A fiddle what?

 

Sometimes my experiments in cooking alarm even me. Last night it was fiddlehead ferns. Central Market sent out an email advising that they are available only briefly in the spring. Get them now while you can! Well, who can resist that kind of salesmanship? Surely not me. So I included the ferns with my order, but knowing that my family would be skeptical, I thought I’d order a small amount. A half pound.

Do you know how many fiddlehead ferns are in a half pound? Or how expensive they are (we won’t even go there). Last night, my family was gone, and I was fixing dinner for Jean and me, so I decided about noon to search directions on the web. Well, I was almost sorry I did that. I rinsed them—and the first water came out muddy, though it was not dirt but moss-like stuff that was attached to the ferns. And not all of it came off. So then I hand washed each fern—that took some bending over the sink which made my back ache. Then I parboiled them for two minutes, prepared an ice bath, plunged them into that, and let them sit for an hour in ice water. Are you seeing how much work this was?

I drained them and realized there was still quite a bit of that moss-like stuff on them, so more hand cleaning. Finally, I decided that they were ready to cook—if that moss was bad for you, Central Market would have taken it off or put a warning label or something (see the faith I have in my favorite grocery store?). I told Jean I would sauté them briefly in butter, salt and pepper and then add a squirt of lemon—which I promptly forgot when I served them.

We had tuna pasties, potato salad, and fiddlehead ferns. Jean liked them better than I did. Despite all that boiling and soaking, they retained a nice crispness, and the taste was somewhere between young asparagus and fresh green beans. They were good but not remarkable. I decided on the path of least resistance, sent them home with Jean, and never mentioned them to my family. I hope she uses them in a salad because I bet they’d be really good.

Otherwise, it was a cooking weekend—Sunday’s real project, before I realized how much time and trouble the ferns would be, was to make tuna pasties. They were good, but I need to work on the proportion of filling to biscuits. But Saturday night—ah, that was a triumph.

I thought Jordan and I were cooking scallops and lemony-herbed rice together, but she kept disappearing. So I did the rice. Now, I’m not much of a rice cooker—we didn’t eat it when I was a kid, and my adult idea was pretty much to follow Uncle Ben’s instructions. But this called for sautéing the raw rice in butter, with green onions, then steaming in chicken broth and finishing with lemon butter, parsley, and the chopped green parts of the onion. Pretty darn good, but by the time I got it ready, I’d run a marathon. I told Jordan she could cook the scallops.

Panic ensued, because she thinks I’m the only one who gets them right—crisp on the outside and soft inside. I talked her through it, with her saying all the time, “I’m in the weeds here.” Because I was being cautious, we didn’t cook them at as high a heat as we should have (induction hot plates necessitate some decisions) and they cooked a bit too long. But they were wonderful. And Jordan said, “That was fun! My first time to cook them!” So the evening and the meal were successes. Christian was out to a men’s only dinner, postponed from its usual pre-Christmas date.

And now I have so many leftovers—ate sausage for lunch, chicken in crescent rolls for supper with the lemony rice. Still have a cheeseburger, some tuna filling for pasties, scallops (just went in the freezer tonight)—and I can’t believe I just marinated some chicken drumettes for tomorrow. We’ll have them with the rest of the potato salad. We do not suffer from a lack of variety around here.