Have a snack

Travel shimmers on the not-so-distant horizon, but for now we're enjoying the delicious distractions of spring around town. Some of the scenery…

…And one of our favorite snacks, the old-fashioned way (for lack of microwave, this is how we roll):

Savory popcorn

• Popping corn
• Peanut oil (or other high-heat vegetable oil)
• Good salted butter
• Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, or similar 

Choose a heavy-bottomed pot with a snug lid. Heat it over medium-high, then add a slick of oil (a couple tablespoons worth). Let oil heat for a minute or so, then add enough corn kernels to cover the bottom of the pan in a thin, even layer. Close the lid. Give the pan a vigorous shake every few minutes, particularly once corn starts popping. Don't open the lid. Once the popping slows down, turn off heat. Melt butter and drizzle and toss it evenly over the popcorn. Use a microplane zester (or other fine grater) to shred lots and lots of good parm over the popcorn – like the blizzard we never had this winter. 

Happy Spring!  

Hen Soup

When my friend Kamila starts telling her tales of growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, I realize what a soft, useless child I was, and I feel pretty lame for all the nonsense I used to whinge about. The chalky medicine I had to swallow for earaches? She had to submit to an eardrum lancing when infection set in…and while I was held down, flailing, by seven nurses trying to gently swab my throat for a strep test, Kamila stoically bore a tonsillectomy sans anesthesia.

At her high school, part of the curriculum was a stint on a chicken farm, and not the cute, idyllic kind of farm, either; her tales of the processing room at this factory operation are enough to make your hair curl. The middle-aged overseers terrorized her and the other teens, but as soon as the gimlet-eyed harridans turned their heads, the younger ladies would slip chicken breasts down their shirts and smuggle them home for the family dinner (at the same time inventing chicken cutlets). To this day, Kamila still can’t order chicken in a restaurant and only trusts what she has sourced and cooked herself. Can you blame her?

As a result of this well-rounded education she's licensed to drive a tractor and a tractor trailer. She also had to catch a turkey behind the school as part of her final exam, while her friends looked on through the classroom window and taunted her. It took her a full hour to capture the "evil and ugly thing". 

But the upside to these gritty experiences is that she's tough, no-nonsense, and can take care of just about any business you throw her way – and she has a great sense of humor about all of it. She gets a campfire going faster than you can say “s'mores.” She knits, she sews, she's an amazing cook. She teaches classrooms of kids to make masterpieces out of discarded cans and odd bits of fabric. Hand her a pile of frizzy wool and she'll poke at it with a needle until it's magically transformed into tiny families of fairies and forest creatures whose loveliness will make you sigh. Her cosmetic artistry could turn an old hen into a thing of beauty…and while we’re speaking of old hens, I'd like to talk about another nifty and thrifty trick she taught me, one that changed the way I thought about chicken soup forever.

This recipe, in fact, puts regular chicken soup to shame. It's hen soup, the difference being it's made from an older hen or soup chicken, which needs hours of slow cooking in water before the meat is tender enough to eat. Did you know that most of the fryers and roasters we buy from the store are only about 7 weeks old? Traditional chicken soup was made with a hen or soup chicken, which adds infinitely greater body, flavor, and nutritional value to the broth, but this practice fell by the wayside as soup chickens became more difficult to find. Now, with more Americans keeping backyard hens and buying from small, diversified farms, soup birds may be within closer reach. A good place to start, if you don't raise hens yourself, is a farm or farmer’s market; in our neighborhood, Fishkill Farms at the Carroll Gardens market on Sundays sells a cooler full of “soup chickens” that do the trick quite nicely, especially since the feet and necks are left on (see this post to find out what's so great about chicken feet). They also carry apples, cider, eggs, and frozen summer produce such as black currants. If you don't see soup chickens at your market, ask a farmer who offers eggs among his or her wares.

This soup is gentle and restorative and the broth has nourishing, savory depth, perfect for this “windy season” that might tease us with 75-degree weather one day, then wallop us with slicing rains and spring colds the next. The variety of root vegetables used – a bit of a change from the carrots-celery-onions triumvirate you may know – adds a subtle sweetness to the mix. It’s a simple, fortifying soup that you’ll want to have on hand at all times.

