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Spring for the Season's Stranger Produce - Kitchen Kat
This Earth Day I’m hitting the farmers’ market. To me, nothing says “green living” or springtime like locally grown food. From familiar spring vegetables such as asparagus and leeks to the rare morel and rhubarb the market provides a wealth of vibrant, flavorful produce for my dinner plate. Of all the vernal offerings the most unusual has to be the fiddlehead fern. Resembling the carved head of a violin, fiddleheads are the unfurled shoots of an ostrich fern. One of the last true wild, foraged foods, they grow in moist woods, floodplains and, in my case, in the damp soil bordering my 19th century farmhouse. When told by a neighbor that the two-inch long, tightly coiled fern leaves tasted like a cross between asparagus, artichokes, and okra, I assumed that he was joking. Making fun of the city slicker, eh? What would he say next? That sautéed maple leaves reminded him of syrup? Skepticism aside, I gave fiddlehead ferns a try. Boiled in lightly salted water for 10 minutes or steamed for 20, they do …
Kathy Hunt