Green, garlicky ramps, luscious, earthy morels, and delicate, herbaceous fiddlehead ferns sing of spring. But Miami produce they ain’t. This goodness comes from The Chef’s Garden, one of three fabulous sponsors of this Wednesday’s Sexy Summer Salads class with Chef Taffy Elrod and me.
Photo by Yossey Arefi and Michelle Demuth-Bibb
Chef Elrod and I help you ramp up summer produce with flavors and textures to light up your senses. With our class, the sensational, seasonal produce from The Chef’s Garden and Farmer Lee Jones’ encyclopedic new book,The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables — With Recipes, you’ll love vegetables as much as I do.
Sign up for Sexy Summer Salads and get discounts from @The_Chefs_Garden_Ohio , as well as @A.Vogel_USA and @Nuvo_Olive_Oil. #summerofsalads.
Enjoy this tasty spring recipe from The Chef’s Garden: A Modern Guide to Common and Unusual Vegetables — With Recipes by Farmer Lee Jones. This incredible pasta dish is full of earthy flavors that you will love.
Recipe note — Beurre Maitre d’Hotel is a compound herb butter used extensively in fine dining to build flavor. The Chef’s Garden Cookbook provides its own recipe, but here’s a simplified one from The Ballymaloe Cookery School. Follow the recipe using a high-performing vegan butter like Miyoko’s and you’ll enjoy the same rich green goodness.
Vegans will want to pass on the basil-fed snails, but a chiffonade of basil would be welcome.
Ramp Top Pasta with Morels and Fiddleheads
Ingredients
- 8 ounces 225 g Vegetable Pasta made with ramps (see page 599), or 6 ounces (180 g) dried pasta plus Ramp Top Puree (page 73)
- 2 tablespoons 30 ml extra-virgin olive oil
- 6 ramp or scallion bulbs halved lengthwise
- 12 fiddlehead ferns
- 4 to 6 large morel mushrooms cleaned
- 12 chive blooms separated into individual florets
- 6 ramp leaves or scallion greens
- ½ cup 75 g blanched or thawed frozen English peas
- ½ cup 4 ounces, or 60 g Beurre Maître d’Hôtel
- Pea tendrils for garnish
Instructions
- This pasta dish makes use of many fleeting spring ingredients, including ramps, fiddleheads, and morels. In our kitchen, we use a pasta extrude to make semolina pasta using vegetable juices for hydration in beautiful shapes. For home, we offer a hand-rolled pasta recipe that you can make with ramps, or really, many vegetables (see page 599 for the recipe and our extruder method). If you want to make something even simpler, you can use your favorite dried pasta and a d the Ramp Top Puree from page 73.
- We also love to add poached basil-fed snails from Mary Stewart (a.k.a. the Snail Lady) in California to this dish. You can buy them at mikuniwildharvest.com. For ease, we left them off here.
- In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the pasta until al dente, 3 to 5 minutes for the fresh pasta depending on the shape.
- In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the ramp bulbs in a single layer and cook without moving until well browned on the bottom, about 3 minutes. Flip the ramp bulbs and cook until the other side is w ll browned, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the fiddleheads and gently toss. Add the mor ls, chive blooms, ramp leaves, peas, and Beurre Maître d’Hôtel. Finally, add the pasta. (If you’re using dried pasta, add the ramp puree at this point as well.) Gently toss everything together until the butter is melted. Transfer to a platter, garnish with the pea tendrils, and serve.
Notes
Thank you for reading my vegan stories and plant-based recipes. I sincerely love to connect with listeners and would like to hear your feedback, takeaways, “ah-ha!” moments, etc in the comments.
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