lsanderson | Food Wednesdays (Reply)

A Good Appetite
Giving Morels the Caviar Treatment
By MELISSA CLARK

AS anyone with a hard-core shopping habit knows, there’s a moment after you’ve zeroed in on your object of desire when all reason ebbs. It doesn’t matter that those strappy sandals are a little too tight, a little too high-heeled and a lot too expensive. A euphoric cloud obscures common sense, especially if they’re on sale.

I can attain a similar state of mind while shopping for dinner, and recently I did. In the produce aisle was a basket of plump, velvety morels, the first of the season. They were spore-ishly seductive: their matte, furrowed skin was taut, their fragrance fresh and earthy, like a rainy walk in the woods. So what if the bill for the half pound I checked out with was $30? Their season is all too fleeting (from May to mid-June). And besides, I rationalized, cooking morels at home is cheaper than going out for them. More

Recipe: Creamed Morels on Chive Butter Toast

In Istria, Fresh From the Land and the Sea
By MARK BITTMAN

PULA, Croatia

THE spring obsession in Istria is wild asparagus. Throughout the peninsula, which juts into the Adriatic across from Venice — just a ferry ride away — people are walking through open fields and along roadsides, carrying the stout sticks they use to shove aside the brambles that hide the precious, knitting-needle-thin stalks. More

Recipe: Black Cod on Wilted Radicchio
Recipe: Asparagus Frittata
Recipe: Octopus and Potato Stew

Hocus-Pocus, and a Beaker of Truffles
By DANIEL PATTERSON

A TRUFFLE by any other name may smell as sweet, but what if that name is 2,4-dithiapentane? All across the country, in restaurants great and small, the “truffle” flavor advertised on menus is increasingly being supplied by truffle oil. What those menus don’t say is that, unlike real truffles, the aroma of truffle oil is not born in the earth. Most commercial truffle oils are concocted by mixing olive oil with one or more compounds like 2,4-dithiapentane (the most prominent of the hundreds of aromatic molecules that make the flavor of white truffles so exciting) that have been created in a laboratory; their one-dimensional flavor is also changing common understanding of how a truffle should taste. More

A Purple Passion for Pinot Noir
By ERIC ASIMOV

SINCE the movie “Sideways” came out in 2004, America has carried on a passionate affair with pinot noir. Restaurants can’t keep it in stock, wineries can’t make enough of it and consumers show no signs of loosening their embrace of it.

Sales shot up by 70 percent in 2005, and might have continued at that rate in 2006 except that shortages held growth to 20 percent, according to the Wine Institute, a trade organization. More

The Minimalist
Some New Friends for the Humble Egg
By MARK BITTMAN