Sauteed morels over spinach
I've never had morels before, and I rarely go to Whole Paycheck, but I picked some dried ones up and decided to try them. I don't know about you, but when I spend $5 on an appetizer-for-two's worth of protein and carbs, I do some research before preparing it.
Seems many morel recipes, like many mushroom recipes in general, call for frying them. They're often halved and fried in butter or deep fried. I figure the average french peasant didn't do a lot of deep frying, so I went with the pan-fry. They're fairly dark, in about the same tonal range as blanched spinach, and often presented with a strongly contrasting white element. Garlic, shallots, and olive oil are common. A dark green is often added. We had a bag of spinach leaves, I don't like boiled spinach, and my wife loves it, so I thougt this might be a good opportunity to try and like blanched spinach. For a white, I decided to go with a bechemel.
I started by setting the morels to soak in water at about 1500. At 1700 I made a thick bechemel with some leftover Jarlsburg cheese, some leftover half-and-half, a couple of egg yolks, flour, salt and pepper (stir in the egg yolks while the cream is cold, and stir the flour with vigourously). I halved the morels and put them in a small frypan with a sliced shallot and a generous amount of salted butter ('shrooms seem to take a lot of butter). While these two foods were on the stove, I blanched enough spinach to cover the bottom of two salad plates. I spread the hot spinach over the salad plates, drizzled some olive oil over that, spread the morels over that, and then smothered it all with the bechemel.
My wife was more than a little hesitant about the morels (they're somewhat pungent, maybe 6/10 on the pungent scale), and I was definitely concerned about the spinach. I've loathed boiled spinach since I was a kid, and blanched is awfully close to boiled.
We both liked it. Very tasty. A wide range of aromas from the morels, the garlic, the shallots, the Jarlsburg, the extra virgin olive oil, and the pepper in the bechemel. The textures ranged from two different pleasant chewinesses from the spinach and morels, nuttiness from the browned edges of the morels, and absolutely no boiled-spinach-alkaline-sliminess due to the rapid blanching and the slightly acidic creaminess of the bechemel. The presentation definitely inspired confidence with a base of bright, dark green spinach, golden olive oil flaring out from the edges, and the center filled with the little mountainous edges of dark morel poking out from the white bechemel.
