Last week at the market, morels had suddenly come down in price. “They were scarce the first couple of weeks and then they just popped up all over,” lamented the woman at the mushroom stand. Her loss was my woodsy gain, although “down in price” means they had dropped from $34 to $18. I bought half a pound and dithered about what to do with them. Every time I see morels I want to put them on my fingers and pose as Morel-Man, a wild and musky superhero. That’s not what I did, though. I made little frittatas.

We currently have from the library a great new cookbook by Debra Ponzek called The Family Kitchen. The reason Ponzek’s book is so good, I think, is that she is a former top New York chef who retired to Connecticut over ten years ago to run a small chain of gourmet shops and raise some kids. So she’s neither a home economist nor a chef guessing at what real families eat. Her book is also refreshingly free of nutritional dogma; it presents a wide varieties of foods cooked with appropriate amounts of fat and salt, and it assumes you can tinker with the recipes if that’s your thing.

Reducing fat and salt isn’t my thing, but tinkering with recipes certainly is. One of the most appealing recipes in the book is for mini-frittatas with zucchini and cheddar. You can find the recipe in a recent post on the fun blog known as [But My Kids Won’t Eat It…](http://www.kymmco.com/).

Instead of zucchini, I minced the morels and sauteed them up with some shallots, in butter instead of olive oil, thereby making a morel duxelles. (This is the kind of wordplay that has won me countless freestyle battles. I have also declared my opponent’s rhymes so low in acidity that you just know he extra-virgin.) I spooned this into the muffin cups and poured the egg mixture on top. It was great. Iris ate two.

Morels are definitely my favorite of the wild mushrooms, at least until chanterelle season rolls around. And I ain’t playin’.