As soon as I saw the recipe, I thought it had real potential. I love crisp spring asparagus, and I still long for the early summer childhood days when we’d go morel hunting in the woods near my grandma’s house. We spend a few afternoon hours hunting for them, usually finding them at the bases of big trees that were growing in a shady clump. We’d gently place them in small cloth bags that were probably just flour sacs that my grandma had stitched up for the purpose. My grandma would clean off our sac of morels and sauté them whole in a pan with some margarine. (Confession: I come from poor-to-working-class Midwestern roots, and I don’t think I understood the superiority of butter to margarine for most needs until my mid-20s. But I still use a 50-50 mix of butter and Crisco in my cookies to achieve the perfect combination of crunch and chew.) We’d eat them right out of the pan with a side of toasted sandwich bread…yum!
It’s only now, when I see morels at the farmers market priced at an arm & a leg per ounce, that I realize how lucky I was back then. But with this little project, I had an excuse to splurge and re-create a memory…although my hunt here involved nothing more than asking the Harris Teeter produce man to point me in direction of the dried morels.
I found the precious 1 oz bag ($10!) located below the display of fresh mangos and proceeded to rounded up the other ingredients:
1/4 to 1/2 ounce dried morels or porcinis, or a combination
1/4 cup ( 1/2 stick) butter
1/2 cup chopped shallots
1 pound fresh shiitake or white button mushrooms or a combination, cleaned, trimmed and sliced
1 to 1 1/2 pounds asparagus, trimmed, cut into 1 1/2 -inch lengths
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon
Salt and pepper to taste
Needless to say, at $10 for one ounce, I cut back a bit on the suggested amount of morels. Mark had said you could make this dish with as little as 6 morels and still have a wonderful flavor. I used about half the package (or 1/8 of an ounce), which was about 12 small-to-medium dried morels. I decided I didn’t want to other strong mushroom flavors to invade the morels space, so I just used morels and fresh white button mushrooms.
1. Put morels, porcinis or both in a bowl with very hot water to cover; soak until soft, about 20 minutes. Drain morels and reserve soaking liquid. Cut morels in half; if porcinis are large, chop them roughly.
While the morels were soaking, I started a pot of quick-cooking barley. I figured it would bulk up this side dish into a main course while soaking up any remaining creamy-mushroomy sauce.
2. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat; when butter is hot and foam has subsided, add shallots and reconstituted and fresh mushrooms to pan. Cook until shallots soften and fresh mushrooms have released their liquid and it has cooked off, about 10 minutes.
This step went off exactly as described. At first it seemed like the mushroom liquid would only increase and never cook off. But in the last minute or so, it started looking like mushrooms and shallots in a slightly greased pan.
3. Add asparagus and 1/2 cup reserved liquid to pan. Bring liquid to a boil, cover, reduce heat so mixture simmers, and continue cooking for another 2 to 4 minutes, or until asparagus is crisp-tender. Add cream and tarragon or chervil and continue cooking, uncovered, until sauce thickens slightly and asparagus is tender, about 4 minutes more. Season with salt and pepper and serve.
After the first 4 minutes, the asparagus was still pretty tough – 1/2 cup liquid wasn’t really enough to get a good steam. But 4 minutes after adding the cream, it was bright green and gave to a fork with a bit of pressure. I wanted the morel and asparagus flavors to shine through the creamy sauce, so I only added a bit of salt and pepper and then spooned it over a thin layer of barley. It looked and smelled wonderful!
And it tasted even better! The mushroom flavor shone again the fatty, delicate sauce and the asparagus provided just the right amount of crunch...and the barley at the bottom of the bowl made sure none of that goodness when to waste. It was all I could do not to go out and buy another bunch of asparagus the next day, so I could make it again. (Thank goodness for book club and Neeta’s yummy pasta and brownies!) While the prohibitive price of morels will keep this recipe from becoming a weekly occurrence, I’ll definitely bring it out every May, when asparagus is in season and morel-hunting memories abound!
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