Aha! Fiddlehead ferns for lunch

The latest issue of 'Mother Earth News' has an article about perennial vegetables, and as I perused it last week I wondered if they'd somehow been reading my mind.  I mused all winter about what mix of perennial crops to plant over the next few years, with the goal being less work and more food down the road.
The piece featured some crops I knew and some I didn't-- I will definitely follow up on growing ramps, groudnuts, chervil and 'good King Henry' (apparently a tasty green). But there is  at least one easy to grow perennial crop they overlooked -- fiddlehead ferns.
The joke is that I forgot about them too. When I was a fine dining line cook many years ago we cooked with fiddleheads every spring. But until I looked around my garden last week and realized that my annual transplanting of ostrich ferns to yet another shady corner of my garden was now producing a bumper crop of fiddleheads, I had never harvested and eaten my own ferns.
Like all leafy crops, fiddleheads are best harvested in the morning when they are plump with moisture.  I picked only the still tightly curled leaves, not those that were already elongating. Most plants had a mix of both:

Though some, perhaps in sunnier spots, were well past the edible stage:

The fiddleheads must be rinsed thoroughly to remove the brown chaff of last year's growth. Here's yesterday's pickings:

I sauteed the fiddle heads with onion, and deglazed with sherry, then combined them with some cooked orzo, butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Delicious.

And I've already transplanted ferns this spring to a new bed by my second compost bin. I love perennial vegetables!