But there is another living thing that stands as a testament to the power of Mother Nature’s inherent ability to rise from the ashes of fire, and that is the Morel mushroom – the Phoenix of the forest.

During the summer of 2003, literally every state West of the Mississippi was on fire at one time or another. In fact, records from the United States Forest Service show that last summer in California alone, nearly 800,000 acres of wild forestland burned. Can you imagine? Nearly 1 million acres of one state were charred and thousands of homes were burned to the ground.

Montana suffered nearly the same fate as California when over 735,000 acres of the great Mountain State were lit on fire. Yet, in spite of this conflagration our forests survived and in many instances, have thrived as a result. The Nation’s forest fire recovery plan is a hotly debated political topic. Some say we should keep the forest floors clean of debris by igniting proscribed burns, while others argue that we should never disturb the ancient stands of Douglas Fir trees and that once lightning strikes down and ignites a wildfire, we must let it burn naturally and let time determine when it will burn out.

As a Food Writer, I don’t need to join in debates about sex, religion, politics or fires. But like many discussions that involve such “hot” topics so to speak, food and cooking somehow seem to enter into the arguments all on its own.

And such is the story about one little ugly duckling that rose from the ashes of last Summer’s intensely ravenous forest fires – the Morel mushroom.

The Morel, pronounced “more-ell,” belongs to the same family as the more stately truffle.

The Morel and the Truffle, like all mushrooms, are a species of fungus. The easiest way to describe a fungus to the non-scientific minded is to just say it is an odd, rubbery-looking sponge that grows in dark, wet and somewhat warm dirt.

Unlike the broad caps and light-golden color of the wild Chanterelle mushroom,
the Morel is one of the more elusive members of the wild mushroom family. This is in part due to the fact that the Morel’s black color and honeycombed shape make it virtually invisible to passing hikers.

And unlike the huge, fist-like clusters of its cousin the Oyster or Hedgehog mushroom, the Morel grows all alone, one at a time. One little mushroom no bigger than your thumb, poking out of the forest floor.

Mycologists are scientists who studies fungus. A Mycologist would tell you that there is a portion of the mushroom that is known as the “spawn” or the “spore,” basically a seed. It is that spawn that is spread in a growing medium and results in new mushrooms being born. Sort of like the “Fungus that took over Tokyo” in one of those famous grade D Hollywood thrillers – the fungi just keeps spreading and growing, and more mushrooms take over the city.

When a forest burns, everything is incinerated in a matter of seconds, including any small morels that are peeking up through a cover of dried pine needles.

While we don’t know for sure what happens to a morel in the actual fury of a forest fire, it is believed that the morel release their spawn and millions of tiny little spores of fungus are carried aloft through the ripping winds of the fire. Then after the flames have passed, the morel spores slowly float back down to the forest floor.

It is then that the morel spores mix with the black ash leftover from the fire.

Friends of mine in the Northwest who are “Smoke-Jumpers,” crazy men and women who go into the gut of a fire to fight it literally with axe in hand, tell me that the ashes of a forest fire are incredibly rich with minerals. Some firefighters will tell you that they have gone back into the forest six months after the last flame was extinguished and put their hands on this fertile ground and still felt the warmth of the fire. The perfect place for morels to grow.

The spring after a forest fire is when an incredible act of Mother Nature takes place. Wild daisies, lupine and lavender shoots begin to appear on mountainsides that were literally barren just months before. And looking carefully down at the base of burned-out stumps of lodgepole pine, one sees the first tiny little morel mushrooms peeking their heads out as if to say, “I survived, I’m alive.”

This natural cycle of mushroom farming has been adapted by commercial mushroom farmers – spreading mushroom spores through warm, nutrient rich soil to produce those big brown crimini’s that sit at the supermarket waiting to be stuffed with garlic and parsley.

In fact, as I researched the natural life cycle of the morel, it brought back some not so fond memories of my encounters with mushrooms when I was a teenager.

The first time I became acquainted with mushroom cultivation was during the few summers I spent as a teenager working at the horse show and rodeo that was held at the Oregon State Fair in Salem.

The Oregon State Fair is an amalgamation of the Western farming lifestyle. Begun in 1858, to this day you can come to the fair and see many of the same attractions that the early Oregon pioneers witnessed: kids tugging on stodgy milk cows that won’t budge, champion shearers clipping wool off lambs in record times, and row after row of sweet ears of Oregon corn displayed on beds of straw.

