcountry (which I wasn’t happy about, but hey – I try to be positive). Now, with the sun rising ever higher in the sky, temperature plays into when you ski. That is… assuming there is snow to ski. I sometimes feel like I just want to give this ski season a big ole boot in the ass and shout “good riddance!” But then when I’m out there on the snow, I remember why I love skiing.

neva was soooooo excited to get out into the backcountry

both of them patiently waiting for me to take a photo

jeremy skins up crappy snow (but at least there is snow)

Last week, my dad texted me to ask at what temperature do I sous vide my burgers. Ever since I taught my parents how to text, they text me all the time with photos of their food, pictures of wine bottles, random reports of their activities (“We are shopping at Costco” – of course they are), selfies from their travels, texts that were meant for other people, and Googleable questions that require immediate responses. I thought I had blogged the recipe, but I hadn’t. So I checked my recipe notebook and sent Dad the various temperature ranges and times for different levels of doneness. I got a kissing emoji reply which meant that I had unlocked the Good Chinese Daughter achievement.

I hadn’t thought to sous vide burgers until my friend, Debra, mentioned that she prepares her burgers this way regularly. The first time we tried it, I couldn’t believe how juicy they were. And now we don’t prepare our burgers any other way.

salt, pepper, fish sauce, beef

You’re probably wondering what’s up with the fish sauce. This is a tip I learned from my friends, Todd and Diane: add a dash of fish sauce to your burgers for that extra umami blast. It doesn’t taste fish saucy, it just tastes damn good. Clearly, I pick up lots of excellent beta from my friends. The key is to have friends who know what they’re talking about. If you don’t want to use fish sauce, just add another half teaspoon of salt. And if you do want to use fish sauce, but need your burger to be gluten-free, there are some decent gluten-free fish sauce brands like Red Boat which is recommended by my friend, Shauna a.k.a. Gluten-free Girl (because I asked her specifically).

yes to the fish sauce

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