Dan's morels become dinner!

Well, as you know Dan brought us some really great morel mushrooms yesterday, and we decided to use them immediately. Petunia wasn't home when I got there so I decided to start things myself and got the mushrooms all washed up an started to figure out what to do with them. Looking at what I had on hand revealed I was going to have to keep it simple, so without consulting a single one of the millions of foodie resources out there for a recipe, we came up with (loosely described) a Pasta with garlic and morel butter, tossed with sauteed onions and fresh morels.  We seasoned this with only salt and pepper and it came out great!  For some reason, I decided to make a side dish out of some roasted fingerling potatoes and organic cherry tomatoes although we really didn't need it.  I did saute the onions and morels in a bit of a sake bath, and we drank the rest of the sake hot with our pasta, being the unconventional epicureans that we are.  Thanks again to Dan Kelley for his contribution not only to our blog, but our dinner table as well!  

 

The morels prior to cooking

 

They look a little like a brain!

 The brains analogy is even more apparent once the mushrooms are sliced! 

The flavor of the mushrooms is a mild one, not too earthy or musky at all.  They have a great spongy texture that reminds me of calamari or something, not exactly sure what.  Either way, it was delicious and we really enjoyed the novelty of knowing that our main event for dinner had been growing in the North Cascades just a couple days ago, and never passed through a grocer's hands to get to us.