Hen Soup

Ingredients:

·      1 laying hen or soup chicken, organs removed, preferably with feet, neck, and wings still on (a regular chicken will do, just won’t make as rich a broth)

·      1 large onion, chopped

·      3 cloves garlic, smashed

·      2-inch knob ginger, halved

·      1 large carrot, split

·      1 parsnip, split

·      1 small celery root, chopped

·      A few sprigs of Italian parsley

Plus:

·      Chopped carrots

·      Chopped celery

·      Other root vegetables, such as parsnips

·      Dried or fresh marjoram, chopped

·      Fresh parsley, chopped

·      Small noodles or potatoes

Instructions:

Put chicken in a pot that will accommodate it and the vegetables snugly, and add cold water to cover. Bring to a boil and add other ingredients (everything in the first group). Simmer gently for 4 hours, topping off with water as you go so chicken remains covered. 

It's best to make this the day before, then put the whole pot in the refrigerator to cool. The next day (or when chicken has cooled enough to handle), skim yellow fat off the top. Remove the chicken to a large bowl or cutting board. Strain broth with vegetables through a fine-mesh strainer or cheesecloth into a clean pot, pressing on vegetables to extract all the liquid. Discard the vegetable pulp. To the strained broth add your chopped vegetables of choice (second list of ingredients) and marjoram. Bring to a boil and lower to a simmer until carrots are tender. I like to cook noodles separately, drain them, and add at the end with the chicken, but you can also cook them in there with the vegetables.

Meanwhile, remove and discard skin from the chicken. Shred the meat off the bones with your hands, removing every last bit, and add it to the pot once vegetables are tender. My children are partial to the tiny star-shaped noodles, which I add cooked at the end. 

Soup is pictured up top with toast and melted Monte Enebro cheese from Stinky Brooklyn.

Kamila adds: If you have kids, save the wishbone so they can break it together.

Rooted

If you had told me, when I landed tentatively in New York, that I would still be hanging around 14 years later, I probably would have laughed at you. I would have been positively howling had you told me that this Virginia transplant would eventually consider herself a Brooklynite – and a proud one, at that. But here I am, and as much as I itch to flee the city on weekends, I adore this little part of Brooklyn where we landed, almost accidentally, seven years ago and are raising our daughters; this post is a shameless love letter of sorts to the neighborhood. 

I love the sound of the foghorns rolling off the harbor at night and the hulking container cranes at the end of our street, backlit by sunset. Nothing beats the smoky tang of the neighbors' grills firing up on the first warm day of spring, or that crazy, confused tree on Baltic that offers a profusion of pink blossoms in the dead of January – even a real January. There’s the occasional clang of the knife-sharpening truck and the synchronized flock of domestic pigeons you’ll see wheeling overhead as you walk up Henry at a certain time of day, if you look up at exactly the right time. 

In a stretch that's sandwiched between some amazing restaurants and markets you'll pass Jesus in a box, the filming of Talk Stoop, and a riotously bedazzled row house. There's always a little surprise. Last week, a loud, late-night manhole explosion brought all the characters out of their brownstones, in various states of pajamaed splendor (one woman told me four times that her sleeping pills were kicking in, then followed me like a zombie down the street). 

I love the fact that I have to add on 10 extra minutes to get anywhere, because I know I'll bump into a friend or neighbor I haven't caught up with in a while…but somehow, I'm always late anyway. 

More and more familiar faces have landed here, and lately, the ranks seem to include Toad out of The Wind in the Willows – at least according to my 7-year-old, who upon surveying the wreckage from a couple of recent car crackups said: “I think Toad must have been out stealing cars again.” Of course she knows the truth, but we like to keep a tall tale going; it adds glamour to our already colorful corner of the world.

In addition to all that is Brooklyn, there are the riches brought into the borough by farmers from the surrounding areas. Ironically, during the winter we have greater access to regional produce here in the city than we do when we're in the country, where it grows. And almost from the beginning, our weekly farm share (CSA) became an integral part of our way of cooking. 