I worked as a “groom” to one of the many trainers showing his customer’s horses at the annual all-breed horse show at the fair. While “groom” sounds like a fancy Victorian English term used to describe a young man in jodhpurs and riding boots standing to attention next to some fancy touring coach, my job was anything but fancy. One of my main chores each morning was to shovel horse manure. And fancy show horses aren’t always welcoming to a guy who walks into their 8 x 8 stall with a pitchfork.

Once the initial anxiety of looking each other up and down was over, it was my job to coax the horse over to one side of the stall so I could scoop up the poop and put it into a wheelbarrow.

Each stall only took about 5 minutes, but multiply that among the stalls of over 20 saddlebreds, morgans and hackney ponies and it was a lot of horse shit.

We then pushed the wheelbarrows down to a large compost pile that was placed in between the “dairy” and “beef” cattle barns. The hogs, goats, chickens and sheep had their own mountain of glory. Imagine an oasis of animal waste nearly 20 feet high and you get the idea.

Twice a day huge dump trucks from the “Lone Oak Mushroom Farm” would come to the fair and load up. Load after load of steaming, stinking, stewing cow and horse manure. While I didn’t think about it at the time, I wondered why so much of the muck was going to a farm that grew things that we would put in our mouths.

“Lone Oak” is a moniker that various Salem companies that border the fairgrounds have used over the years, mainly because of the large orchard of old oak trees on the fair property. But it is also a fitting name for a mushroom company since fungus is especially partial to the roots of an oak tree.

It was only after a school field trip to the mushroom farm that I realized what they did with all the shit we shoveled.

Manure, like the ashes of a forest fire, is a natural sleeping bed for fungus, a.k.a. mushrooms. It’s naturally moist and warm: a brewing tea for ‘shrooms, full of nutrients, minerals and protein, basically recycled barley, wheat and alfalfa if you know what I mean.

From the outside, a mushroom growing barn looks quite stark – a long narrow building without windows and just a few aluminum steam pipes coming out of the roof. And steam did in fact stream out of those pipes.

Get within 100 yards of the place and you pick up the distinct scent of the barnyard. I quickly realized where all the manure had gone.

Inside the dark, cavernous barns were rows of beds filled with the manure. The rows were stacked one upon the other, with barely more than a foot of vertical space between the rows. It was in those beds that the mushrooms grew in merely weeks from tiny little spores littered throughout the manure into white, button mushrooms destined for both the fresh and canned mushroom markets.

The mushrooms were picked by hand by strong-willed workers who were brave enough to spend an 8-hour shift on their stomachs in the dark, amid the humid stench of rotting compost.

But oddly enough, even though I’ve always known the secrets behind mushroom farming, it never turned me off of eating mushrooms.

Every time I come across someone who doesn’t like eating mushrooms it hasn’t had anything to do with how they were grown. (Most people probably think mushrooms grow on bushes.) No, people who shudder when I tell them about a mushroom recipe generally do so because they tell me they don’t like the soft, somewhat rubbery texture.

But that is exactly the point. They are in fact a bit chewy, sometimes rubbery. Mushrooms are so much more than what you find in a can of “ends and pieces.” Shitake mushrooms give depth in texture and flavor to a dish of stir-fried snow peas in oyster sauce; Enoki mushrooms, the lithe, little fingers of fungi, give just a bit of snappy crispness to a chicken salad; and the Portabella has found a special home in our eternally dieting society as an alternative to beef burgers. Grilled and put between two buns, you almost think you are biting into a slab of Angus rather than a beefy mushroom.

And then there is the morel.

While you can buy logs called “mushroom growing kits,” to supply you with shitake’s, enoki’s or portabella’s, you probably won’t find one that offers up fresh morels. No one can really produce a forest fire in a pre-packaged kit.

While a large part of the country is well into the heat of summer by June, it can still be raining buckets in the Pacific Northwest, one of the lucky places in the country where you can find the morel.

In the Northwest, we often say that Summer doesn’t really start until after the 4th of July.

Where I live in Eastern Washington, the season for morels begins in late April and runs through the end of June. And it is our rain combined with warming Summer temperatures that keep the morels sprouting up in the forest.

And because the morel only grows in the wild, they tend to be extremely expensive when you can find them fresh in a gourmet market. Just last week I found a basket of morels on the shelf in the corner of the produce section, oblivious to most of the shoppers grabbing for the button mushrooms next door. But I was a bit scared off at the $34.99 per pound price tag. Rather than see them go to waste, I grabbed just a few. Although expensive, you don’t need many morels to give an omelet a boost of fungus flavor.

