The Marvelous Morel Mushroom

mar·vel·ous: Extremely good or enjoyable

Morels are edible wild mushrooms.

Funny story: My daughter, Madison was playing outside while my husband & I were finishing up our dinner. She comes back inside carrying a mesh bag of these mushrooms. We asked her "where did you get those?" and she replied "some person gave them to me." I could see the concerned look on my husband's face...some strange person giving our daughter a bag full of mushrooms? I had never seen these type of mushrooms before but my husband knew what they were - morel mushrooms. We went outside and found Derrick's Uncle David standing on our back porch - we were quickly relieved! He explained to us how he had gone mushroom hunting and found these in the woods, and how to clean & cook them.

We were quite excited about having these new mushrooms to try so I took pictures throughout our process of preparing & cooking them. We decided to cook them the way Uncle David recommended since this is our first time cooking with morels. He recommended tossing them in saltine cracker crumbs and frying them in butter! Sounded delicious so we tried it out.

Here's our morel cooking adventure:

A morel in my hand.

Derrick ready to cook the morels.

Soaking the mushrooms in salt water.

Soaking some more

It's very important to clean morels well. They have a lot of nooks & crannies for dirt & bugs to hide in (we found a slug hiding inside one of the mushrooms.)
We soaked the morels for 15 minutes in salt water. They were still a little dirty so we swapped out the water and soaked them for another 15 minutes.

After they were done soaking, I dried them on a paper towel and Derrick cut them in half lengthwise.

Derrick cutting the morels in half.

After they were cut in half, I rinsed them again in a bowl full of water to clean out the hollow inside. While I did that, Derrick crushed up some saltines to make crumbs.

The morels anxiously waiting for me to toss them in the saltine crumbs.

The all coated in cracker crumbs and ready to be fried in butter.

Putting them in the pan of butter (we used about 2 tbs).

Cooking in butter.

...and voila! Fried morel mushrooms!

They were delicious! We both really enjoyed eating them and decided they were the best mushrooms we have tasted yet. Thank you Uncle David for bringing us these marvelous mushrooms!