The ferns in our front garden unfurled so quickly this year, that we only had a chance to get two small fiddlehead harvests. And now, the timeliness of this post has quickly lost it's relevance, as all the delicacies and quiet hopefulness of young spring has been swallowed by and swirled into the frantic abyss that is summer. Not that I don't enjoy summer, it's just that I had hoped to be able to relax and languish in the hesitation of early spring that the fiddlehead itself seems to represent, but here we are. Fully unfurled.
But, I hope you'll bear with me while I rewind a few weeks to when the fiddleheads were beginning to uncurl. This year I was pretty ruthless in my harvest, because we plan on moving a few (not all, we inherited a LOT) to put in some sort of evergreen. I had hoped to try a few new things and make a fiddlehead quiche... perhaps next year. This year we enjoyed and devoured them in their simplest form: boiled, then fried in a bit of butter and topped with salt. (I tried steaming but they seemed to retain some of their mouth-puckering bitterness, even though I meticulously rid them of their bitter papery skins.)
I read many, many articles and threads online to determine if our ferns were the edible kind, and how to prepare them, etc, etc. I had enough fear in me to do my research, just imagining the headline "Ottawa Woman Poisoned After Eating Own Ferns." (Somehow the more likely and mundane possibility like "Ottawa Woman Suffers Minor Stomach Upset After Eating Undercooked Fiddleheads" does not seem newsworthy in my over-active imagination.) But no suffering of any kind occurred, just pure gastronomical pleasure. And it was all the more enjoyable and gratifying knowing that I had cut it from my very own garden, just a few minutes before.
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