Signing up for a CSA, at first, can be like being told to sit in a room with strangers and chat amongst yourselves; some of them, you discover you hit it off with and want to get to know better. Others, not so much. Jerusalem artichokes (aka sunchokes) for me were the first kind of stranger, meaning I might not otherwise have sought them out and had probably stared right through them at the farmer’s market. They’re kind of like the mousy introvert in the room, the one you didn’t notice at first but who later floors you with a warm, nutty personality that just needed a little drawing out.

Now, since we get Jerusalem artichokes at least twice a season in our weekly share, they're regulars around here, and I find myself seeking out more when I run low or when there's no CSA – I've been picking them up lately at the green markets and at Perelandra. Often I'll cut them crossways into coins and sauté them slowly in butter, flipping so that each side gets nicely caramelized. The trick to this – and it's hardly a trick – is to not have the heat up too high, nor to crowd them in a pan. Sprinkle a little sea salt over them and serve them instead of potatoes with roast chicken. I also used to make a very creamy Jerusalem artichoke soup, using a Daniel Boulud recipe, but this Christmas the husband gave me Nigel Slater's Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch, with its lovely arrangement of fava beans on white linen across the front. He had a hunch this vegetable-centric book would be right up my alley, and he was right. 

The recipe below, from the book, highlights the particular sweet nuttiness of Jerusalem artichokes. The soup is light and pure on its own and can even go vegan with a quick swap of oil for butter. Whatever you do, though, do yourself a favor and don't skip the spice mix, even though you may be tempted to save time. Yes, there's more chopping involved and yes, you'll have to clean an additional pan afterwards – but this crunchy garnish is what makes the soup something special, flavor-wise and texture-wise. 

A soup of roots, leeks, and walnuts (Adapted from Nigel Slater, Tender)  

Serves 4
Ingredients:  

• 2 large leeks  
• 3 TBS butter or vegetable oil (such as olive or sunflower)  
• 3 medium/large celery ribs  
• 1 lb. (give or take) Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes 
  
• 4 cups light stock (chicken or vegetable), and/or water  
• salt and pepper to taste  
• Small bunch parsley, chopped (to yield about ¼ cup)  

For spice mix:  

• ½ tsp. ground coriander seeds (fresh ground from about 1 tsp. whole seeds is best – in a spice mill or mortar and pestle)
• ¼ cup shelled walnuts, chopped fine  
• 1 oz. ginger  
• 4 tsp. peanut or sunflower oil

Instructions:

Slice the white and palest green part of the leeks into rounds, then rinse away any grit. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, melt the butter and add the leek slices. Sweat over low heat until they are soft enough to crush with the edge of a wooden spoon. Meanwhile, slice celery and add to the pot when leeks have begun to soften. Peel and chop the artichokes (I don’t peel too scrupulously – just the really thick, crusty skin) and add them to the pot. Cover the pot and let the vegetables soften without coloring, then pour in stock and/or water, and bring to a boil. Lower heat to a simmer and partially cover with a lid. Cook for about 25 minutes, until artichokes are very tender.

Meanwhile, peel the ginger and slice very thinly, then slice into very thin matchsticks. Warm oil in a small skillet and add ginger. Fry for a few seconds, until it is golden and crisp, then add coriander and chopped walnuts to the pan, let them sizzle briefly, then drain on paper towels.

Puree soup thoroughly in a blender (or with immersion blender), stir in chopped parsley, then adjust seasoning – you will need to add salt until the flavor tastes full, and crank in a bit of black pepper if you like. Serve topped with spice mix.

More good roots: 
Bittman on roots
Raw Winter Salad 
Lovely Beet Chips, at La Tartine Gourmande
Meaty Borscht, at Glutton for Life
Sweet Amandine Talks About Parsnip 
Another Root Soup from Cannelle et Vanille

Tea Cakes

I’d been working on a post about Brussels sprouts, when all of a sudden I woke up one morning and Wham! was on the radio singing “Last Christmas”, and the tree people had come down from Vermont to re-forest the corner of Kane & Clinton. This means, by necessity, that letters for Santa have been painstakingly scrawled in childish hand, and Good Curious Elf has begun his nightly patrols. We’ve already been swept into the whirlwind of the Christmas Spectacular and tree viewing at Rockefeller Center, and we've handed the tots off to the grandparents for the more onerous Manhattan errands. So suddenly, shredded Brussels sprouts with lemon and cappellini, as much as I love that dish, seems colossally un-special. It’s time for some baking, and I’d like to share a cookie recipe that, for us, always kick-starts the holiday season. It’s not the most original one you’ll see in this year’s cookie line-up, but it was my great-grandmother’s. That sounds even more impressive when I tell my daughters we are baking their great-great grandmother’s cookies, the ones my mom used to make with my sister and me every December.