Now there are some chefs who think it would be sacrilegious to use any dried ingredient in a dish.
But it is a well known secret among morel experts that the best flavor comes from morels in their dried form.

As a fungus, a mushroom is up to 90% water over fiber. Drying Morels extracts that water, yet the flavor of the wild forest is preserved and intensified. And ½ oz. of dried morels sells for around $2.00, a much easier bite out of the budget than buying fresh fungus.

To reconstitute any type of dried mushroom, just place them in a small bowl. Pour enough boiling water over the mushrooms to cover them, then let them sit in the hot water for about 30 minutes until they have fully reconstituted. Once they have plumped up, drain the mushrooms on a towel and squeeze out the water, and then add them to your recipe.

But don’t throw out that left over mushroom water! It is incredibly flavored, so freeze it for one of your favorite soup or sauce recipes.

The best way to enjoy the full flavor of morels is in fairly simple recipes without a lot of ingredients; and the other ingredients should not be overpowering in flavor. Eggs and pastry are probably the two best examples of ingredients that let the flavor of the morels shine through.

In developing my quiche recipe, I experimented a bit with making a pre-baked pastry shell.

Pre-baking a pastry shell is important because it starts the pastry cooking and helps give it that crisp, flaky texture. You also pre-bake a pastry shell because if you don’t, the bottom of the crust will be a soggy, eggy mess when the quiche is sliced into serving pieces.

Pre-baking a pastry shell takes a bit of work. First, cover the pastry with aluminum foil. I like the new nonstick aluminum foil. Then add some rice or dried beans, enough to come to the top of the pie pan. This adds weight and keeps the pastry from puffing up or shrinking too much.

Our second recipe sounds quite fancy-dancy and maybe a bit too difficult to prepare – “Rack of Lamb Wellington with Morel Duxelle.” Trust me, it will be worth the effort.

Beef Wellington is a classic recipe featuring beef tenderloin encased in a mixture of mushrooms – a duxelle – and then covered in puff pastry. Traditionally Beef Wellington is served with a rich sauce made from reduced veal stock, black truffles and Madeira wine. This is a special occasion, holiday dish and not one that we normally associate with the onset of summer, but I was trying to think of how I could pair some unique ingredients of the season (such as lamb) that would showcase the flavor of the morel and shape it into a stunning presentation. Thus, Spring Rack of Lamb in a “Wellington” style was created.

In the mushroom duxelle I used both dried morels and fresh, brown crimini mushrooms for added body and flavor. Quickly pulse the mushrooms in a food processor and then sauté them in butter, shallots and a good lug of Madeira.

Any leftover Morel duxelle can be refrigerated and used in sauces and stuffings.

Now using your tender hands, gently pat a thick layer of the Morel duxelle over the seared rack of lamb.

Next comes the “Wellington” layer of puff pastry. I buy puff pastry at my local Russian ethnic grocery store because it comes direct from Russia, and I find it to be more flaky and light than the puff pastry in most supermarket freezer cases. But if you don’t have a Russian market in the neighborhood, the American puff pastry will work just fine.

One tip when you use commercially made puff pastry is not to mess with it too much. Don’t add any flour to the counter if you need to roll out the puff pastry. That added flour will make give the pastry a glue-like taste and it may not rise and puff up properly.

Just cut out a rectangle from the sheet of puff pastry and delicately lay it over the duxelle layer on the rack of lamb. Then carefully form the pastry around the top of the rack of lamb with your fingers. Don’t worry about covering the bottom, or bone side of the rack.

A final brush of egg wash over the pastry to give it a glossy golden color and into the oven it goes.

And when the Wellington comes out of the oven it will be a masterpiece. (Really!)

Whenever I develop a recipe for the first time I worry. A lot. I want to be stunned and surprised when I see the rack of lamb carved into chops, showcasing each distinctive layer: lamb, spinach, morels and pastry.

I want every single morsel of this lamb to be perfectly medium-rare. I want the puff pastry to be baked through, each layer tender, flaky, light and crispy. I want the sauce to be unctuous and rich.

I want the dish to be memorable, better than any rack of lamb you have ever eaten. I want this Morel infused lamb masterpiece to be as memorable as the pistachio-crusted rack of lamb with blood orange conserve that you ate on your honeymoon at that tiny little bistro overlooking the Pacific in Kaanapali, Maui.

I want the herbal, woodsy flavor of the Morel to come through, to remind you of a Cascade forest of old-growth fir where the Morels first winked at the sunlight through the trees.