FOOD ON THE FOOD

Curried Chicken Salad

One of my lasting memories of Nonni is of her standing at the kitchen counter after a roast chicken dinner and pulling every last shred of meat off the bones.  The chicken would then find its way into soup or whatever else she pleased.

Her depression-era tactics have served me well.  On these warmer days, I like to use the scavenged meat in a quick curried chicken salad.  If I'm diligent, I can get enough meat for 2 to 4 sandwiches before I freeze the stripped carcass for soup stock.  That's three separate and substantial meals from a single chicken, if anyone is keeping count.  Nonni would approve.

Curried Chicken Salad

If you don't like raisins, you can substitute chopped grapes, but I'm partial to the raisin version. 

2 cups cooked chicken, chopped
1/2 onion, finely chopped
Handful or two of raisins
1/2 cup mayo
1 Tbsp. dijon mustard
1 Tbsp. curry powder (or more)
Salt and pepper

In a medium bowl, combine chicken, onion, and raisins.  Make a well in the ingredients and stir together mayo, mustard, curry powder, and plenty of salt and pepper.  Mix everything together well.  Heap into your favorite sandwich configuration.

Goat Gyros

Okay, enough with my crazy mushroom obsession.  Time to get back to something a little more mainstream.  Like goat gyros!

Wait, don't leave!  Goat is good, I promise.  Remember that time I made Vikram Vij's goat curry and then never wrote out the recipe for you guys, apparently?  Well, it was really delicious, trust me.  So good that when goat came up in our Chestnut Farms meat CSA again, I dove for it.  This time it was ground goat, and I knew right away what I wanted to do with it.  Gyros! 

First things first: pronunciation.  You may, if you choose, mentally read the word gyro as "YEE-ro" with a Greek accent.  Or, you can do what I do and pronounce it "JAI-ro" because I'm never going to change.  Or, if you're too embarrassed to pronounce it in public at all, just make it yourself.  I mean, when it comes right down to it, a gyro is just a souped-up meatloaf sandwich.  One with slightly different flavorings and served in pita with lettuce, tomato, red onion, and a generous slathering of cool, creamy, garlicky tzatziki sauce.  But, still, a meatloaf sandwich nonetheless. 

My trusted Internet sources suggested that ground goat can be very lean, so I mixed it half and half with some ground pork.  It wasn't dry at all.  Feel free to substitute the goat/pork mixture with ground lamb (or ground beef, for that matter).  It was super tasty, but this sandwich will be to-die-for during the height of tomato season.  Mark it down!


Goat Gyros with Tzatziki

The meatloaf technique is borrowed from Alton Brown.  The water bath seems a little fussy for meatloaf, and I may throw caution to the wind next time and go without it, but I'm including it here anyway.  I mean really, Tammy, how hard is it to put water in a pan?   Get your yogurt draining several hours before you start unless you're using Greek-style yogurt.

1 lb. ground goat
1 lb. ground pork
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 Tbsp. dried marjoram
1 Tbsp. dried rosemary
2 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 tsp. ground black pepper

8 large whole pitas
Head of lettuce
4 tomatoes, diced 
Red onion, thinly sliced

Preheat oven to 325°F.

Process onion in the food processor until minced, 10-15 seconds.  Dump onion into center of a non-linty dishtowel.  Gather up the sides of the towel, twist, and squeeze hard over the sink until most of the juice is extracted.  Shake onion back into food processor and add ground meat, garlic, marjoram, rosemary, salt, and pepper, and process until pasty and gross, about 1 minute, scraping down the bowl halfway through.  Don't worry, it gets better.

Scrape meat mixture into a loaf pan, pressing it into the sides.  Place loaf pan in a larger roasting pan and fill that pan with water halfway up the sides.  Bake about an hour and change until it's cooked through and smells great.  Remove from oven and drain fat.  I took another loaf pan, set it on top of the meatloaf and put some heavy tomato cans inside to weigh it down (I did this instead of weighing it down with a foil-wrapped brick per the original recipe).  You could probably skip this step, too, if you wanted.  Let rest 15 minutes.  Slice for sandwiches.

To serve, nuke a stack of whole pita rounds for about 20 seconds until warm and bendable.  Line each with lettuce leaves.  Arrange your meat down the center (I find one or two slices broken up to be sufficient). Scatter diced tomatoes and sliced red onion, and spoon tzatziki sauce generously over it all.  Fold up an inch or two of the bottom of the pita and, while holding it in place, fold one side over, then the other.  Insert a toothpick or two in the bottom or wrap with foil.  Dollop a little extra tzatziki sauce on top and you're good to go.  When I reheat the leftover meat in the days that follow, I do so not in the microwave but in a pan with a little olive oil so I can brown each side while it heats.


Tzatziki Sauce

If using Greek-style yogurt, use maybe 1/4 less than the recipe calls for since you don't need to drain it. 

16 oz. plain yogurt
1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 Tbsp. olive oil
2 tsp. red wine vinegar or lemon juice
1 Tbsp. fresh mint leaves, finely chopped
1/4 tsp. kosher salt

Place the yogurt in a cheesecloth- or tea towel-lined strainer over a bowl, and drain for two hours in the fridge.  Gather the chopped cucumber in another tea towel and squeeze over the sink to remove liquid.  In a medium bowl, combine drained yogurt, cucumber, garlic, olive oil, vinegar, mint, and salt.  Refrigerate until ready to use.