Mrs. Julia Butterworth, known as “Juju,” lived in the tiny town of DeWitt, VA. This is not the first time I’ve written about her here. Since she reached the venerable age of 96 I got to know her for a handful of years, but those being my youngest years I only caught her in glimpses, which at this point in my life have gotten muddled together in a grainy black-and-white montage. I imagine her with a nimbus of snow-white hair and old-fashioned eyeglasses, slimly built and simply dressed, with a sweet, old-lady smile. I suppose, now, I know her more from Mom’s stories than anything else and can almost feel the feeling of climbing in between cold sheets in her guest bedroom, peering out at the dark shadows that gathered in the corners of her old farmhouse. I can hear the birds chirp in the morning as I imagine stealing into her garden to pull sweet young turnips from the dirt, warm underfoot in the Virginia sun.

And so, following her recipe for “tea cakes,” rolling out the buttery dough and pressing down onto the cookie cutters and snapping a crisp cookie between my teeth, I almost believe I can visit with her for a while and bring my daughters along to meet her. They don’t yet appreciate time passed and memories preserved as I do, but they adore a good tea cake and beg for them year round. We’ve been known to pull out this recipe at Halloween or Valentine’s Day, too, merely as an excuse to wield cookie cutters.

There’s nothing especially elaborate or new about this recipe, it’s just a good, solid one for this old-fashioned type of cookie, which inhabits the space somewhere between a butter cookie and a sugar cookie. In spite of what the name might suggest, there’s nothing cake-y about them–especially when rolled thin as we’re in the habit of doing in my family. Juju had two different versions: the “everyday” ones baked with Fluffo instead of butter and cut thicker in the shapes of bunnies, with raisins for eyes…and then the fancy “tea cake” rendition for special occasions: made with real butter, rolled thin, cut in a variety of shapes, and decorated prettily with sprinkles. That’s the kind my mother made with us at Christmas. It was part of her slim repertoire of sweet treats, and in fact the only thing we ever baked during the holiday season. But she was a decent baker and had her opinions about how things should be done. The dough had to be stretched whisper-thin and lightly adorned, preferably with 4mm silver dragees. My sister and I used to torture her by loading on the colored sugar, as much as a cookie could physically hold, as soon as she turned her head…and gleefully watched her horror when she turned back around to discover our handiwork. As I make these cookies with my daughters every year, I catch myself falling into the same OCD patterns, tensing up as they pile on the crystallized red dye #5. But I hold myself back, letting them unleash their little creative demons.

Around here, it’s not Christmas until a round of these cookies gets made, and flour dusts the whole kitchen, and the house fills with their buttery-sweet smell. I do roll them wafer thin, a habit which demands a little more work and watchfulness (they burn in a flash). My preference is for cookies that are  golden and a little toasty around the edges, with a hint of caramelized flavor. I am also partial to the glittering dragees, even though I’m not quite sure what sort of metals we’re ingesting (note: I prefer the 2mm size to the 4mm; they’re more like birdshot than BBs and much gentler on the teeth). Brooklynites can find all sorts of pretty sprinkles, dragees, and cutters at A Cook’s Companion on Atlantic.

Truly, the best thing about these cookies always was–and still is–the raw dough. Rich and vanilla-scented, with a sugary crunch between the teeth, it is the very essence of what cookie dough should be, and there is no better anywhere. I still gobble up the scraps as I roll and cut. Mom used to give us each a beater off her 1968 hand mixer–the one she still owns in spite of the gaping hole in its casing and exposed wiring and gears within (“I keep things until they die,” she'll proudly tell you). We would strip off every atom of dough with our tongues and stick our heads into the empty mixing bowl for good measure, until somewhere along the line there was a salmonella scare, and a dough-laden beater acquired the same, suburban menace as a raccoon out in daylight or unwrapped candy on Halloween. It became every parent’s responsibility to keep cookie dough away from children’s mouths, and so Mom fell in line. Still, we managed to swipe our fingers in the dough bowl while she wasn’t looking and later, growing bolder, to steal down to the refrigerator where the dough rested, peel back the plastic wrap and break off hunks of chilled dough, which was even better, somehow, than it had been at the freshly-whipped stage. After she got wise to our ways and threatened to cut us off from Christmas sweets forever, our deceptions grew more intricate, and we honed the art of opening the fridge swiftly with a well-timed cough to mask the sound, and with a potter’s skill, of molding the dough back into place after prying off a sugary chunk.

