About morels: Don’t pick and always use butter

If you’ve never gone hunting for wild morel mushrooms, then you probably shouldn’t do so now. I’m not saying this to be selfish and to keep you from finding and eating mushrooms that might otherwise find their way into my hands. No. I wouldn’t do that. My main concern is for the health and safety of the readers of this column (this is, after all, the health page).Morels are popping up in prodigious quantities on lawns and in woodlands around the Northwest Corner right now. Apparently this is a banner year for the little fungi, which are shaped like gnome caps and have a distinctive woven flesh (like the folds of a brain, or the straps of a badly twisted macramé plant hanger).The staff here at The Lakeville Journal Co. have made it clear to landscapers and hikers over the years that anytime anyone has an infestation of these pesky mushrooms, we are happy to come over and help remove them from the soil. We do this as a community service, a way to help keep lawns clear and clean, not because we have any interest in eating the morels that grow there. Mark Niedhammer, the company’s classified advertising manager, has been hunting morels for many years and is an excellent guide to identifying which morels are salubrious and which might be more toxic if ingested. Readers of this column who think they might have found a spray of morels are invited to call or email him for help; but be forewarned that you will have to divulge the whereabouts of your find (and share in the bounty).As recently as a week ago, the morels were young and tender and fresh. Already this week they will be starting to pass their peak point of perfection. A morel-centric website, called www.thegreatmorel.com, offers this advice on knowing when it’s getting too late to pick: “Usually you can tell when they start to look unhealthy or they are announcing ‘pick me’ by examining the tip of the morel and the base of the stump. They will begin to discolor at the base and turn brownish. The tips will begin to do the same and they may be missing. Typically that is when you know if you are a day or two late when finding them in the wild.”If you’d like to try morels but don’t know how to (or don’t want to) find them in the wild, they can be purchased at specialty food purveyors such as Adams Fairacre Farms in Poughkeepsie. Keep in mind, though, that you are potentially endangering any wild foraged foods when you buy them in large quantities at retail. If this column hasn’t yet discouraged you from finding and eating morels, you might want to know how to prepare them. The first thing to know is, they shouldn’t be washed. You want to trim off any dirty stem bits (remember that when you’re collecting morels you shouldn’t pull them out of the ground, you should cut them off at dirt level, so they might regrow in the future). Shake them out, to get rid of any little bits of bug and grit. I like them sliced kind of thin. Other people quarter them or cut them in thirds. Some people, who live large, eat them whole.The second thing to know is that butter and morels go together like fish and water. If you prefer not to eat butter, well, that’s just one more reason for you to give me your morels instead of eating them yourself.Here are some ways we’ve eaten morels this week, here at The Lakeville Journal Co. Assume that the first step in every one of these recipes is “Sauté in plenty of butter.” Season to taste, of course.• Cook pasta. Add cream to the buttery morels and toss with the pasta. Optional: Add greens such as spinach, or garnish with chive blossoms, which are abundant right now.• Serve with fresh fiddlehead ferns and roasted asparagus. Soak the fiddleheads first, then boil them briefly, then sauté them with the morels.• Slather thin, toasted bread (eight-grain is good, so is a traditional baguette) with truffle mousse pâté. Top with sliced morels.• Marinate chicken cutlets in a little Dijon mustard, lemon juice, olive or canola oil, salt and pepper, tarragon. Sauté and cook, then top with morels that have been sautéed in a separate pan.• Fry an egg “sunny side up.” Top with morels that have been sautéed with butter, the delicate green tips of either scallions or chives and a few grinds of black pepper.