Desperately Seeking Salem

As a child growing up in Lancaster County, PA, there was nothing I hated more than asparagus.

Asparagus — boiled so fast and hard that the color turned from crisp green to Army fatigue olive. Asparagus — leeched of all of its nutrients and tastes until all you could do was put a pat of butter on it and munch away at the soggy, wooden stalks.

Gulp!

And if I couldn’t get it down — something that happened often — I might just put it in that earthenware jug in the corner and hope mom doesn’t find out.

Well, she didn’t find out until a couple of years ago, when she discovered a little cesspool of dried goo in that earthenware jug while we were preparing for a yard sale.

You meet something  like boiled asparagus and it takes about 30 good impressions to make up for that first bad one. I’m a pretty open-minded gal, and I give people a chance to make good,  so asparagus and I have been  friends for a long time.

Roasted asparagus, with just a little olive oil — and if you have some on hand, sliced truffles. I generally roast a pound of asparagus (and that’s for two people!), drizzled with a little olive oil, at 375 for about 18 minutes. Last night, I added the sliced truffles with about one minute to go.

They make the asparagus taste like it has just been pulled out of the earth and walked on a plate through the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles .

Or, thinking about it another way, this is absolutely the most decadent and charming version of ants on a log that I’ve ever encountered.

Ice cream and mushrooms are two mutually exclusive tastes in my book. Luckily, truffles aren’t really mushrooms. They are fungi — but not in the sense of a shitake or a porcini. They are the fruiting body of a species of fungi that propagates itself much like other fungi do. Nor are they particularly closerly related to what we normally think of as fungi.

They are really in a class all of their own.

And while I am not one who believes that all strange tastes lend themselves to good ice creams — green tea ice cream? blech — I can say that truffle ice cream, when made with Oregon spring black truffles, is delicate and interesting enough to be worth the expense of a single truffle.

The recipe I used is from the FOOD Network and calls for “honey cream.” If anyone knows what that is, please enlighten me. I had no idea, and couldn’t find it online, so I just added some honey to some cream.

This, by the way, is not something you want to read on your online recipes…

“This recipe was provided by professional chefs and has been scaled down from a bulk recipe provided by a restaurant. The FN chefs have not tested this recipe, in the proportions indicated, and therefore, we cannot make any representation as to the results.”

Truffle ice cream hits the tongue cool and earthy, but then mellows out as the tongue picks up the cream, sugar and honey. The lingering flavor at the end is sweet truffle, which tastes something like mushroomy chocolate that’s been sifted through peat moss.

“I’m not sure that I can eat a whole bowl of this,” I said.

Brother-in-law Steven looking at me, looking at his dish.

“Um… I can,” and he spooned another mouthful.

I must have underestimated myself, because the truffle ice cream grew on me. I ate two bowls. They were small.  Still, if given a choice, I’d take a baci gelato or a maracuya sorbet over truffle ice cream any day of the week.

Four days into Truffle Week, my jeans are fitting a little tighter. my lap feels a little smaller, and my arteries — if you can feel arteries –are packed. I’m not sure I can keep up this exercise. Even if I temper my truffle-infused, cream-based dishes with a side salad, I’ve been leaving the table feeling like I never want to eat again.

You all know how that story continues.

And though I have given away five of the twelve truffles I pulled out of the Oregon forest floor last Monday, I am finding that these babies go very, very far and just keep changing with my whims. They are power-packed. They are long distance runners.

They are the Madonnas of food ingredients.

To be honest, they are starting to get a little annoying. Truffle Week should probably have been Truffle Night.

Tonight I pulled out my old Bayerisches Kochbuch, given to me by my German host mother Sabine from my Fulbright year in Munich, and flipped to the pages for Kartoffelpuffer — potato pancakes, latkes, whatever you want to call them, whatever your culture, these are much-loved street food in Germany and are  often served with applesauce.

I like mine with sour cream and chives.

With a side of pork schnitzel.

And a thin smear of truffle butter on top.

I used one of the remaining truffles to make a little canister of truffle butter. Not too difficult, just chopped really small and mixed in soft butter. I’ve been eying this French butter dish, or something similar to it, at the Portland Saturday Market. Seems like a better choice than a custard cup.

Truffle butter goes great on, well, just about anything. I recently had some atop some grass-fed beef in bavette steak form at La Capitale in downtown Salem.

I’m not sure that I’d try it on sweeter dishes, but I’ve heard it can be dripped across anything — brownies, muffins, whatever.

Truffle butter on potatoes of any kind is comfort food with a kick in your hedon bone. We should all be happy that no one has come up with truffle potato chips.

Whoops.  Too late.