Enjoy this recipe any way you like: pressed thin, left thick, modestly or garishly sprinkled, iced, pale, tawny at the edges, or burnt to a crisp. Enjoy the meditation of flouring the board and rolling out the dough. And if you happen to be making these with kids, savor the way you're forced to slow down a bit during the holiday season. Let go of your control freak side for a moment and make a terrible, floury, sprinkly mess.

Juju’s Tea Cakes  

Ingredients:  

• 2 sticks butter (8 oz.), softened at room temperature 
• 1 ½ cups sugar (the natural kind works if it’s finely textured)  
• 2 eggs (large sized or smaller. Just use one if they're "jumbo")  
• 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour plus extra for flouring cookie surface  
• 1 tsp. good-quality vanilla extract  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Instructions:  
With an electric mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat until combined. Sift dry ingredients together into a separate bowl, then add to the butter mixture in two additions. Mix until just combined. Scrape out of bowl and shape roughly into four disks, wrapping in plastic wrap or parchment. Chill for at least an hour, or overnight, until firm.

When ready to make cookies, preheat oven to 350º. Leave dough out at room temperature for 20 minutes or so, until softened and workable but still cold and somewhat firm. Prepare trays with either parchment or silpat. Ready a clean surface and rolling pin, along with some extra flour for dusting. Lightly dust your work surface and rolling pin and roll out cookie dough, working from the center outward and rotating the disk for the most even thickness. When you’ve reached about between 1/8" and 1/16” thickness (or as desired), cut out your cookies with floured cutters of your choice. Transfer to prepared cookie sheets (a dough scraper really helps) and decorate as desired. 

Bake, checking frequently, between 15 and 25 minutes. Ovens vary widely, and much depends on how thinly you've rolled your dough. When done to your likeness (I like them golden around the edges), remove tray from oven and cool cookies before handling. They keep in an airtight container for a couple of weeks.

Strawberry muffins

Our summer CSA kicked off last week, which was the starting gun, of sorts, for summer cooking. Now, instead of beginning with a recipe and wrangling the necessary ingredients, the ingredients wrangle us. Imagine a benign but insistent band of curly cress, sunchokes, and sweet potatoes twirling and hurling a lasso at this family of four, because that’s kind of how it is. Funny salads are born, piquant green sauces evolve, spur-of-the-moment pastas and gratins equal dinner–and it's usually pretty delicious. 


What's headline-worthy right now are the glorious strawberries, the best we've had in years–I exaggerate not. They should be insipid and half-drowned from all this rain we've been getting, but instead they're concentrated and perky and sweet, the very essence of what a strawberry should be. I’ve followed Wilklow Orchards, our fruit CSA, to the Borough Hall and Fort Greene markets because we keep emptying our little green baskets of fruit and wanting more, more, more. I have a drawer full of those little red berry hairnets. As with the rhubarb, I’ve been compulsively hoarding and overstocking, because I know strawberries will be on their way out soon (This trait comes from Mom, who crams her cabinets with lotions, potions, and incandescent light bulbs, for fear her favorites will be discontinued).


I’ve been keeping this recipe for strawberry muffins up my sleeve for the past few years, and it makes nice use of the berries once the shine goes off them–which believe it or not happens very quickly if the berries last that long–because we're not talking about giant styrofoam strawberries here. The recipe somehow sprang out of one for blueberry muffins, from the Gourmet Cookbook (the big yellow tome), but it bears only a passing resemblance to the original. I did away with the suggested crumb topping (overkill), scaled back on the sugar, and substituted almond flour for some of the all-purpose flour, for a gentle nuttiness and tender consistency. The strawberries create fierce little pockets of fruit, and their juice runs a little bit into the nutty sweet batter; they remind me vaguely of the financiers I used to mix by the hundreds in a Hobart. 

