As spring slowly creeps up on us here in the northern states, I'm looking forward to my first harvests of the season. Usually the first "vegetable" I pick is the elusive morel mushroom that springs up on my property and it appears just when the asparagus is at its best. Mushrooms, as they emerge from the ground, are one of nature's small miracles. The lawn and woods will be mushroom-free and suddenly after some moist weather, they will suddenly poke up, seemingly overnight.

As I was walking around my small city lot quite a few years back, I noticed a mushroom that looked like a brain on top of a stalk. I hunched down and studied it - thinking "morel..." but certainly didn't pick it or eat it. I've mushroom hunted before, many years ago, with field guides in hand and made spore prints of the caps. I found quite a few varieties but darned if I could barely ID one or two. What I did find out is that many of the edible shrooms have toxic look-alikes, including morels, so I wasn't going to risk it on my first find.

The following year when more morels showed up - this time in the front yard I was talking to a friend who happened to be an avid morel-hunter. She agreed to come out to ID them and I said she could keep the harvest for her boyfriend's cream of morel soup, or steak and morels.

Both of them came out to hunt and found many with several being quite large. We decided that the morels were probably feeding on the rotting elm roots from the tree cut down in the front yard. This last year an elm tree in the back yard became fodder for the morels with bunches of them showing up last spring. I now harvest and eat them. I cut them in half and soak them in salt water to eliminate the critters that hide inside the hollow stems and ridges of the "cap. I like to sauté them with the just-emerging asparagus in a bit of butter. How I love a garden that produces free food for the finding.

DON'T go out and eat any wild mushrooms unless you can positively identify them, preferably with an experienced mushroom hunter. Many wild mushrooms are toxic including the false morels, and eating some can be potentially fatal! Even if you've identified them, consume wild mushrooms in small quantities as true morels have even caused gastric upset in some people.