We celebrated spring yet again with a fiddleheads feast.
As usual, our Saturday adventure to Maine produced a lot of great foodie loot and we had to do something with it. We had fiddleheads and diver scallops from Gurnet Trading Post, Jersey cow milk and fresh eggs from Two Coves Farm, spring onions and some mushrooms from Bow Street Market, so we went with an early-spring "fruits of the forest" fiddleheads and mushrooms theme.
We:
Opened with a Lazy Lady cheese and some cob-smoked pepperoni (both from Vermont) - Puff-pastry shells filled with a mushroom medley and each topped with a fiddlehead.
- A canape of medallions of shad roe poached in Fino sherry with a cider vinaigrette, and
- Some fresh green almonds with salt.
- A salad of steamed fiddleheads dressed very lightly with thin-sliced spring onions and a cider vinaigrette.
- These were enjoyed while we sampled Two More Dry Vermouths
Then we moved on to:
- Mushroom soup, using the recipe from the fabulous Longwood Gardens in Kennet Square, PA
- Four timbales made with the Jersey cow milk and farm fresh eggs, some Vermont cheese, and the fiddleheads, both chopped and whole
- Pan-seared diver scallops
We added a red Cotes du Rhone to the mix to accompany the mushrooms, but the vermouths stayed on the table.
and we finished with
- a Strawberry and Orange Bavarian Cream made from the Jersey milk and fresh eggs from Two Coves Farm
- and a Maple Ambrosia from Vermont's Hillis Sugarbush Farm and Vineyard. This proved a bit too sweet on its own, but I remembered a classic cocktail, the Van Vleet, that employs maple syrup with lemon juice and light rum, so I got out the rum and all was well.
The feast was on 22 April 2012. Attendees were the core four.