There’s nothing exotic or mind-bending about this recipe, it just works and always, like strawberries themselves, aims to please. It makes a nice breakfast for those days we’re a bit late out of the starting gate, lying too long in bed listening to the birds outside, hearing the second wave of dogs go by on their walks. These muffins have rescued us on many a lazy morning. They’re not exactly health food, but they are pretty wholesome, tasty enough to tempt the most breakfast-averse among us to eat. And, since they're packed with fruit and a few almonds (almonds are a super food, right?), I don’t feel too guilty pressing one into a small, camp-bound hand and calling it the start of a day.

Strawberry almond muffins   

Makes 12 muffins
Ingredients: 

• 1 cup all-purpose flour   
• ½ cup almond flour (a.k.a. almond meal or finely ground almonds)  
• 2/3 cup sugar  
• 1 ½ teaspoon baking powder  
• ½ teaspoon salt  
• ¾ stick (6 Tablespoons) unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing tins  
• 1/3 cup whole milk  
• 1 large egg  
• 1 large egg yolk  
• ¾ teaspoon vanilla extract  
• 2 cups chopped strawberries, in blueberry-sized pieces

Instructions:  
Preheat oven to 375°. Generously butter muffin cups. In a large bowl, whisk together dry ingredients. In a small pot, heat butter until just melted, and remove from heat. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then whisk in milk, eggs, and vanilla until just combined. Stir wet ingredients into dry ingredients, then carefully fold in strawberries. Fill the muffin cups about ¾ way full, dividing batter evenly. Place in the center rack of preheated oven and bake, rotating about halfway through baking, for 20-30 minutes–or until tops of muffins are golden and they pass the toothpick test. Cool at least 15 minutes before removing from tins (I run a blunt knife around the edges of the muffins, then give them a little twist).

Days of rhubarb and roses

Each June, just before the wealth of summer fruits bursts onto the scene, I go completely rhubarb crazy. Never mind that we have our own patch, or that our vegetable and fruit CSAs both flood us with rhubarb; I just can’t stop myself. Seduced by the ruby bundles in the farmers markets, which until recently were dominated by the beige of overwintered roots, I stagger away with armloads. That's fine at first, before the heat has withered my enthusiasm for baking rustic tarts or roasting the chopped stalks with wine and vanilla. Although a few strawberries are just coming into the markets, rhubarb is still the default spring fruit here.

It is my secret shame, though (secret no more), that this rhubarb usually sits in the fridge too long and goes all bendy in the vegetable drawer. This year it happened when, in a fit of optimism, I overbought right before Memorial Day weekend, and then left town before I could fire up the oven; I arrived home to a heap of limp stalks. If this is you, too, or if you are otherwise over your head in rhubarb, all is not lost. There’s a solution: rhubarb syrup. It’s bright, it’s tangy-sweet, and it’s a versatile mixer for potions both virgin and spiked. Scroll down to the bottom for the how-to on rhubarb syrup, which can be mixed with a little fizzy water for an all-ages pink drink. We also enjoy the occasional  rhubarb mojito, which I stumbled upon a couple of years ago at Brooklyn Farmhouse. Other ideas are a rhubarb basil cocktail from The Kitchn and the rhubarb and Aperol cocktail from Franny's, one of my favorite Brooklyn restaurants.

*Tangent Alert* Instead of posting a bunch of boring pictures of rhubarb, I decided to ply you with the lushness of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, a treasure we’re so lucky to have within a stone's throw. If you live in the area and haven't become a member, do it! You can go every two weeks and have a completely new experience each time. City kids can roll in actual grass. There are amazing members' nights in the summer, when you can linger until bats swoop down over the lawn, and you might even spy a star or two. Did I mention it's one of my most favorite places on earth? 

This week featured rose night, a sprawling picnic with live jazz, hats of all kinds, and strolls through the Cranford Rose Garden with drinks in hand to see the colors pop in the fuzzy dusk light. A rosy rhubarb cocktail would have been nice (we had rosé, which was nice, too).

