When my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon went live with the latest recipe, Mushroom-Filled Blini, one of the first reactions that I received focused on the mushrooms, rather than the thin pancakes I wrap around them. Although I wrote the recipe for cremini mushrooms, the brown-toned baby Portobellos that are easily found in most grocery stores, I ate delicious blini stuffed with wild mushrooms while traveling across Russia.

In my corner of Northwest Montana, spring mushroom foraging season is just around the corner. I recommend bookmarking this week’s recipe if you’ll soon be out hunting for morels, our most popular edible spring fungi. You can find more ideas for cooking your bounty in this blog post. It also links to a Flathead Beacon column I wrote in 2022 after interviewing local forager Dale Johnson, who offered tips for identifying and using your wild mushroom collection.

Learn more about fillings for blini and get the complete recipe for Mushroom-Filled Blini in my column.

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Blini are essentially crepes made of white wheat flour that can be wrapped around all sorts of fillings. Other cultures traditionally make crepes from buckwheat, which works best with savory fillings.

Blini tend to be savory too, but they also work well as sweet desserts. Amid a Russian winter, we typically folded them around jam, rather than fresh fruit, and ate them after the savory round. Leftovers with sweet or savory fillings make a tasty breakfast or second-night dinner when reheated in a skillet with a little oil until crispy. Blini are always served with a thin, tangy sour cream that I now make at home.

Russians generally prefer mild flavors and fill their blini accordingly. Besides mushrooms, we would sauté onions with potatoes or carrots and cabbage, just seasoning the filling with salt, pepper, and perhaps parsley or dill. Personally, I lean toward more flavorful fillings.

Here are just a few other recipes on the blog that I use as filling for blini and other crepe-based meals. You can find more in the recipe index.

• Huckleberry and Cheese Crepes
• Potato and Lemon Cheese Filling
• Brine-Braised Breakfast Potatoes
• Curtido (Cabbage Slaw)
• Carrot–Tofu Filling
• Curried Sweet Potato and Mango

You can learn more about making other fun recipes with edible wrappers in this blog post.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.