Morel mini kabobs

update: Thanks to Marx Foods for choosing this recipe to be the winner of the 2011 Morel challenge! We are touched and thrilled!

Our friends at Marx Foods had another exciting challenge - creating a morel mushroom hors d'oeuvre recipe. For that purpose, Roland and I were sent flavorful and beautiful dried morel mushrooms.

Your first encounter with the morel is like no other, they look like mushrooms that are more fit for a fairy tale book page, than for a kitchen counter. See them in nature, and I promise you can get lost in the marvelous texture, wondering how something this unusual popped up from under the leaves. I can see you thinking: "is this mushroom for real?''.

In Bulgarian, we call them ''frowning mushrooms'', perhaps to illustrate the deep wrinkles on their surface, but we had nothing to frown about when we cooked them. They were delicious!

It's not easy to come up with a recipe, specifically tailored to one type of mushroom. Enter the Flavor Bible, our favorite companion in tough times. The authors smartly lined up paragraphs upon paragraphs of items we could successfully match with morels, so we used our kabob idea and some inspiration from the list of flavor affinities! The result was more than we had hoped for.

To make 12 mini kabobs, we used:

12 teeny tiny potatoes
6 oz Fontina cheese
12 small dried Morels
2 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary
2 tbsp olive oil
12 bamboo skewers

We started with soaking the morels in a bit of warm water and letting them reconstitute for about 20 minutes. We boiled the mini potatoes and cooled them off. Then, we cut the cheese in 12 cubes. We lined a potato, a piece of cheese and a morel on each skewer. Then, we mixed the rosemary and olive oil on a plate and rolled each skewer so that the rosemary could stick. At the end, we heated a large non stick pan over medium heat and cooked the skewers on both sides, until the cheese had melted. If you feel like your cheese has melted too much, just take the pan off the heat and let it cool off before removing. Less than 5 minutes for each side of the skewer should do the trick and have the cheese cooked to golden and slightly crispy. Let the mini kabobs cool off slightly and serve with rosemary. Enjoy with your favorite dark beer or a glass of red wine.

To get your fresh or dried morels, head over to Marx Foods. You can also check out their extremely rich morel recipe section!