One of the most delightful things about roses is their cultivar names. When I was growing up we had Dolly Parton roses in our garden. They were the color of dress-up lipstick, and brazenly perfumed.

You could get drunk on those masses of blooms. One of the children in our midst exclaimed "I think I'm gonna faint!" and I suddenly remembered feeling that same wooziness when, as a child, I stumbled through the Bagatelle rose gardens on my first visit to Paris. 

And now, back to the rhubarb: 

Rhubarb Syrup

Ingredients: 

• 10-12 medium stalks rhubarb, chopped into 1/2-inch pieces
• 1 cup sugar
• Cold water 

Instructions: 

Put rhubarb and sugar in a heavy pot and add water to cover. Bring to a boil and then lower to a gentle simmer, stirring occasionally. The pieces will break down fairly quickly. Simmer until rhubarb fibers are evenly dispersed into the liquid, around 15 minutes. Remove from heat and pour contents through a fine-mesh strainer into a clean bowl. Using a large spoon or spatula, stir and press pulp to force all liquid through. Clean out pot and pour strained liquid back in (reserve pulp as a topping for ice cream or Greek yogurt, or simply to eat like apple sauce). Simmer for 10 minutes or so, until liquid has thickened to maple syrup consistency. Pour into a clean jar and store in the refrigerator until ready to use. 

To make a simple spritzer, pour one part syrup and three parts seltzer over ice, and add a squeeze of lime.

Rhubarb "Mojitos" 

Adapted from Brooklyn Farmhouse

Ingredients: 

(Amounts per drink–multiply for each drink you make)

• 4 tablespoons rhubarb syrup 
• 1 fl oz. white rum
• 6 (ish) mint leaves, finely chopped or torn
• 1/4 lime–for juice and a slice for garnish
• 3-4 fl. oz. seltzer or club soda
• ice cubes

Instructions:

In a glass, stir together rhubarb syrup, rum, a few mint leaves, and a healthy squeeze of lime juice. Pour in soda, and top with ice cubes and a slice of lime, or a swizzle of rhubarb. Note: Consider these amounts guidelines, adding more rum, more soda, etc. as desired. 




 

Morels

Let me start by saying that amateur mushroom hunting can be a nasty little game of foraging roulette–a gamble you don't want to lose. You really, really shouldn’t do it unless you have an expert along. Yes, there are ways to identify mushroom species with a degree of precision (by taking spore prints, for instance), but then there’s the matter of poisonous “evil twins,” which mimic their edible cousins, sometimes concealing themselves within an otherwise innocent fairy ring.

Though I’ll enthusiastically pluck fiddleheads, nettles, wild onions and dandelions for the dinner table (and would dig ramps if I could find them), I stop at fungi. It’s just not worth the risk. There is, however, one exception I’ll make, and that is morel mushrooms. This may make no sense at all to you, since I have zero credentials as a mycologist, but morels are an exceptional bunch in that, to a practiced eye, they can be pretty much be identified by appearance alone. They have distinctive conical, honeycombed caps, which may range in color from platinum blond to yellow to black. Sometimes, they resemble pine-cones. Their closest deadly doubles, the false morels of the Gyromitra genus, bear them merely a passing resemblance–in other words, they're more like distant cousins than twins. To me, false morels look like melted, misshapen horror-show versions of the real thing, and I can't imagine being fooled or tempted by one. If there’s any doubt, though, slice the mushroom in half lengthwise: a true morel will have a hollow core from top to bottom, while a false morel’s cap is filled with fleshy or cottony stuff.

This first flush of Spring is the time morel hunters dream of all year, and it coincides with other glorious things, like the unfurling of fiddleheads, the bursting of buds, the warming of soils. In some areas of the South, the season is already wrapping up right now, but in northern climes it’s just beginning. You can chart the fervor on message boards where morel maniacs share the vicinities, dates, and conditions of their finds with fellow aficionados–but will never reveal their "spots". The Midwest and Pacific Northwest are hotbeds of morel hunting activity. In the latter, carpets of black morels may sprout up following forest fires, drawing hundreds of hunters to a burn site. Michael Pollan wrote of this phenomenon in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Morels are known to proliferate after good, soaking rains, and while there’s no guarantee where or when they will pop, they’re found throughout most of the U.S. from April through May, with outliers emerging in some places as early as March, reportedly as late as August. Morels also seem to have affinity for certain species of trees–so you're more likely to find them in certain forests than in others. Areas near poplar and ash trees, old apple orchards, dying elms, and some conifer forests all seem to encourage morel growth, but then the mushrooms may materialize almost everywhere, including in mulch piles, suburban lawns, and along railroad tracks.



