ITS FIDDLEHEAD SEASON!

Okay, so fiddleheads are simply the best vegetable known to mankind.  If you havent tried these little darlings, then you havent lived.


You can find fiddleheads growing in Southern Ontario along side brooks and creeks.  They like shade and moisture.  The fiddlehead season is very very short lasting sometimes only one week!  


My dad started taking us fiddlehead picking from the time we were able to walk.  We have a secret spot that I CAN NOT share with you!  Lucky for me it is actually on my way to work.  This allows me the ability to pop in regularly to check and see if the little darlings are peaking up through the ground.  You have to nab them right away or you will miss the season.  When we were younger we would go day after day to pick as many bags of fiddleheads as we could until the season dried up.  
I am talking about literally 50lbs of fiddleheads lol.  We ate them daily and my Dad would blanch them and freeze them using one of those wrapping machines that sucks the air out of the packages so that we could enjoy them all year long. 


When you pick fiddleheads, they have a thin brown film covering them that you want to try and remove prior to cooking.  This is not an easy task!  Especially with that many fiddleheads.  My dad would get a blanket and lay it out on a picnic table.  He would then spread the freshly picked fiddleheads out all over the blanket.  They 1 person would grab one end of the blanket by the corners and he would grab the other end of the blanket and we would pick up the blanket and use it to toss the fiddlehead up into the air and then catch them again on the blanket.  If we were lucky enough to have a nice breeze, the thin brown covering would blow off of the fiddleheads!


Then we would bring them all in to the laundry room sink and rinse them really well. 

It is really important that fiddleheads are cooked well.  They can not be eaten raw!  Here is a great link to some information that Health Canada posted for fiddlehead eaters! Fiddlehead Safety Tips 

I love fiddleheads cooked two ways:

for both methods I always boil them first for about 10-12 minutes.

The first is sauteed in a frying pan for about 8 minutes with lots of butter and salt.

The second is BBQ using one of those bbq vegetable trays.  I toss them first in some EVOO and then bbq them about 10 minutes.  Then I toss them again in butter, fresh dill, garlic and sea salt. Yummm!!

This is a great website that provides plenty of nutritional information about fiddleheads http://www.nutrition-and-you.com/fiddlehead-ferns.html