BRAD DOKKEN: Morels provide a tasty surprise

The best way to find morel mushrooms, I've determined, is not to look for them.

I've been hooked on these springtime delicacies since the mid-1970s, when my dad brought some home one day after work. He worked for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and filled a lunch bucket with morels after finding a batch somewhere in the west end of the Roseau River Wildlife Management Area.

Knowing nothing about wild mushrooms and assuming they all were poisonous, I was squeamish about trying the morels, but he assured me they were safe. We fried them up with steaks, as I recall, and I was absolutely amazed by their delicate, nutty flavor.

Morels are cool-looking mushrooms with their spongy, cone-shaped caps and really can't be mistaken for anything else. An imposter "false morel" grows in the wild, as well, and is known to be at least mildly poisonous, but the stems and caps of true morels are hollow.

I'm no expert, but I know a morel when I see one.

I also know people who find a good morel patch are more secretive than anglers are about a favorite fishing hole.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a few morels last Saturday while working in the yard "up north." I was sawing up a dead elm tree that had fallen when I looked down to see two morels growing at my feet. They were nowhere close to the base of a tree but were simply growing in the lawn.

In a case of pure, dumb luck, I'd missed stepping on them by inches.

Where there's one morel, there's usually more nearby, and so I put the tree sawing on hold and spent the next 15 minutes scouring the surroundings.

I scrounged up a couple more, but four morels isn't much of a feast.

The accidental mushroom find reminded me of a similar encounter a couple of years earlier, when I came across several morels along a roadside when I wasn't looking for them.

Unlikely, I thought, but perhaps I could scrounge up a couple more this year in the same place.

The fallen tree would keep.

So, off I went, walking the edge of the road, eyes peeled and hoping for a glimpse of a morel peeking through the grass.

I wasn't disappointed.

For reasons I don't understand, the morels found the ditch to their liking. An adjacent patch of woods shaded that portion of the road, and perhaps shade was the necessary ingredient because I found no morels when I got past the woods.

The shady roadside, though, had an abundance of morels. I even found some growing out of the gravel along the edge of the road.

Go figure.

By the time my yardwork diversion was complete, I'd filled a half-gallon pail with morels and was just as excited by the find as I would have been if I'd been fishing and reeled in a 25-inch walleye.

I soaked the morels in salt water to get rid of any bugs that might have crawled into the spongy caps and kept them refrigerated. Three days later, we sauteed them with ruffed grouse and a blue grouse, washing down the bounty with my friend's homemade porter.

A feast fit for royalty it was. The only way it could have been better is if I'd saved the wild asparagus I also found last weekend.

And so, we "settled" for morels and grouse.

I've specifically hunted for morels a handful of times over the years and usually have come away empty-handed. They never seem to be where the experts recommend looking.

Not looking seems to be more productive-and definitely more exciting.