My own experience with finding morels is limited to Virginia, around the second week in April, in a light poplar forest scattered with dogwoods and hollies. There are generally bloodroots growing nearby. But I won't tell you any more than that.

Last week, I got my five-year-old in on the game of "mushroom hunt." My children won't touch mushrooms of any kind–all because of the disturbing Story of Babar, in which Babar becomes king after the old ruler eats a poisonous mushroom, turns green, withers, and dies (this, after poor Babar's mother is shot by a hunter and he flees, takes up with a sugar mama, and then takes his cousin as a child bride). But my girl was happy to poke around the forest floor with a stick, and as further proof of the power of books, she insisted on wearing her daffodil-colored wellies, which she adores because "in books when it rains people always have on yellow boots or yellow raincoats."

I'm always surprised we never find more than a few there, because if I were a morel that's where I would want to hide out: up on that enchanted hill enjoying views like this:

But you just never know. In fact a friend, whose name and address shall remain anonymous, e-mailed me a picture that same week: 

She found this specimen and some companions peeking out of the ivy in her Brooklyn backyard. She had been purging her borders of them nearly every spring for years, for fear the kids or dog might take a bite and poison themselves.

If you happen upon some morels this spring and decide to eat them–if not your own finds, then those that are sure to appear in finer food stores and farmers' markets–you should know how to treat them, for there's really nothing like a fresh morel. Earthy, nutty, and even somewhat meaty, they have a texture reminiscent of tripe, meaning all those little folds just provide more surface area for crisping and for holding onto sauces. 

First, the matter of cleaning. Your 'shrooms may have soil or small bugs clinging to them, being that they are products of nature (all morels are wild–even those found in Brooklyn). I recommend brushing the soil off with a soft brush or clean cloth, and if they are especially gritty, you will have to resort to some water–something I almost never recommend for mushrooms, since they're essentially sponges. You can clean dirty morels by submerging them in a bowl of lukewarm water, swishing them carefully, then putting them on clean towels to dry. Use them fairly soon after cleaning so they don't turn soggy. For larger morels, first slice them in half lengthwise (top to bottom). 


Always cook morels. Though not poisonous, they do contain a compound that can can irritate some people's stomachs, especially when consumed in quantity and with alcohol. Cooking takes care of this. The fresher the mushroom, the simpler the cooking should be–at least, that's my rule of thumb. At the most basic, a little butter and salt does the trick. Slice the morel in halves or quarters (depending on size–some giants may require more cutting). Choose a shallow skillet that won't crowd them, put the heat on medium high, throw some butter in and let it start to brown slightly before adding your morels–the butter will turn nutty and sweet (just don't burn it). Cook the morels for around 10 minutes, stirring, until they're still tender but crisp on the outside. If the morels release water, allow a few more minutes' cooking time for that liquid to evaporate. Sprinkle with salt to taste.


You can fold these sautéed morels into an omelet, or just put them on toast. You can also make a lovely pasta sauce by first sautéeing minced shallots in butter for a minute, then adding some chopped thyme leaves and the morels. Sauté as described above, then add a bit of vegetable or chicken stock, cook until reduced by half, and swirl in a generous measure of cream and/or creme fraiche at the end. Add salt and pepper at the very end to taste, and stir in a few spoonfuls of pasta cooking water to make it saucier if needed. You can scatter some chopped, fresh herbs on top, like parsley, chervil, and/or tarragon. 


Morels taste heavenly tumbled in the pan with some of their vernal cohorts, like fiddleheads, asparagus, and ramps. If you happen to have access to all of these, well, then the gods of spring are clearly smiling upon you. 


Morel links:
American Mushrooms
MushroomExpert.com
The Great Morel
Morels.com  
"Wildman" Steve Brill (local NYC foraging trips)