I love pickled ostrich fern fiddleheads, and my recipe for crisp vinegar fiddlehead pickles is one of the most popular recipes on this site (if you’re not a fermenter, try those first). I love the old pickles too, and by old I mean naturally fermented pickles–kosher dills, if you will. I’d tried fermenting ostrich fiddleheads…
Fiddleheads
Fiddlehead Salad
This simple salad is my go-to recipe for eating ostrich fiddleheads. There’s all sorts of advice out there on how to cook them: blanch five minutes, blanch ten minutes, saute afterwords and cook them to death in oil, put them in lasagna and bake them to oblivion, then pull out long, soft and stringy noodles…
Midwestern Vignarola, 2017
There’s usually a point in April where I just stop ordering root vegetables-a purgatory state of the local growing and selling where I can’t really get anything except the random squash, root or potato, maybe some greenhouse vegetables if I’m lucky. After I stop ordering roots for the year I look forward and dream of…
Bread and Butter Fiddlehead Pickles
A couple years ago I shared my basic method for pickled fiddleheads- a savory pickle using salt as opposed to sugar. I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t share some variations though, so here’s another favorite of mine: bread and butters. It’s pretty much as easy as it sounds. All I did was…
Spring Vegetables With Spruce Tips and Lemon Agrumato
Out of all the dishes I created for Slow Food MN’s “Where the Wild Things Are” farm dinner, this was probably the crowd favorite. The evolution of it was a little interesting. The hosts of the event looked at my original menu and suggested we add a vegetable side of some kind to appease vegetarians…
Fiddlehead Salad With Spruce Tips, Peppermint, And Pecorino
Here’s what I made with the last of my fiddleheads this year, it’s a great little spring salad. The origins are Italian. In the Spring, it’s an Italian tradition to have fresh fava beans with hunks of pecorino cheese, a great example of less is more-just beans and cheese, that’s it. A colleague of mine,…
Midwest Vignarola
After a long winter, the green explosion of spring is breathtaking. When you live in a place that’s frozen for plenty of the year like Minnesota, you learn to appreciate Spring that much more, and if you’re like me, you want to stuff your greedy face full of all of the treats you’ve been waiting…
Black Grain Salad with Ramps And Fiddlehead Ferns
While I was busy getting prepared for the Black Morel Hootenanny, I got a surprise email from my new friend Jason at InHarvest, a Minnesota supplier of artisan grains and legumes. He asked if I would like to incorporate some of their products into the post-foray dinner, I told him I’d love to. He sent…
Crunchy Pickled Fiddlehead Ferns
As the fiddlehead ferns are starting to dwindle in our areas in Minnesota, facing a commercial fridge packed full of them means I need to work quickly to preserve some for the coming months. When I pick a large amount of something, I usually set aside a nice amount to preserve, whether it be by…
Fiddlehead Ferns
By now, most people casually interested in wild foods know fiddleheads. Fiddlehead ferns are a harbinger of Spring, along with ramps and morels they’re some of the most widely known and desired spring edibles, and I look forward to picking them every year. They’re also usually very expensive, since they have to be harvested wild….