Wild Morels: How to Find Your Own

Wow, that is one phallic-looking mushroom!  But let's not get distracted.  I promised you hints for finding morels and hints you shall receive, at least for the yellow morel (Morchella esculenta).  Please note that these are only suggestions based on my own limited, amateur experience and, let's face it, a healthy dose of beginner's luck.  Still, they're better than nothing. 

Hint #1: THEY'RE OUT RIGHT NOW!!!  Late April through early June. 

Hint #2: You'll probably want to read some books before you go.  The field guide I have is the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms.  This is the book I bring to the woods.  Another book I love is The Complete Mushroom Book by Antonio Carluccio, an Italian chef and forager.  It has great recipes and amazing photos.  Total mushroom porn.  This is the book that moves between the kitchen and the bedside table.  But the book that really made the idea of foraging for my own wild mushrooms accessible to a novice was Start Mushrooming, which was recommended by a Harvard-trained mycologist friend.  It teaches you how to identify six edible varieties of wild mushrooms safely.  Morels are one of them. 

Hint #3:  As far as habitat, I found my first two morels under a blossoming apple tree.  Old farms and apple orchards are prime hunting grounds.  Be sure to ask permission before foraging on private property.

Later, I found a bunch in the woods under what looked like a dead oak tree. 

Morels love dead elms and stressed-out ash trees, too, I hear.  Watch out for poison ivy.  Since morels are associated with the roots of certain trees, you'll often find more than one around the base of the trunk, sometimes as far as 10 feet out.  Mine were much closer. 

Morels seem to grow all over Massachusetts, but my luck turned when I headed away from the city a bit, say 30 minutes due west of Boston.  If you want ideas for trails, check out the Bay Circuit Greenway maps.

Look at this morel growing through a maple leaf.  Weird.

 

I also found a bunch of poisonous false morels on my trek, like the one below:

I didn't touch them.  They are the poisonous look-alikes that the experts warn you about.  I don't think this one really looks like a morel, though, do you?  I mean, something would have to be seriously wrong with that morel for it to be a morel.  Like if it were growing out of a toxic waste dump or something.  But false morels can look a lot more like true morels, as in this photo.  Can you tell the difference?   Real morels have more of a conical shape and a pitted, honeycomb appearance.  False morels tend to be wrinkled (as if deflated), misshapen, and brain-like in shape.  Another difference: real morels are completely hollow inside while false morels are chambered and often filled with a whitish, cottony material.  Cut your morels in half, top to bottom, to double check your answers. 

Finally, we come to the disclaimer portion of this post.  Here it is: Don't be an idiot.  Don't eat anything you're not 100% sure about.  Always cook morels thoroughly—never eat them raw as they contain a toxin that is deactivated with cooking.  Furthermore, some people have allergic reactions to certain mushrooms that are edible to the majority.  I am one such person.  So, if you've never had morels before, or any other wild mushroom, it's a good idea to start with a few bites and then wait 24 hours to see how things go digestively before you gorge yourself. 

Good luck on your morel hunt!  It's such a thrill to find them!

Mother's Day Morels

Guess who found morels on Mother's Day?  ME!  It was ME!!!  Seven of them!!!  Can you believe it??

Actually, I found more, but it's proper mushroom etiquette to leave some behind.  It was hard, but I did comply.  Barely.  Your next question, I'm going to guess, is where exactly I found these morels (especially if you arrived here by Googling "morels Massachusetts" or "morels Boston").  But I'm not telling you where I found them, so don't ask.  If you do ask, I'll be happy to draw you a perplexing map—one you will be unlikely to decipher since my sense of direction is terrible and I can't draw for shit.  However, if you do manage to figure it out, the trail will magically lead you to the morel bin at Russo's because why not just buy them from the store if you're going to have someone tell you exactly where to look.  That's missing the whole point: the thrill of the hunt!  You have to find your own spots.  I've clocked nearly a dozen hours in the woods over the last week and a half to find these and I've loved every second of it.  Except for the part where the mosquitos were biting me.  I didn't love that part.  But the rest was awesome and you'll love it, too.  (Just bring bug spray.)

Here I am cutting my very first morel with the pocketknife Husband gave me for Mother's Day.  I literally could not believe my eyes when I first spotted it.  I froze for a second, then began frantically fumbling around for my camera as if it would disappear at any moment.  Then I saw another one about a foot away.  The rest I found in another location.  Thank god nobody else was around to hear me giggling and talking to myself as I collected them.  I mean, except for the jogger who came charging up behind me out of nowhere.  (Dude, the next time you run up behind a woman like that in a completely isolated area, you might want to announce loudly and clearly that you're not a rapist or you're likely to get a pocketknife to the heart.)

When I brought the mushrooms home, the children were very excited and unanimously declared them to be "yellow morels, not black morels."  (They keep stealing all of my mushroom books.)  Husband insisted that I get a second opinion about the edibility of these mushrooms before I cooked them—a second opinion besides the children's.  I thought I might as well set a good example for you guys for a change, right?  So I grudgingly returned the stick of butter in my hand to the refrigerator and proceeded to contact Russ Cohen, local wild edibles guru.  He confirmed that they were, indeed, yellow morels.  Huzzah!  I'll let you imagine the seven-bite feeding frenzy that followed!

In my next post, I'll share some tips for finding your own morels as well as my favorite mushroom books.  And, yes, I'll get that post up this week, keep your pants on.